Edges of the Head

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  A head is not merely bone and skin, but a chamber of storms, where thought churns like restless seas and colours spill beyond their edges. What can the brain contain? It holds infinities, yet bends beneath routines: the labour of survival, the weight of names, the endless tally of tasks that tether imagination to necessity. Once there was a freedom— a childhood bright with unscripted hues, where colours did not ask permission to scatter, and play was the only labour. But thresholds arrive, drawn by institutions, by timetables, by the slow narrowing of sky into ceiling. Here the child learns to sit, to raise a hand, to speak in sequence, to dream only in sanctioned hours. The head adapts. It absorbs order as it once absorbed wonder, and the saturation of colour dims into function. Yet at the edges, still, the threshold glimmers— a reminder that within the skull’s dark theatre there lingers a pulse of rebellion, a fragment of the child unwilling to be tamed. And perhaps that ...

The Leash of the Universe

 
In the heart of Connaught Place,

where neon halos circle tired buildings
and the night hums with a distant commerce of dreams,
a dog sits—
alone,
its shadow pooling like a forgotten constellation
on the pavement.

To the hurried passerby,
it is just a stray,
a creature without home or name.
But look closer:
it is a voyager,
adrift in the cosmic silence
that seeps even into the loudest of cities.

For what is isolation,
if not the echo of our own smallness
against the cathedral of the universe?
The dog is free—
no chain binds its throat,
no master calls its steps.
And yet,
like us,
it circles in the invisible leash of gravity,
of hunger,
of the strange mathematics
that tether every being to the laws of existence.

Outside captivity,
yet captive still—
in the spiraling dance of galaxies,
in the certainty of decay,
in the promise of dawn.

The dog lifts its head to the streetlight,
as though it were a distant star.
Does it know,
in its quiet waiting,
that all of us—
man, beast, stone, and flame—
are passengers together,
wandering this pale dot of dust
under the indifferent gaze of eternity?

And there, in that pause,
the animal becomes a mirror:
a solitary witness,
to the fragile, fleeting
wonder of being.