#140Story

The blind crow cawed all night, scavenging light in the dark. #140Story

Her eyelids beat like wings; her sleep flies away. #140Story

70something and wide-eyed, she asks, Is that the bad guy?
80ish and smiling, he calls, Shh, I can’t hear the dialogue. #140Story

Sunday deals her hours carelessly, between drags of smoke,
puffing her coiffure, and smudge-lipped sips of wine. #140Story

Doubt works hardest in the dead of the night. #140Story

He listens to sleep tiptoe in guilty anklets. #140Story

Cynicism is: The sambar packet’s extra rubber-band. The stepny on a scooter.
The un-discarded phone number. The twelfth man. #140Story

Shake a piggy bank before breaking it, feel empty pockets bottom-first;
For hope of disappointment, is hope seldom disappointed. #140Story

The caterpillar walks to music, its legs like tumbling piano-keys. #140Story

Your sweet nothings, and the dancing crumb on your upper-lip. #140Story

After her first day at school, the little girl went home with a headful of lice,
but no friends to count. #140Story

Pocketing his bus-fare, swallowing his pride, he thumbed a lift.
A kind scooter dropped him, and all his coins, all the way home. #140Story

The spaces between words are the gaps in their seating; the pauses in their dancing;
the lull in their conversations. #140Story

Pirouetting cotton candy. Giddy little ballerina. #140Story

“Happy Teacher Day Miss!” he beamed, in an inked shirt, darned shorts and
last-evening-knocked teeth. Gifts come in strange boxes. #140Story

undoing is and her sweet He slow. #140Story

Her back to him, she sleeps. His feelings, unworded;
her hair in yet-to-be-invented punctuations. #140Story

Runaway Poppins. 40something-year-old knees popping to retrieve them. #140Story

The rain hissed, the tethered goats bleated, and the rowdy dogs barked back all night.
The next morning, only the eagles cried. #140Story

Every father’s waist aspires to be as wide as the reach of his son’s arms. #140Story

Empires and castles with royal elephants are built with
summer holidays, teddy bear ministers, and mosquito nets. #140Story

He gives. She gives in. #140Story

We are seldom imprisoned by walls. We are imprisoned by windows. #140Story

Married on paper, with an ampersand ring. #140Story

When not splashing in the waves, or painting tufts of cloud,
the lighthouse twirls round and round, dizzy and giggling. #140Story

Libraries have fat gilded tomes for knowledge,
and open windows for dreaming. #140Story

He waits for her like a second waterdrop does:
to collect in its arms the gingerly fickle first,
and fall in giddy momentum. #140Story

Underlined eyes. Highlighted cheekbones. Bold lips.
He takes furious notes of her face. #140Story

Dry as bone she stands, toes curled, in a puddle of her clothes. #140Story

Fingers climbing staircases of toes, to stand giddy on the height of restraint. #140Story

He lights a cigarette; the air draws her eyes with kohl. #140Story

Text-relieved tickets. Bottle caps. Context jokes. What ifs.
The things we hold dear are surety; our hearts, emotional junkyards. #140Story

The bottle has held English blueberry jam, Ooty uniform buttons,
delicate hairpins and now, just-pinched gooseberries. #140Story

He asks her to hold his hand, so his feet can still find the ground. #140Story

Four chambers of heart. Four ways, broken apart. ‬#140Story

And we decided we’d call it “falling in love” because there’s never
rhyme, reason, sense or season to hold onto,
or hold us back.‪#140Story

We’re ever so eager to give away our hearts.
Perhaps they’re too heavy for us to hold. #140Story

Soon we’ll know, that in our lives, we matter the least.
For the promises we made to ourselves,
were the promises we didn’t keep.#140Story

Wars in gnaws of hunger. Defences torn thin.
Territories claimed in throbbing red. Quiet conquests of skin. #140Story

A string of jasmine buds later, her face blooms. #140Story

He purses his lips to keep loose pearls,
coinage, and change from spilling. #140Story

In his approaching shadow, her water lily eyes droop. #140Story

To have too little to halve. To halve too little to have. #140story

The meaning of flowers changes
according to which side of the cemetery wall
he gives them to her. #140story

Then he was owned. Now he is possessed. #140story

She offers quiet words. He serves the sentence. #140Story

The waters of their skins rushed to meet,
but fell through the gaps between their fingers. #140Story

When her warm hand reached for his,
he feared for his butterfingers.#140Story

Slippery chins, smooth shoulders,
shiny noses, knees. Our rounded edges are proof:
we’re made with weathering, built by corroding.#140Story

The glass is half-full of emptiness. #140Story

He watches light & dark throw punches at each other.
Sparks fly. Dark buckles. Light bleeds.
In her window, a tubelight’s come on.#140Story

He left her, with a blooming bouquet of
unfurled tissues at her feet.
Romance is a doing of the eyes. #140Story

Eggshells of composure. #140Story

Someone’s slowly stirring in night blue poison, in Evening’s drink.#140Story

Raindrops make hollow sounds when they knock at my chest.#140Story

She’d give something. He’d get something.
Little wonder, hurt hurts both ways. #140Story with @clownasylum.

