The Difference

To stare into the horizon,
Waiting for the Sun to set,
Watching the birds going home…

To watch the Sun go down,
Beyond your path,
Waiting for someone, to come back home…

To wade through the lake alone,
Picking hyacinths, watching frogs,
Waving to the flying egrets…

To trudge along the sludge,
Losing your shoes along the way,
Feeling the paste of this earth,
Slipping through your toes…

To wake up every morning,
Feeling warmth in your sheets,
A familiar scent in the fabric of your pillow…

To wake up every morning,
Feeling the brutish winter,
Even through the summer,
The salty smell of your tears on your pillow…

To spend a quiet evening,
Listening to the breeze,
Playing with the music on the radio…

To spend a silent evening,
listening to the breeze,
Playing with your soul,
More than it ever played with the music,
On that radio…

To feel yourself,
Filling up that large armchair,
It’s sides holding you in an embrace…

To feel yourself,
Unable to fill your favourite chair,
Becoming smaller, smaller than a grain,
Disappearing between the leather…

To fill cups of coffee for two,
Knowing you will drink both,
Remembering that precious another…

To fill cups for two,
Knowing you will drink more than two,
With whiskey,
Remembering, how you once remembered another…

To walk up that mountain trail,
Tasting the heat in someone else’s sweat,
Hand in hand, even when,
You’re alone…

To walk up that mountain trail,
Tasting your own shallow breath,
Cold sweat creeping down your motionless face,
Breath leaving you, before you inhale another…

To write poetry,
And leave it in small notes on the refrigerator door,
Not knowing, whether they will ever be found,
Or read, but hope…

To write poems,
And leave them in your jacket’s left pocket,
While you climb that icy, cold mountain,
Knowing they will never be found,
Because they will never be found,
Because no one is looking for you,
But hope…

There is a difference, you fool!
Between Solitude and Loneliness,
And in between,
There is barren soul…

And there is nowhere else left to go,
But the to the farthest extremes,
Of the limits of the Now;
And there is nowhere else,
Left to go…

–

Siddharth Pathak
16th June 2017

Anger

I am one of those guys with no sense in his head,

I make dreams in the bar and mate death in bed,

The pendulum swings forth as the sheets go red,

While I fight my way through nightmares of Lead,

Serving my spine for the big fat spread,

With gravies and wines and multi-grain bread,

To the demons on tables waiting to be fed,

We’ll pile up the plates and cheers will be said,

The chef’s special tonight is Blooms of Dread,

We’re running out of room, if you catch my thread,

Grab a seat right now to get your shred

–

Siddharth Pathak | 23^rd April 2015

Le Ole Meaningless Song

I don’t know what that means,

But I don’t care because I don’t care,

About titles

 

Who gives titles?

Supposedly people we empowered to represent authority,

Who made the notion of authority?

Supposedly the people who asked us to bring them to power,

I can’t help but fall apart in laughter,

At your hopelessness,

For accepting this idea,

More like coming to terms,

With inception,

Like an illusion,

To make you believe,

You are in control…

 

Truly pathetic,

In its most evident state,

Is this manifestation of humanity,

Through the ages;

One is forced to think history truly held,

Figures of inspiration,

When sadly,

None of the facts,

Can be verified…

 

How am I to believe in this false promise?

The one we made to ourselves;

A world of order in conformity,

When in truth,

Walls can only but limit our growth –

Do we expect,

Humanity to thrive in the absence of creation?

 

Because,

It does not take a scientist,

To tell you,

That creation cannot coexist with conformity,

There is enough evidence,

In our experience,

That proves the aforesaid

 

I needn’t end a stanza,

With a full stop anymore,

Because grammar is propaganda,

Their stories are propaganda,

Their products are day dreams,

Packaged like life-savers,

And we are fools,

To buy

 

I do not have sense,

Or direction, or scent,

On the trail of this ending path;

Either the wind coming ahead,

Is the call of the cliff,

Or the thudding heart of the storm?

Help me find the answer soon,

Or,

Take it for yourself,

I will not go into it alone.

