Neha's Notebook

'Poem' is a word that flutters on the mountaintops In puddles & pebbles that fandangos & hops Like a boat that drifts On streams of milky mists And like a flock of doves that peregrinates from hills to treetops A word that nestles in the tiniest dewdrop That paints a peacock's feathers with rainbowy pop A word that shimmers in tones of electric blue-green An eye invisible yet seen A word that blooms in the meadows of golden springs That marks the arrival of dusk, the colour of homecoming!

In a story of a yellow rufous summer where zillions of tiny-little poems gathered together in coalesce to emit a vibration of light, the light so bright that it drowned away all the shadowlands, all that was dark, leaving only the fleeting glimpses of memory and deflating clouds of monsoons long gone, in that story of the yellow summer I was a witness, a spectator.

Life is an assorted smorgasbord of colours Dark and bright A melange of little glowy lanterns In dusk's coppery light From shadows livid To rainbows vivid From symphonies of seasons sweet & bitter To dreams of fantasylands Tippling with starry gold glitter!

I am a noun I have with me, a box of adjectives Stored in which Are my joys, lusts & griefs A casket of trinkets & beads And a thread that strings  them all together in a classical weave. At times Even I become an adjective too Cocooned in the noun of life I warble at its beauty & bounty the words & verses a few!

Nestling in the backdrop of the sky of dusk painted in a blend of persimmon & periwinkle husk, Humming in the space beyond  Bubbling like the quiet florescence Of glowy fireflies & cutesy unicorns Even beyond the music Of shimmering stardust Sings an invisible elf This song I know As the voice of my phantom self!

Every time  when the sun falls in love with the earth, the space above the sky lights up in zillions of ionic starbursts As if some mythological Pandora Swashes the cosmos  With speckles of sparkles & goblets of glitter Glassy iridescent lakes rise like serpentine heads of bony critters Streamers of dancing haloes close-up the dayspring Shimmery electric clusters of dusky pink, turquoise & sea green In a resonance of passion delicious tunes play in plethora  Swaying pirouetting magnetic waveforms Emerging in a classic aurora!  

where zillions of stars twinkle at the end of the day where bumblebees wander from flower to flower on their way where a tranquil breeze flutters in the golden-green fields where trails of hilly pines lead towards a waterfall perennial & chilled where fairies bungle on treetop swings such is the chronicle of the place where there is the eternal spring!

  ​ As the fabric of darkness curtains the springtide light A foxy seamstress sews it with a moon bright Starry rhinestones dotted here and there Perfuming breeze with a tranquil flare Somewhere in this musky darkness She encrusts a gem musical The north star, the cosmic sparkle!

  A catwoman's head is made up of ten thousand cats A Catwoman wears them all in her invisible hat As the Catwoman prowls around the universe from land to sky from sky to shores These ten thousand cats reverberate in chorus one rumbling roar!

memories of childhood – a vast meadow filled with infinite sunflowers sequinned tawny & brown faces towards the sun, yellow crayon smiles & blossoming mirrors, the wellsprings of pure gold!

A tendril silver-grey stick spiced with powdery charcoal soot & Wrapped in a glossy wooden flesh Spilling onto crisp notepapers words into poetry & poetry into puttery scribbles mesh Imprinting with its tootsie smudges Expressions of vulnerability, magic, tenderness!

Imagine someone with cotton candy cheeks Someone, with a smile Pleasant as a chocolate-lolly stick Someone whose eyes like raisins nutty brown Whose lips like roses that swirl into a candy town Imagine someone with a voice like honeyed sugarcane sweet So when they speak to you Your heart explodes with the feeling "Hurray! Candy treats!" Imagine someone sweeter than a billion cookies And a trillion desserts too Don't think too much 'Cause this someone is none other than you!

  Mighty is not the one who never falls, but the one who falls a little and rises a little to fall again to rise again incessantly drifting like a queer boat through the erratic play of flotillas of emotional waves yet never forgetting the flamebulb of resplendent spark that flares, blazes, flickers in the deepest recesses within oneself.

for, butterflies are compasses of eternity floundering for ever inside their gooey caterpillar cocoons striving for polarity to sprout their wings their life’s boons dusting the fragrance of floral honey off their teeny-tiny feet polarity, they teach us, ain’t so sweet

Humans are mirrors, Not quintessential or sublime But rather Inherently flawed reprises Glinting illusions & disguises Crackled fragments of broken dreams, crestfallen hearts Smithereens of turmoils & tribulations Shattered mirrors, splitted from pore to pore, part to part Plighted to a mortal coil of utter insanity  A chronicle lasting almost eternity!

I aspire to be a lighthouse Steady, stable and still Gushes of restless waves Crash and splash Lapping on my feet Yet I remain Unmoved in my will A symbol of sight An anchor of light  A lighthouse I aspire to be With all the might!

