Day 360: Wandering Wanderers

Not all wanderers wander and it is the nature of travel. It is the nature of people to feel the need to roam and be lost and yet fall in love with nostalgia of just the same. I am amused by the need to travel, the notion of the wandering wanderers and while I look for no subtle hints of where to go next, I am fascinated by all. I am in the lost farewell at the airport you say, I am in the bus tickets you keep folded in your shirt pocket sometimes, I am maybe the directions you ask a stranger when lost and maybe maps  that you never use. In the wilderness of the world I pay an ode to you the wanderers who live in journeys every single day. While the whole worlds finds a place to be , you refuse to stay.

Wandering Wanderers
Why would I worry about tickets I am yet to buy?
Choose destinations before knowing if I could fly
I would wander without knowing I am a wanderer at heart
Just looking for places to go and waiting to start

For those who are lost among the familiar places
Who are forgotten and remembered in the everyday faces
Traveling home or far away from one
We have started to fade, but we have only begun

Am I a wandering wander at heart, are you one too?
If I follow no maps and directions, will you follow through?
For now I have no good answers; just questions on my mind
Why being lost is hard and yet is the easiest thing to find

In words that travel far and some that echo back
I am keeping notes of all the things of which I lost track
While we may all come and go, we will leave a trace
While the wanderers who wander, try to find their own place

Day 359: Words we Mean

For the next one week I will try to write perhaps the last week of writing before the project that ran a little over a year comes to 365 poems and a year or more of poetry writing. I have been asked by many about what I learned and though I cannot comprehend in the full complexity the nature of that, I have learned in bits and pieces. I have learned in good and bad times, in the best and worst possible of time and in hope and also in despair. I guess one thing I can say is that the ideas and things that keep moving me have never run out and maybe only slowed just a bit when I wasn't paying any attention. I guess it all comes down to doing something because you need to, and because these are the only way and words I can reach without knowing. These are the words I mean and for the last week they are with you hidden waiting to be seen.

Words we Mean

If either one of us knew
Time we collected & of moments so few
If all was written out into your heart
While we collected scratch space right from the start

Till the end of endless days were reached by just the two
We would walk endlessly and find places to go
I would wait till our writings like flavors of food
Would taste & feel different as much as they could

But these familiar spaces we walk between
The green grass and sunshine that grazes your knees
I will pick and choose the colors I need
I will follow no one and yet  I will let you lead

I pause just for a while and write the last 7 days
Because I have written for a year & yet I have much more to say
I pick and choose these things I write about
I am storyteller with last acts as the curtains draw

Day 358: Palettes

While I kept staring at the pencil sketches on the side of my notebook I kept looking outside at the rain outside my window. It smells of a memory that you can go to when you close your eyes. It reminds you of the first time you walked in the rain or maybe reminds you of paper boats that would go to no places. I think in the colors we mixed together in the palette we have painted with only a few while the rest are still waiting for brush strokes to spread them around. My color palette grows in my imagination for now, slowly as we sketch again, come paint with me.

Palettes
Come paint me like the outlines your draw
While you try to recall things that you saw
I will be the sketches in your handbook; for now
Keep drawing with no instructions, not knowing how

These palettes with dried out colors of mine
Have seen much that has passed in the passing of time
While some I have painted on canvases in the background
Important things that have refused to stick around

How do we capture a thought or a memory?
Is it fresh when it forms and nostalgia to be?
Or are we painting sketches from rough outlines
Things that we remember and the ones that we define

I am the restless boat on your wall, resting by the sea
I will be tied to nothing but the waves that are set free
While time will pass on and I will capture just today
In pictures and sketches and writings in my own way

Day 357: Sketches Here

I always feel that our notion of carrying memories are similar to when we travel to conferences with posters, locked in poster tubes. Wrapped somehow as we carry them in our mind. The idea was that the poster tubes they grow and we keep sketching and drawing new things onto the canvas. We trace walks we took, we think of moments we share and probably find inspiration scribbled somewhere. As I wrap up one of the conference here in Boulder, I keep thinking about this staring at my very own poster tube. In the hope of more things I keep writing, maybe adding a few thoughts of my own to the days that pass by. The airport windows loom with sunshine and yet it feels just a little cold as though the city waves goodbye.

Sketches Here

My poster in the tube it lay
I watched the sun flickering on and off
I kept wondering about things to say
And hoping some will get through to the top

I was moving around in bed sheets
Hoping a few more hours of the day I would cheat
While the sunlight grows stronger for now
It escapes outside my window somehow

These pencil sketches of people that I know
Some who remember me and some I will draw
As relentless as my travels may seem
I have yet to go these places where I may have once been

Rest for now my friend you have come home
Or maybe just places you don't feel alone
While the rest of us come and go
There are some who leave traces you don't even know 

Day 356: Chocolat

Some of the sweetest things in life are often indeed like chocolates sweet and bitter, blended and tempered and handled carefully. They are sweeter still in my hot chocolate mug and as they are in the pieces I unwrap one at a time. In whatever shape or way, in hope and in dismay I find them better than comfort food or maybe something I would eat everyday if I could. But why lie maybe I do get the steal the taste every now and then and may that's all I writing about, wishing I had hot chocolate instead of ink in my pen.

