Vihanga Perera

One night - it was past ten, more eleven -
I was traveling with my heart heavy,
And where the bus let me off by
Letting me slide off the foot board,
...

Our lives are note pads, the
Kind on which we sketch with deliberate pen,
With refillable ink, with a pause for thought
Before a doodled smiley, now and then.
...

One June I walked out that door
Thinking that that was it; that
I would not return there again —
And as I walked down through the
...

The song that was written for you
On a guitar with just four surviving strings
— For over a decade that bane of an instrument lay
Serene among cobwebs, debris and distant things —
...

A friend from mid teens,
Who said for love he'll take his life,
Met me, a decade later, at
An obscure pharmacy with a
...

In the end, the actual breaking up
Is not by the least justified
By the strain that precedes and
The pain which the mere
...

One day, from behind an
Oak, wooden door, from among the
Many thousand things she will then
Check in and out to do,
...

The way I remember you
Is the way I remember you on Primrose Hill
On a walk I wished would linger; not end:
Gazing far away into the city, cushioned between mountains,
...

We prolong the inevitable
Ending to whatever memories we gathered,
Whatever tension we lived through,
Hesitant in our words, undecided in our moves,
...

There was some sense of foreboding
Which was ridiculous, in a sense,
As there was no way that you would die;
But, I remember, a tremor that moved me
...

It is almost as if I felt that that hollowness was
Too empty to bear; that, our connection failed
Permanently; that, I had given myself too soon.
I sat where I sat against a pathless silence
...

I still believe it must be something else,
But the joke is, he read some book I'd written,
For, he banned his kids from talking to me,
Who, as if the kitchen mortar eaten,
...

You had left a mark -two nights ago -
That you had been and gone though
The dust remained undisturbed; that
...

To your funeral I come and I bring no words
And it is better so, for silence greets me
And grieving faces in my nostrils search
A mark -if not a snot -of identity. Uncertain,
...

-To Madeline, specifically -

On a night like this
I'm not surprised the least
...

How I remember you
Is how on an unmarked, now-forgotten
Thursday's eve about '94
As you stood -all your meat,
...

- written for TM, many months after she left -


Once you walked with me and that evening was
...

The writer names him Pakkiri:
Loyal, intellectual, jolly
Rotund kind of fellow
-Who, on the day he joins his banned party
...

Forty years later, Nimalasiri died
After being summoned to the party head's room
In the middle of the night.
He had collapsed and passed out.
...

All the best years of our lives
Best energies and dreams
Were ill-spent writing verse for
Women who had better things to do,
...