Works of RK

I visit her chat window now and then And it feels like an ode to a Tombstone    And as I walk among the dead lines That were once alive with our love I can feel the grass of time grow  Steadily, under my very feet. Maybe next year, on her birthday  I shall scroll through here again  And until then I will leave these lines here As an elegy To what was once living And breathing But is now very dead. 

I knew an artist once She would paint through those parts in her That bled from neglect   In here frames, There would always be a woman Who will always be engulfed In flames masquerading like oysters Or tresses Or even Dresses For a decade or more She would paint me in dark colors She would scratch me with her palette knives And write on me with her pens And often, she would step back a bit And look at me like I were her Art. You smile still! And she would start all over again.

She would bat her eyelids constantly  As if they were sending morse codes Of the things she spoke about. The things that one misses of another Are everyday stuff, nothing momentous... Like how she enjoyed my food Or how she would allow me to make the bed I wish I could decipher In time The dots and the dashes of despair  Before silences fell over the valley And the fog of time Caved in. 

If you were to cry for long enough Your tears will sear through your skin And create puddles in your soul. And eventually,   You will misjudge the roundness of your edges To compassion and to growth.  Those are just scars Masquerading as Trophies. Stop crying.

Her birthday reminder popped up on my screen yesterday. It was close to two years since we had stopped talking to each other. There was a finality to it.   There were parts of her that I could never fathom. And in the easiest of times, I can muddle minds.  I knew it then, as I know now, that it will be many seasons before she would allow me to grow in her garden again. If ever.  I closed my eyes in a prayer. May I be protected from droughts and floods and lightning and fire and other evils of everyday living.... for I want to someday regain that lost patch of loving land in her garden.  Let there be sunshine and water and shade and care and flowers and love in her life. Until we catch up again, may the keepers of time run slow. ps: Written in early Feb of 23

I want you to look at me Like a passenger on a slow train Looking out of an iron window At an old man sitting on an unkempt Ancient wooden recliner  In the balcony  Of a tiled traditional kerala house And it is raining A really light drizzle  Misting Your memory  Of the time we shared

I was trying to make sense of the thousands of lines of code before me. They wanted me to figure out why it was sluggish.   Over the years, so many programmers had worked on this. There were so many patches and upgrades that the brilliance of the master coder had stopped shining through. There was only this much overwriting that it could accept before it turned into a zombie. I looked at the Client Account Manager. All she wanted was for the application to work. Make it work...she said. I looked at the lines, it were like stories of many characters crisscrossing through time. It was too complex and opaque. As if the meanings of these lines were now lost in time .  Allow it to die....I said. She looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Let it be, it cannot be worked upon anymore. It is asking for redemption. Tell the client it's over, I said. She started crying. I could see similar tears bleeding through the lines on my screen.  No difference!