Notes from a prison

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Rohit Pansare under Poetry

*Notes from a prison

One moment you’re calmly sitting in your cubicle sipping sugar saturated tea and then something hits you. Your soul leaves your body, floats above your head and scorns at yourself, mocking at what has become of you. Showing off its freedom ….“You can never be as free as me!”

“You are locked up forever in those crisp green papers that are handed over every month; no; wrapped around your legs to prevent you from running and binding your hands to prevent you from setting yourself free. They are your master, they are your prison. All that you hope and wish to accomplish, all comes down to how stronger this prison will be. You are young; there is your whole life in front of you to enjoy what you’re doing but now you have to build this prison, to protect yourself from this world”.

What a strange prison this is? It is created to protect the prisoner from this world. I want to break through this prison. I want to burn it down.

Then you feel like tearing-up these masks, these fakes, trying to cover-up everything, trying to make everything look wonderful, when it’s not. Why can’t I say whatever that is in my mind? Why can’t the world accept me as I am? Is there no end to this make believe. When do I actually start living and stop faking it?

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*Image created by overlapping two photographs made in twilight, Feb 2011

A boy and his butterfly..

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Rohit Pansare under Poetry

I remember asking my grandfather to catch some butterflies for me,
so that I can make them a pet and store them in a glass jar…
I remember him telling me to leave holes in the lid so that they can breathe.

I remember running around in in my neighbors’ yard,
when I was not learning to make paper boats, from him..
I finally did capture one in a jar, but it didn’t survive.
I don’t remember having the courage to catch one again.

I imagined myself walking in a forest, as creatures peek from the dense undergrowth.
Then suddenly a butterfly fluttering down on my shoulder and then on my outstretched palm.
In the palm of my hand, it looks like the prettiest thing on earth!

My mother planted a Curry leaves plant,
With it came a beautiful black-white and red butterfly.
Amused, I thought, what is it doing on a boring flowerless plant like this?

Then in a few days I noticed a pair of gooey green caterpillars resting under a leaf.
Night would knock them off their slumber and make them ferociously feed.
In the day they would snugly sleep under the half eaten tattered leaves.
I watched them grow night and day until they grew as fat as my fingers!

I remember taking them in a box to school in my science class,
Girls shrieking and boys feeling their velvety sides,
The caterpillars seemed to like it, I thought then!

As I touched them, two red horns would emerge from behind their heads..
The boys would entertain themselves thus playing with their new friends!
Then our biology teacher explained that these horns are meant to scare their predators..
They are not the tails that dogs wag when their gay!
She told me to put them back on the plant as the caterpillars seemed ready to cocoon!

I hurried back home and let the little fellows on the plant again….
But I kept one for myself on my desk, with a small branch of the plant for it to feed…
hoping that I get to meet that butterfly which emerges…
hoping that it will rest on my palm just like the one in my dreams!

And cocoon it did, but the wait for the butterfly was too long,
I hurried back home everyday to find the fellow asleep in his self-made bed!
On one such day when I was at school the butterfly emerged,
My father later told me how it fluttered about my room for a while until he let it free!

I cried then a little for life being so unfair…
I still wish someday I can meet that butterfly…
The one that will rest on my shoulder and then flutter down on my palm!

Butterflies (lifeasabollinger.wordpress.com)
Six Nectar Plants to Attract Butterflies (gardening.answers.com)

a double life

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Rohit Pansare under My say, Poetry

It’s not easy living a double life,
Within oneself it’s like a strife….

It’s hard to improve your situation
If you feel you lack the tools to do so.

It becomes easier to drag your body…
Being numb and moving with the crowd….
yet trying to find your way aimlessly.

So what if you don’t want to be a cliché?
You are either alone or your one of them..
Either ways you are a stranger in the crowd.

You get into a monotonous rhythm…
it is difficult to break, difficult to escape,
It keeps rolling you in its swell…

The tide takes you in,
spins you around, takes you for a ride,
until you realize that you haven’t moved an inch!

Trying to escape but making sure you don’t…
There is nothing much you can do..
You either rise above or drown in the swell!It is not easy living a double life…

Unconscious Double Life (sammyg14.wordpress.com)

In this boring room…..

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Rohit Pansare under Poetry

Staring outside from this boring room…

I see the rain coming down, washing the earth below…

At a distance, the grass looks greener and trees more fresh…

All that I can imagine is this, sittin in this boring room….

People moving about, doing their work, oblivious to my state…

No one bothers as I stir from my slumber and walk towards the closed window…

I push open the window and peer out,

feeling the cool breeze and drops of water on my face…

Water trikles down my face, my arms outstretched, it runs down my spine…

Just as I am ready to climb up the ledge and fly away,on top these drops of rain….

I awaken from my slumber again, back in this boring room…..

(Now as I finish writing this, I realise, this kind of resembles the song Lemon tree by Fool’s Garden)