We are as transient as our utterances, as opaque as our unsaids.#140Story

Her skin is so deeply the colour of earth,
he can smell the moments before she begins to cry. #140Story

We are born of extraordinary circumstances. We will find
extraordinary means. #140Story

In some homes, bottles, bills, books with banned names,
low-cut clothes, letters, and numbers are secrets.
In most, feelings are.#140Story

All the silences of the sentence crowd
at the beginning of it. Like unfulfilled dandelions. #140Story

Bustling down busy streets, bumping into wayside
heart-hawkers wearing their wares on their sleeves. #140Story

We are built on the waiting cells of our cancers.
Like the bits of sand making glass that pebbles break. #140Story

His spine’s the tinkling xylophone, his pulse, the wavering drum,
his breathing’s the whistling, her thoughts are the hum. #140Story

For every nerve-ending that fires,
every plosive that pops at lips,
every clap of blinking eyes –
there are explosions in the sky.#140Story

His nose is a crestfallen flower: drooping stalk, petals downcast.
His eyes, basil leaves that end in dew. His misery. Her art. #140Story

Travel is sometimes what’s outside myriad windows.
And sometimes, what’s reflected in them. #140Story

Her lips defy geometry. His thoughts defy modesty. #140Story

Distance, is not finding his musk
in the smell of her hair. #140Story

Birthday parties. Suspect letters. Or when he leaves.
Surprise is hardly what happens, but for how long it doesn’t. #140Story

Half-full teacups. Half-empty conversation. #140Story

Grandmothers are angels
who give away their wings to grandchildren. #140Story

Without him, she is half an apple. Wobbly footed.
Core exposed. Severed seeds.
A browning half-sin. #140Story

For every action, there is equal reaction.
For every balloon that escapes gravity’s clutch,
a bird sits on a branch to watch. #140Story

Possession is a woman creating him – bone, muscle, skin.
Possession is a woman destroying him – skin, muscle, bone.
#140Story

Many I’m-just-a-normal-person promises later,
she is yet to meet a normal person. #140Story

Dejection walks in dancing shoes. #140Story

Doctors conclude that the leading cause for
both narcissism, and self-loathing,
are the same: mirrors. #140Story

Home is somedays inside the door,
looking hungrily out – and somedays outside the door,
looking longingly in. #140Story

In reverence to the ways of her fingers, his hair stood on end.#140Story

Where is our kingdom? When will it come? #140Story

The slide of her shoulder, curl of nostril, depths of hair, ends of lashes.
He envied light for holding her in places
he couldn’t.#140Story

Power is his ability to make her deliriously happy. #140Story

He basked in the already-11 sun. Time ran by. Grabbing her by the waist,
he asked, “What’s the hurry love? Got some place to go?”#140Story

And at the end of evolution is humanity.
Our actions, no longer in the bounds of who we are.
But finally, in what we do. #140Story

He’d finally bridged his head and heart with irrefutable logic:
Here is now. Now is she. She is here. #140Story

She lifted the waves of her hair from the pillow, bound them
in a swirling whirlpool, and left,
with him struggling mid-ocean. #140Story

He advised his patients to talk to themselves. They were, after all, the best,
most sympathetic listeners they could ever find. #140Story

He was the white of snow. She was the cold of it.
#140Story#Thompson

He broke open the lock on the chest, sliced the eaves of neglect,
cleared films of dust, and drank deeply the memory of her smell.#140Story

Sparks are fireflies of luminous intensity. #140Story

We are poems. Defined by unsaids, metered by caution,
metaphors for kin.
Our breaths, like spaces between words, catch before a -#140Story

Reading braille on the sealed lips of a blank sheet of paper.#140Story

The spaces between his ribs are moulds for her fingers, the edge of his cage,
for her thumbs – to open a humble gift he gives her.#140Story

The most mesmerizing thing about a woman is her hair.
Pan, trapped in Saturn’s, watches her through this veil eternally. #140Story

Fallen apples aren’t proof of gravity.
Knees in surrender are.#140Story

Waiting is most days, the black veil.
On some days, the brown eyes.#140Story

He cast a line in her ear today.
It tugged. He reeled it in. #140Story

Growing up is a problem
even her mother can’t solve. #140Story

On some days, love is who holds in their hate longer.
On other days, hate is who holds back their love. #140Story

If the heels are the beginnings, and the head,
the end – the neck is the thickness of love. #140Story

He boxed with his shadow. And lost both ways. #140Story

Sinews of muscle and strings of nerves bind us.
Brittle bones set us free. #140Story

Giddy circles of argument.
Triangle of her skin between seam of top and beginning of jeans.
Square expression. Love is geometry.#140Story

She promised herself she’d leave,
before the seat of her stockings could fray.
The breeze was so lovely, she forgot them today.#140Story

He came to an incomplete home,
after an unresolved conflict,
with unfinished popcorn. #140Story

Improbability ran, and ran down several zeros,
before rushing up to embrace one certainty. #140Story

I held a box of the universe for my son to pick just 3 things out,
assured that no matter what he picked,
he could get by with.#140Story

