When robin cried

dear robin,

your tale and mine

resemble the saddest parts of poetry,

they resemble the echoes of febrile ghosts

lurking in the mist-painted alleys

of our haunted construction sites

that we call home,

they resemble that

maladroit mud-slinger of a tinker

we had made in order to save

what we call home,

they resemble the healthiest apostle vein

in our hearts,

that despite all stop-signs

give into impugn love every fucking time,

they also resemble the

asphyxiation of our affections

for sinking ships

and broken apothecary tables:

...

it wasn't too long ago

when summer rains only meant no going outside to play,

and not a bowl of hyperboles

and romanticised exaggerations

about how apparently the shape of raindrops

made dead poets roll over

in their distant-land slumbers,

all thanks to puberty of course;

it wasn't too long ago

when post-school teletubbies

would give way to

post-teletubbies scolding

to force late noon naps into reluctant eyes,

and it wasn't so much about the need for them

but because disobedience was disallowed back then;

grumpy and sedated from all the paying attention

to the six periods in school,

those eyes did fall asleep

and practised shiny three hour long dreams

in the span of one hour long naps,

and that was probably when hopes were first born;

then, of course,

old man came back

who had an even longer ago

given birth to a tradition

which lasted till adulthood

of spending evenings inside

closed walls inhabiting a door in them somewhere,

only to be used for

biscuit excursions and urine trips;

thus, once again,

for the second time in the day,

dreams, only this time open-eyed, had to be practised

because even toppers didn't study every day:

...

dear robin,

the way i see it,

i didn't think i gave two shits about

how he met their mother,

as long as your brusque mannerisms

when handling something vulnerable about yourself

had that guilelessness about them,

as long as your smile kept being your mantle

and your laughs became shrieks

every time you became self-conscious;

but, dear robin,

it was when you cried

that daisies learnt how to properly bloom,

that Saturn stopped its opprobrium,

that monks pledged for oblivion

and lost rituals became less inchoate;

your tears were like my own, robin,

in comparison to whom

the gloomiest of Shillong winters weren't pale enough,

and the mollycoddling of them weren't incessant enough;

...

dear robin,

your tale and mine

are tales of cajoled attempts

of voluptuous love and desires,

if only we could hide them well

from the plain sight of our admittees to them;

if only we could remain in our kowtows

rather than opening up to our respective pulchritude,

we wouldn't have had to live

with only dogs for years on end: