The Picasso in My Life and Adityan’s other poems

Aditya Shankar

The Picasso in my life

No one sees me on the streets. So, how
does it differ from being under the blanket?
My imagination is safe here, and my consciousness –
a glowing bulb in a room waiting to be occupied.
Or a room not knowing how I fill it with my
stillness:
my breath becomes our connect .
Sometimes life keeps breaking this way –
in love with the palms of a girl, the eyes of the second,
the breath of the third, the hair of another.
My object of desire a monster or a divinity if a whole –
three scripts, four accents, and
five dialects for each attempt at expression
It’s a flurry of floating eyes, like the dynamic IP
address of my system that blinks into a new face,
a new location for each ping:

The Picasso in my life is an armchair traveler.
He keeps watching me from unknown quarters,
turning me into an object to behold in the
backdrop of ‘memory mountains’,

canvas the color of streets, erasing the image,
redoing it into just a thing, an evolutionary leap
me/you/we/I:
object d’art, around and through,
and I request you:
Please pick me up as a free vector/icon,
attribute a creative commons –
a trying artist makes me less aloof in this world.

Before love

There is a period of love before each love

when you eagerly expect calls from long lost
acquaintances with whom you have nothing to share

To come across anyone from your address list –
The administrative assistant of a previous company,
The girl you met in the bus couple of months back,
The cousin of your friend’s friend,
The daughter of your mother’s colleague…
in the melancholic bagatelle of a hotel just
to remind them you are still around

Days when you travel aimlessly in metro trains
from one station to another,
watching couples hand-in-hand, eye-in-eye,
sitting next to you in their own beautiful worlds

when you sadly find out that
something as insignificant as
checking mails, recharging mobiles and washing
clothes tops your priority list

Passing through certain city streets
that remain strangely vacant on working days,
you would walk along with a friend
who turns silent near the sea

On the cold floor of an empty church,
you would close the eyes and think of
the darkness inside a beehive
on top of the church tower

There is a period of love before love

When you alone know that you are in love with something that you don’t know

Party poopers

At a party my friend hosted
No one turned up.
His gifts were excuses and unanswered calls
the sadness of uncut cakes,and virgin balloons-

It takes the sharpness of a rejected eye to
Burst them with a glance.

His guests were old photographs in old albums,
And he spoke for them all;the one here,the torn,
the one on the sticky-

He played with them
A game of empty musical chairs-
Games he lost before it began

and sat at the window gazing at
How water dreams of color,
Of finding the roots and travelling towards the flowers.

When you are left alone,
You feel like the only factory sounding sirens on a holiday,
the only cubicle with light in an office,
the only hand of vigil on a recluse night of beat patrol.