 

Siddharth Pathak | 22^nd April 2015

Disordered

Sometimes I feel like I was a cheap dish served at a local restaurant. The beggars and the bums have a piece of me every chance they can get, and I get served on Saturday night at all you can eat buffets. I am not a starter. I am not dessert. I can’t be main course since I can’t seem to be able to fill anyone. I am what you can eat at three am in the morning, out of a box that was left outside the refrigerator; forgotten and left to rot because no one was sure if I was worthy of being savoured on the next day.

It makes me feel so common, that I could be one of the most over-consumed items on the planet, like that extra tissue that comes out with every pull, or that adulterated drug anyone can buy off the street or even find large quantities of, for free just around the corner dump. I am replicated in so many of these eateries in so many ways; I don’t even know what I taste like anymore. Maybe I am tasteless.

I am just another item on the menu, that comes to the table really fast, and is eaten without fuss by all its eaters, and I am nothing gourmet. I can be slop, I can be grub, and some think I am bed and board and some just come in to steal some of me, yet I am nothing special.

I am just another item hoping to be ordered more, so I can climb up the ranks on the list, but hey, not many want to eat me forever. I am not staple diet, if you know what I mean. This is not a riddle. I am just talking about myself. Can you smell the aroma yet? I am not sure if I am being baked afresh or refried, but I will do my best to taste as I always do.

I suppose you smell nothing. A forgotten item of food also has a forgotten smell. Well, at least I’ve had no one to eat me in a while, and tell me I smell great, and that I can be quite appetizing if I want to be. But my ingredients make themselves; I can be put together, not prepared. You can’t fry me; you can’t roast or toast me. I can be baked to perfection, but as far as bakery chefs go, I hardly have any takers.

Some think I am cake and cut into me; sink into me, devouring large portions of me, knowing not that I am a once in a lifetime recipe. Some think I am porridge and gulp me down to soothe their cold throats and their strangled within choking souls, never leaving a good tip for the waiter who served me, or for how well I was prepared.

I hate to be on every menu. I wish the eaters would seek me, for if ordered right I can provide great degrees of taste, sumptuousness and satisfaction. But they all want to use me. No one wants to own me. I am bread; anyone can make me, and I make everyone very happy irrespective of whether they pre-heat me at three hundred degrees or end up burning me at a repeated five hundred degree scorch. It does not matter; I can always manage to taste good. That probably is the only good thing about me.

However, I often get cold and wasted. They leave behind my borders. They only consume my insides. They love me with cheese, and I think I am great on cheese, or with cheese on me, or let just say I love being cheesy. But cheese makes them a little too happy and they tend to think that too much of me will spoil them, make them fat and ugly to other people, which is why they always peel me off. They seem to enjoy pulling apart all my layers, before soaking me in gravy and then consuming me.

It is usually easy to pull me apart with your bare hands and I don’t demand much chewing before I become soft and warm in the throat, quick to swallow. The openness about me baffles people. The fact that I can be changed into so many preparations, as per the liking of the eater makes me a regular side dish, often with butter; my best friend and companion.

I am fabulous with butter on me. Add a little cheese if you want me to serve you right. I can be a soft loaf, a crispy slice or a side-loading hot dog bun; anything you want me to be. Order me today, if you want to be filled up just right. Don’t let me get stale.

I don’t want to be stale. I have been here since the beginning of time. Bite into me today, if that is all you can do. I won’t last long. There will be others like me out there, but they will never taste like me. I can be right out of the oven, as soon as you’re ready.

Bon appétit

Siddharth Pathak | 17th January 2015

Kohl Eyed Sun

From the dark passage of a full moon night,

Came her skin of roses and ivory,

And spells cast on enchanted water,

Brought forth her tresses of magnetic death,

 

While thorns turned into her tender bones,

Her eyes swallowed the light of stars,

To shine on my broken soul,

Making me whole again,

Under the shadow of her kohl eyed sun,

Where my heart remained in her cupped palms,

Throbbing,

Waiting to become one with her ruin,

Sinking to the bottom of her lake;

Of beauty and darkness,

Where I lost and found meaning,

Like the moth does,

When it flies into a flame…

 

Siddharth | 13^th October 2014

Flowers behind the wall

Here is the blue sky,

That stretches over the limits of my eye,

Falling over to the other side,

Pouring colour into my mind;

