I sit between a sequence of street lamps and an eternity,
digging a way through.
The mountain ranges,
widened and thickened by my wet vision.
My wet, deceptive, formulated vision,
a lifelong obsession, a frantic fixation,
spots a younger you.
Memories curled up about the ordinary.
Questions of tomorrow looming over the dark sky.
The yellow light. The flashy, the swanky, the rude yellow light.
cuts across my vision,
like an ill-mannered brat,
interrupting a conversation.
And then, on the streets that follow to a paroxysm of memories,
we survive a lethal firecracker,
we win our first Cricket match, and
we lose ourselves in the melody of Kishore,
it smells of alcohol.
Sobriety asking questions of existence.
Entangled forever in a private discussion.
Tonight, I had a long smoke,
so long that I smoked myself. I perseverate.
A cigarette. A deadly, long, poisonous, addictive cigarette.
Held by a stranger, in disguise of yours,
mixed its smoke with that of mine,
forming an unidentifiable conglomeration,
Like I am today, without you,
an incomplete phrase,
frequently used but rarely defined.
