One Day, for You

At the end of all the day’s bargains,
one day—
for you.

The twilight of a drift between shores
lies submerged
at the water’s lip.

In this dream-dazed city of lovers,
the quiet dissent
of a life without horizon.
In the boundlessness of roads,
step by step,
the road forgets itself.

On a matchbox
I sketch you.
Amid the unbroken push and jostle of pavements,
days ring hollow.

In indifference, the clock moves on—
on and on.
To the hollow clapping of spring puppets,
time breaks its tether,
runs blind through hours:
mad, all mad.

At the end of all the day’s bargains,
one day—
for you.

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1997–2005, Dimapur, Nagaland
First published: Lakhimi, April 2007

Editor’s Note

One Day for You portrays human longing within a commodified world, where time, movement, and intimacy are reduced to fatigue and repetition. All commodities at the end of the day gestures toward a non-exchangeable, irreducible impulse at the core of desire—something that resists circulation, valuation, and use.

The city is rendered as both romantic and aimless: a city of love without fixed geography, where every path opens onto infinity. Images of matchsticks, bamboo, pavements, clocks, and mechanical dolls evoke a landscape marked by fragility and mechanisation, where tenderness exists alongside exhaustion.

The poem’s sense of time is unstable and fractured. Within this disjointed temporal flow, the poem itself emerges as a quiet, deliberate form of protest—an insistence on longing that cannot be absorbed by the logic of commodities.

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