On every blade of grass,

Dripping from the petals of every blossom,

Down to the earth, hidden beneath the verdure,

Where a hungry soil lies awake,

Soaking in the blood of life,

Turning deep red,

And deepening…

Here is the raindrop,

Eager to please,

Frantic and fragile,

Plunging to the seeds,

Making puddles in my mind,

Bringing the under-earth to life,

Sprouting with ease,

Beneath a fresh cold river;

That is washing everything away,

Making rocks with the light,

And emerging…

Even though I can’t see,

Anything beyond me,

Except this cold and lonely wall,

On which I will cast my dream,

All but a delusion to be,

In it you will find,

A poem written in images,

Changing to the sound of the wind,

And swaying…

Here is the Sun,

The one I share with the other side,

Blinded not by its brilliance,

But by its shadow, partially;

This separation –

We call it the facts of existence,

It can’t be breached, it can’t be broken,

My hope, becomes the eventual;

All but a bed of flowers,

With youngling blooms,

Reaching for the vines,

From behind the wall, and over the top,

Slowly building the tangled grove,

Where nestles my buoyant sanguineness,

Singular, and thriving…

Siddharth Pathak | 12^th October 2014

Death, by Love

To,

A beautiful mistake,

This breathlessness I feel exploding slowly, inflating my chest to the point of soft tears on the surfaces inside, soaked and moist in the tears my eyes could not let out. They stopped still, buried into your cadaverous moonlit skin, white as the snow with a dark blue halo; and I could not move an inch. My id remained interpolated in the fissure of your flesh, from where your soul leaked out in the last mire confession we could make to each other.

As my fingers dug deep into the softness of your back, your breasts bruised themselves against my chest; with your heart attempting to rip its way out of our body, to become one with mine; our hearts, as if they were never apart – like conjoined children born in a womb of two loves falling away, but implanted and always together as one, with a singular heartbeat. We heard our eyes say to each other,

“I could have never loved again, and I could not have loved you anymore…”

Then we collapsed onto each other like mannequins in embrace, as if laid in the store room – forgotten and derelict; like the saddened death of a rock that withers away in surrender to time. The alarms go off as it begins to rain in our little concrete sky, and the water drowns us in the fish-tank of our dreams; the nightmares we both saw wide awake, coming true with our eyes open as we kissed each other desperately, wanting to fill each other will more love through our mouths, while knowing all along that we were bursting at the seams, filling up to the brim inside with the love we had already so addictively given each other, all summer. But alas, my heart every time reborn enjoys a lifespan short-lived and it gave away, in reflection to yours. Only this time, we decided not to go on living because we had burned out, and our ship was falling to the dust in fragments; like fireworks on a wedding night.

Look up to the sky.

By now the carbon-monoxide in our room must have taken us to the distant lone universe of our love, where we collide into each other, repeatedly and forever, into the black hole of our dreams. Wait and watch.

Close your eyes now, Shhh… here it comes…

 

NEWSET#LITTLEDEATHNOTESOFLOVE

Siddharth Pathak | 16th May 2014

 

The trouble with love…

You little chunk of my meat,

I don’t know how to love you forever. I don’t think there is such a thing as falling in love with someone forever. Love is larger than what we know of it. It is not some selfish desire to own another free soul for the rest of your life, or to belong to someone for the same amount of time with the same intensity. No.

I have so much love inside me; I don’t think you would be able to take all of it, without destroying yourself. I can barely contain it within myself and I am always falling apart at the seams, how do you believe I will be able to take all of your love either? We can’t love each other alone for the rest of our lives. I don’t know how else to say this. But I can tell you one simple truth. I will always love you. Unfortunately, my black tangled heart cannot do that, while it is beating inside your breast. You must let go of me, or I will love you so much, it will tear us apart.

Remember, if you fill your heart with hatred for me, you will only love me forever too. There will be no escape.

Farewell my beloved,

P.S. I wear your blood in a band around my neck. I drew it from you when you were sleeping last night.

NEWSET#LITTLEDEATHNOTESOFLOVE

Siddharth Pathak | 13th May 2014 

विश्वास की एक छलांग…

 

जब पटरी ज़िन्दगी की आग में पिघलती है, तब अरमानों का कारवां फिसलता है;

कंधे झुक जाते हैं, मन ढल जाते हैं दीयों की तरह, बिखर जाता है सपनों का फूल.