He slept, arms like he’d serenaded her
at her window that evening.
She slept, legs like she’d run away him. #140Story

The man who knew too much married the most
intelligent person he’d ever met: the woman
who knew enough. #140Story

Too proud to beg, too honest to steal, the wayside poet
rummaged through piles of broken promises
outside effusive men’s homes.#140Story

On most days, he can’t forgive her.
On other days, he can’t forget her. #140Story

He watched her wipe her nailpolish with tufts
of acetone-drunk cotton. His bride gone,
now his wife. #140Story

Mothers fold it in the smell of their sarees.
Fathers line it in their jackets’ inner pockets.
Home, is hide and seek. #140Story

They sat at the edge of reason.
The view was breathtaking.#140Story

As far as earworms went, his favourite
was her breathing. #140Story

He didn’t leave. Not because he had no place to go to.
He didn’t leave. Because then, he’d have no place
to leave from. #140Story

When on guard, she binds her hair in an aperture that threatens
to catch him considering the vulnerability of her neck. #140Story

She’d never fully left, until even her absence had left. #140Story

The unsaid lies behind the wall of his skin.
She is armed, with fingertips. #140Story

Her plait had come loose. Her rubber band was in his hand.
And her tears unravelled like ribbons down her cheeks. #140Story

According to her, every feeling in the world has a name.
This feeling, she decided, was called daddy. #140Story

He woke to an empty pillow scrawled with curly stray taunts.#140Story

His eyes followed her all the way up to disappointment. #140Story

In the age of modesty, her hair and his fingers are misfits. #140Story

He tenderly confessed, “I play the organ at church.”
The prostitute burst out laughing. #140Story

For sale. A nun’s habit. Never used. #Hemingway #140Story

His tongue ran through his mind, stirring hordes of sleepy words
aflutter. Then, they settled on the telephone line between them.
#140Story

He knew age would slide down her sides and settle thick at her
hips. She knew age would gather round his ankles and so, he’d
stay. #140Story

To her, nothing around him could be inanimate. His
pillow dimpled under his head. His t-shirt drummed at his
chest. #140Story

The night’s countless hours he had to kill. And yet, he made
himself instant noodles. #140Story

Just like everyone else, he’d inherited his mother’s self-doubt,
and his father’s self-destruction. #140Story

The sun juiced her lap’s diaphanous skin. The car seats
smelled hot. She sucked at the orange candy that didn’t
run. #Yoshimoto #140Story

Their boat bobbed on his sleeping desires. The
boards creaked and groaned under the weight of her
tread. #McEwan #140Story

When played in reverse, they didn’t fall in love. They
bubbled up. They loved in ferocity, before they never met
again. #Vonnegut #140Story

He woke up on the wrong side of bittersweet. #140Story

The boy with coffee eyes smiled. Her knees
dissolved. #140Story

All their earthly belongings fit in the pallu of her saree: An
idol god. Gold coins from their wedding. And their week old
son. #140Story

His mind was slowly unraveling. With the loose threads, he
spun bright quilts for his grandchildren. #140Story

The streetlight leaned against the pole, smoking lazily, half-
mast eyes devouring the drunk drizzle’s dirty dance with the
wind. #140Story

Disciplined hair. Poker straight back. Perfect Th of Thank You.
A man of manners. He’d found a little bread. Now, to find a
plate. #140Story

With deft movements of her fingers, she’d spell her eyes with
kohl. Spell, of course, in braille. #140Story

Her love swelled his heart and made it lighter. Afraid it would
float away, he’d put in a stone a day. Soon, he had a heavy
heart. #140Story

She twirled her hair. Sighed. Looked at the time. Wrung her
fingers. Chewed her lips. Looked at the time. Sleep was late
again. #140Story

Her secrets would wilt into sweet nothings when he listened
without imagination. #140Story

He wrote of fading love & hoped she wouldn’t believe it’s them.
She wrote of lasting love & hoped he wouldn’t believe it’s
them. #140Story

His ma went to bed, too ill to hold her love. He stood on the
spot where she had, soaking up the warmth she’d spilt on the
floor. #140Story

By tomorrow, her hair would’ve curled, her lips would’ve
forgotten lines, her smell, returned. So tomorrow, he’d fall in
love. #140Story

Winter came. So she patched her jeans, disbanded her hair and
burnt her rebellion. #140Story

You, before the words. The roundness of your buttons. The
texture of your cuticles. The exposure of your elbow. Love is
disbelief. #140Story

Rings. Portraits. Children. Snug-knit sweaters. New smelling
homes. Old letters. Heartbreaks are made of these. #140Story

She slept in the impression of him on his side of the bed. It was
the most comfort he had ever given her. #140Story

He couldn’t whistle. She couldn’t remember dates. It’s okay,
they decided, that’s what the kids would do. #140Story

She was watching their wedding video, shredding a tissue.
He pulled on his boxers and said, “Hey, that looks just like
you.” #140Story

She didn’t want to talk. The darkness was an itchy blanket
that didn’t agree with him. Livid, he stabbed the dark with a
light. #140Story