Tripping at the edge of time where space sings, and silence chimes Falling into the abyss An abyss – endless, dark & deep Where frames of thoughts seem to materialize in a slow sweep Where, at times, there are floods of emotions Breaking some illusions shattering some notions Tripping at the edge of time falling into the abyss Transcending the perimeters of that and this!

An enchanted forest lilliputian fairies Streams of wildflowers oozing amid trees   Engulfed in this phantasmogorical mishmash there lay a fruit of gold encapsulated in a stash   It must be a magic potion! thought she,   ‘cause as she stared into the canvas that was stationary & still she found herself drowning into it losing charge of her will   Mesmerised by its magical spell she stepped into the canvas The painter took his paintbrush & added a woman’s silhouette adjoining the magic potion’s flask. Staring at his masterpiece mused he While the woman wondered, locked inside his painting, where really was she!

 This life is a dreamworld for those with an eye of wonder From an oasis of stillness to a spectrum of mirages, varied & sunder This life is a fairyland for hearts brimming with love of dispassion and passion of thunder A story of wilderness, a tale of a zillion blunders The one who seeks either the all or the none in this dreamworld fairyland’s plunder!

 Reverberating in the drums of the ears, the clink and clank of bangles, some jingles some jangles… The grainy vibration in the pineal antenna the sandy quivering of a broomstick, husky straw fibers swishing a leafy floor The creaks and the croaks of a wooden door… The buzzing of wasps on a quietly tranquil night Or the touch of a soft breeze humming through a cloudless sky’s sight The rustling susurrations of leaves stirring before a storm A reptilian whisper that sounds somewhere at the edge of time where breaks a norm… Is silence full of quiet, or is it a sound of mystery? The sounds of silence, perhaps, lead the way to the quietude where silence is all empty and free!

  Once upon a time a woman saw a dream A dream in which she saw a giant mannequin…   Sculpted intricately in shade of taffy pink Towering majestically till the sky’s brink…   The woman saw through the glass case of the dream The sculpture shedding tears of gold, downpouring in a stream…   The woman’s ears clinked, her inner eye rolled, as she saw herself watching in the dream the sculpture’s tears of golden marigold!

Wavelets of time Rise and fall Dawning lights of noons and dark of the dusks Flipping from spring to summer, from summer to fall Rhythms of patterned inks Dance on a typewriter scroll As wavelets of time Write themselves in a poetry's sprawl!

I'm a leaf You're a leaf All of us humans are, leaves... Bejeweled on the branches of trees separating and falling Wandering around with the breeze All at once, in one moment of time Yet in the end, always, Dissolving back into the ocean of mud Becoming compost to our resurrections and metamorphosis... We, the wandering leaves!

  Sunset is a blossom, Blushing orange red, and pinky tangerine some... A symphony of passion, a soothing musical strum, Neither of glee, nor of glum... Just simply an endless vastness, dissolving into a sea of either, the nature's rum!

Repositories of memories, euphonies of inspired glee… Reveries of an eternal spring & glitzy glamours, oh so soul-stirring Many an often, erratic glooms or piecemeals of impending dooms But collect, if you may, these thrills-n-thunders, and be, if you may, a marvel of kindness, a paragon of wonder Like a magical juju, some concoction or a cryptic key Life, and all moments of it, shall become, for you, Dazzling fireballs of exquisite beauty… Life, shall become for you, a dazzling fireball of beauty!

 The nightsky, she swallowed rolled it into a number, awaking from the trance of a lifelong slumber From the ewer of numerals, some spells of arithmetic she cast curious to discover the impermanence of square roots, of brackets, till when they’d last. In the mazes of trigonometry, drifted, she, like waves of sines & cosines… searching for a function of tan for a way to connect with the divine… In a sea of infinite variables, looked she, for a constant to stick Unlocked she, this is how, the attic of mathematics, Hoorray! She wondered. What intoxicating a magic trick!

A poet is a bumblebee, who flies from flower to flower, collects the nectar within, ambrosial and unseen, and fills their teapots with this sweet-sweet honey… Teapots, from which, they outpour, onto their notebooks’ pages, a spring, an essence, called ‘Poetry’!

Snaking my way through a forest trail, through groves of lush green trees in a wooded terrain, a quiet fragrant morning, muffles of crunchy fallen leaves crystalline pellets of dewdrops and hail I traverse a solitary split-second beholding a stream, a thought train… Listening perhaps for the first time, to the voice of an echoing whisper reverberating somewhere in my tranquil heart space, jingling and jangling as the twinkling of the stars, reminding me of an invisible grace!

Hidden beneath every gremlin of darkness, lies a glittering sea of colors... A cacophony pulsating with yellows, blues, reds, greens, purples and a zillion others!

  Tapping the crazy rhythms of their typewriters’ keys, how these poets mystically plant their own typewriter trees… swinging with breezes of emotion, where the leafy words rustle wild and free…   Slipstreaming with florals of beauty, these merry-n-sweet gardens of poetry, Poetry - isn’t this what they call, a typewriter tree, a poet’s tree ?!