इस आकस्मिक सफर में,  अगर कुछ बातें तुमने मौत से भी कर ली,

तोह कौन जाने तुम कहीं फिर से रास्ते पर आ जाओ?

शुक्रगुज़ार रहो हमेशा, इस देन के लिए,

जो सन्सार से हमने पायी है, अमानत की तरह.

हौंसले पाने की जो हिम्मत रखते हैं, वह गिरने से डरते नहीं.

सांस लेते रहो. सपने देखते रहो. जब आँखें खुलें तब छलांग लगा देना, बस! और क्या?

~ सिद्धार्थ पाठक । १६ अप्रैल २०१४

Twenty Eight Pictures

Twenty eight years of battle have made me into a slave, a “victim”, a disabled survivor, a struggling parasite, and over the last year, to my attempts at attaining balance, a bohemian freethinker. Through these years I have ashamed myself, fallen down and begged my way out of some days in life, only to get by, get up again, and fall back down in pieces on other days of life, and even though twenty eight years seems like a long time, for me they went by in twenty eight flashes.

Every year gone by in my life so far, has given me one image, one memory and only one feeling to keep with me, for moving on, or should I say I have always been able to save only any one piece of me. Most of these images are of pain, regret and anguish, and almost all of them in some or the other ways are connected with Love. This isn’t to say that I am hungry for love and that, I am asking for some from you. Nor does it mean I live my life walking alone on the street, talking to myself and staring at other couples. It does not mean I get “dated and dumped” after every few weeks.

It means that I have learned my own ways. I am a loser for love, a complete sucker for romance and love and “love” and all the different things that happen to you when you are in love. I know a lot of people who say they feel the same way as I do. However, this is not about them. This is about me. This is about what love can do to me, and in how many ways I have grown to love that feeling of Love, and let it do so many things to me.

This does not mean I have given up my dignity for love and “fallen” in it repeatedly with every other girl I met after every few weeks.  Well, not always.

There was this once when I even gave up my dignity for love. She took too long to give me a chance. By then my life had turned me around, twisted me and torn me apart. I had begun to become someone else and I thought her love would save me. But it didn’t. By the time she had given me her heart, I had burned out, completely. The rubber was molten away and I was cruising through life on wheels made from the dreams of metal. There was fire everywhere and I had burned all my bridges behind me. It was time for me to leave.

I had just stumbled across a few borders and then it happened to me again. I saw her, and my bags fell out of my hands, I broke a lampshade and tripped over my own foot into my new dorm room. In the beginning I did not know I had fallen so hard. But when I realized, it was so late to turn back – the Sun had set and I found myself in the dark, drowning in common fluid poisons, burying myself in work without breaks for weeks, eating a few biscuits every day and selling my things one by one – moving from a large personal apartment to a one hundred square foot room atop someone else’s terrace at a throw away price, only to buy more of that dreaded fluid poison, that has destroyed everything we know of in time, by way of a slow, agonizing spiritual death followed by the rotting of the walking corpse, until it finally falls apart and disintegrates, only to soon disappear. All we remain are but a memory.

However, something saved me.

My life was shadowed by fears of all kinds of things. My mind was cracking rapidly, and little concrete chips from the vertical edges of my emotional structure were beginning to scoot down to the basement of my soul, in the wind. There was nothing left for me there. The town seemed stranger every day, and on one odd afternoon, I packed my bags and walked out. I left behind all of my belongings, as they were in the room, and closed the door never to go back for them.

All I could manage was to board a cargo train to another city – a journey of three days in a cold, dark chamber through the mountains. I remember, I didn’t think about anything else but all the people I loved and those who loved me and how much warmth and beauty I had once shared with them, and I realized I could never go back to any of them, ever again.

There is something about Love that is “Lost” by virtue, and it can only be found again, in love.

Whether they say I am depressed, perpetually lovelorn or even emotionally manic, it does not make the slightest difference to me. Love has been the only eternal constant of my life. Since the moment I was born, I have either chased love only to find it easily and squander it, or to find it with difficulty and give it so much that I lost everything I ever had, all the way to coming close to finding it forever; only to lose it in a moment, again. One moment; all it takes for a camera to take a picture, and it’s gone, for all eternity. You are left with only one thirst; the thirst for Love.

