The Creaking Chair – Part XIV

11th July 1999

“I am writing to you in a state of unbridled passion
I have intoxicated myself on poetries from Pablo Neruda 

and the 90’s Bollywood love songs 

Remember how you found my love for ‘Zara Zara’ from RHTDM 

to be hopelessly romantic !

I am in one of those moods right now 

And it’s pouring outside completing the setting for reminiscence

It’s funny how in spite of calling myself a poet,

I have never written many letters to you 

That is supposed to be the thing with lovers who are poets, right?

Wasn’t that my biggest pull when I tried to woo you? 

Oh those were the days !

The butterflies in the stomach, the incessant checking for text messages

Do you even know how many times, I wrote an entire poetry 

just because I wanted to tell you something 

and was too shy to speak to you directly

How far have we come from there

From writing messages through my words 

to concealing messages between my words 

and you still read me; with all my apostrophes and full stops.”

I found this handwritten note in one of Pablo Neruda’s anthologies yesterday 

I think it was ‘twenty Love poems & a song of despair’ 

the letter was half-written, in fact I was just getting started

and I don’t remember why did I stop

This was the time when she was in a foreign land 

and we decided to experiment with letters so that we would have a story to tell later

Maybe it was a call from her that made me stop writing 

or it was the use of full stop – like a valve shutting off the flow of thoughts & emotions

~ Ashk

P.S. - Should it be ‘Lovers who are poets’ or ‘poets who are lovers’?

P.P.S. – The letter must have been somewhere in the early August of 1949 or 1950

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