Chocolat
I am only in the sugar coated wraps of my mind
Sweet tastes and chocolates that I can find
While reminders that warm memories are tempered too
They are aftertastes some for me and some for you

Why make bets on things you cannot see
Why wish upon things and then set the thoughts free?
Keep the hope they are things that manage to stay
Some that are persistent even if they seem to slip away

These questions that I am sometimes asked to frame
The bigger ones that are different but not the same
Things that encompass everything I know and do for now
So I keep coming back to the drawing board somehow

My chocolate chip cookies or biscuits whatever may
They are things I keep in jars hoping they would stay
While some things they drip like hot chocolate drinks
On the edge of my tongue & my seat, while I wait for you to blink

Perfect reminders of sweet things maybe hard to come by
So I write them down anyways, in my words I try

Day 355: I am Rain

It started to rain in the evening as the day ended. The rain it passes by as reminder of things that had been and reminder of things to come.  It treats all equally,  it just pours without reason,  without judgments or without reservation.  It knows of no boundaries that control it,  it rides the free wind.  As you close your eyes it washes both tear and anguish while the lightning reaches a part of you that you hide from even yourself.  I am the relentless,  I am the cold and the warmth of the day.

I am Rain
I am pouring outside your window pane
Between the moments that you find me sane
While I wash away the moments you hide
And bits and pieces of me will somehow survive

I am making a sound outside your door
I am sticking to your roof and lying on your floor
I am still attached to the moving of the day
I am trickling down your back like a drop of rain

I am the puddles you cross over and some that splash
You are putting out fires and leaving behind ash
Yet some things you cannot leave & neither change
Some things as they must, they will simply rearrange

These cold drops on a warmer summer night
These lightning strikes as though putting up a fight
In between the restless days, the hours too will fall
I am rain, I am washing away all

Day 354: Sweet Biscuits

This one was a harder piece to write, I guess mostly because it was looking at something we get to make and yet as something more symbolic. I write this to the sweet biscuits we make, the memories we bake together in the oven. Even on a slow, gloomy and slightly warmer day, my thoughts escape right back to you in the month of May. I am writing this as though hoping that the room smells of that perfect batch we made, the little pieces of warmth I share at the beginning of the day. For all that is unanswered for now, I hope they remain just as they may. Here's hoping it reaches right where it needs to and the aftertaste lasts just a little longer.

Sweet Biscuits
So I packed them all, all that I could fit
And took it on travels; even if just for a bit
Reminded myself of a warmer place
And a smile that lit the day, right on your face

There are words on my footsteps, I write them down
I am hoping to be the familiar, in the box of lost & found
Come find me when you expect me; to be nearby
When you looking for a walk and yet wishing you could fly

I bake memories, as the warm oven it slowly cools
I am sweet biscuits that sit on the tray and on the stool
While the whole house it fills with maybe just your smile
You are thoughts that don't escape & aftertaste that lingers a while

My sweet dreams that I sometimes get to make
These perfect pieces of sweet biscuits that we bake
You lend me a hand and I lend one back to you
We are making memories and keeping them in jars too

Day 353: Funny How

I seem to be slowing down more as I keep writing and edging towards the last few pieces of the blog. I am not sure if this is something I planned for or something that is just triggered in the back of my head. I find a few things funny because of situations lately than anything else, funny how we wish for lost things, funny how we claim to remember dreams that we often forget. In the little things, I wish to write today, I am crawling just a bit and then somehow hoping I will have to leave this incomplete someway. It is funny how we struggle with life and learn from the contrasts at best. For the rest, I leave as though gossips that are untold and in stories that will unfold.

Funny How
Funny how the crescent moon still takes a peak
Looking out for the night, as though waiting for it to sleep
Or how it says goodbye in the middle of the dream
As you lie awake hoping to go right back to the scene

The moments that I climb up and down the stairs
As though looking for something and not knowing where
While the hours come together & the hourglass hits play
Our thoughts as they align, during the passing of a day

Funny how these songs that are stuck in our head
You whistle them time to time and I hum them instead
How life is more of passing that staying still
Holding on to dreams you don't remember at free will

Old friend on the side notes of paper diaries
Are you lost at times just like me?
Or have the crumpled pages and writings remained
Have they somehow refused to simply age