You think it is not the thirst for love that births into you the lust for money? Isn’t it the deep-set craving for love that drives us to change and morph into different beings, even though we may not be happy doing it? I expect you’ll concur when I say, everything we do, in every single moment of our time, even if it may be something as pure as dreaming; it is something we do to become the next possible superior versions of ourselves – to want more, deserve more and get more. Our time; this time unfortunately, is a time of shallow waters, where sentient beings chase every next breath of life as if it were leaving, while being completely and clinically I might say, unable to understand, that it is breath itself that holds the weight of our soul; our life force and only known medium of existence, in this Universe – our Universe, in the centre of which, believe it or not is Love.

Indeed, we are the children of one Universe – OUR GREAT MOTHER, who brought us to life in the Milky Way so we could be nourished and brought to life on Earth, as instruments of Love, Belonging and Universal Oneness.

Take a look around you. Does THIS picture, fit the former description? I think not.

With the amount of betrayal we endure, induce and succumb to, I believe we’ve been grossly misfired. Our memories are filled with horrors, fears, disappointments, guilt and regrets. Our happiness turns to dust the moment we touch it, and it often remains a secret that dies quickly.

In all of this time we are being dragged through life; or at least that is how it begins to seem – mustn’t we be careful of what we choose to hold on to, while we make this journey? Shouldn’t we learn to harness the good memories so we can ride the thunder better?

If for a moment, SCIENCE in progress of INVENTION can be thought of as a fond memory – a great picture taken every time a world-changing invention was born -for example, Edison posing with his Bulb in a picture – especially taken to be of record, either personal or for documentation in history, or Tesla posing with his Two Phase Induction Motor – for reminiscence. In that case, every improvement in every invention ever conceived, was made based on the previous version, the previous happy memory * [Key words; improvement, happy memory].

I have always been deeply interested in Science and its spiritual application with rational approaches for achieving rational results. I have derived thus –

“At the unexplained, unseen core of science, there is Love.”

I mean, what else can it be? We don’t understand Love and the moment we try to define it, we lose it. Yet, everything about it seems completely rational.

However, keeping the right pictures and doing away with the wrong ones, does feel pretty good, doesn’t it? Especially on a nice warm afternoon, when you realize you are so happy, energetic and excited to go further ahead on this journey of your life, and you grab the reins and say, “Heehaw” – well, that’s what I am talking about.

We must keep pictures in our hearts, of every moment gone by, when we moved on to the next stage of our life-play; captured and framed. Keep the good pictures; forget the bad ones as if they were never even yours.

At least, I have decided to do that for myself. Three days ago, someone I love, woke me up in the morning and held me and gave me a hug – a soft, warm embrace. By the time I opened my eyes and looked at her, I felt more awake than I have ever felt in my whole life.

I went through the next few minutes cuddling up to Marble and Asphalt, brushing my teeth, having a cup of coffee, standing in the balcony and looking at the birds flittering about on the treetops, and then I realized it was my birthday. That is what all of this love and beauty in the morning, was all about; it was about me, my life and all its power and splendor. I thought I saw someone on the pavement right below my stance, walking and waving at me. I could swear I knew that face. It was so vaguely familiar, yet unfamiliar at the same time.

By his expressions I thought, he seems to have recognized me.

Does he know me?          

He stopped waving after a while and realized that I have not recognized him at all. My face bore an expression of blankness I had never felt before. All I could think of was – He looks familiar, maybe…

He was about as tall as me, wearing the colours I stopped wearing a long time ago – deep maroons and grays. He looked like one of those people in college or at work, who are a little too chilled out for their environments. His face was covered with dark foliage. He looked as if he had just come out of prison and had nowhere to live. His eyes were soft and filled with sadness. His smile was one of loss and fears but bright none the less. He was however, a complete stranger to me. Of that, I have no doubts.

Twenty eight pictures I have collected since the beginning of my time, today having found satisfaction, because I am smiling in each and every one of them. The people with me in those pictures are smiling too. Through my time I have also become a survivor, a fighter, a warrior, a gladiator and now, when I have found my reins again, I shall ride as a barbarian, till I find the twenty ninth panorama of my life, with me in the centre of the vision, at the centre of this Universe, at the core of which is Love; at the centre of my Universe, at the core of which, I am a complete stranger to myself.

There it is; the secret. I found it.

 

Siddharth Pathak | 1^st – 4^th April 2014