Period

At midnight as the wind howled

One remembered random things

Images which came straight

From the back alley’s darkness.

It was time to say something

Or get back to soft wet sleep.

More random images, period.

This way you break conversation

And prevent lapsing into comma.

Sleep comes creeping in the bones

In the face, in the eyes, period.

Srinagar crows

Here I lay with my face opposed to the wall,
As its whiteness slowly seeps in my wakefulness.
At midnight I open my eyes in sleep’s darkness
It is these Srinagar crows that are restating
What the Mumbai crows had stated metallically-
These little specs of midnight’s darkness hide
In dark green chinar leaves waiting to burst out
With their sordid tales of primeval horror
Of two innocent women in the chinar forest
That lost their magnificent innocence and life.
It is all in their bellies, their black undersides
Those refuse to stay quiet behind the leaves.
I turn to the side and lie dreaming of the chinar
Its golden autumn leaves crunching under my feet
And the house-boats shaking their bodies dreamily
In the still golden waters of the morning lake.

Prayer

It is nice to think you can play with light
You just prevent the light in the curtains
From ritually raising its hands in the dark.
Perhaps you can also write pictures, sketch
A thing or two like Picasso did with light
When he drew elephants in the dark room.
My praying hands are outstretched palms
Waiting for grace and light from the roof
As sunbeams streak through its tiny holes
With dust atoms swimming diagonally in them.

Evening rain

Evening rain glistens on the road
As bread is bought and bananas are
Turned over for ripeness and less ripeness.
The rain is dancing on the car roof;
From the car the camera tries to catch
The wet sun on the leaves of the corner tree
Soon the wipers catch fever and quickly
We make our way in a sea of umbrellas.

Midnight

In the opaque darkness of my night
Thinking is neither love nor poetry ;
Midnight breeze slows down thinking.
Only a dog’s nightly barks keep it going
By thoughts of bright yellow laburnums
At the turn of the morning walk road
And two contented dogs under them.
It is sultry nights that slow you down
Memories keep going of bones in pots
And night Buddha ,not really laughing
With enormously bursting stomach
But a stone Buddha with fixed gaze.
That man in anger thinks he were there
But anger makes him just not there
Because he wants much to hurt you
Not in the stomach but in your upper.
He is quizzing because he is not sure.
He gets into a maze of wordy thoughts
And his words confuse you and him.
They hit you in your solar plexus and his.
Now, now, he wants to saunter leisurely
On the frosty wastes of the snowed hills
As I saunter leisurely now in this night
On the frozen darkness of my years.

The peak in Hong Kong

Here we talk on the peak ,about the peak
And some times walk gloriously on the peak
In summer our performance peaks in the peak
As tiny white lights glitter through the dark.

When the night air is biting and crisp
The stars peak in their glittering performance .
As we go up and up on the peak tram
We hold on tight like a dear to the rails
Our hair wind-blown ,stands on edge
As the tram is forty degrees to the hill.

Here was where the white men peaked
And now the yellow men ,brown men.
Here they lived in cloistered white houses
Their lights glistened in the night’s dark
Their dogs barked with delegated authority .

Now the brown men mend the broken road .
As the fragrant harbor peaks in commerce
Assembling electronics for hungry men
In the dark continent where they buy music
And radios on empty stomachs and distended.

Anger

We were tracing the cause for his miserable effect.
When one gets into cloud-storms of anger and frustration
It is nice to think that others deserve calumny.
That way one feels less guilty ,less responsible.
The black spot on his face seems less visible
But we have our focus on the spot ,between the brow
On the cheekbone ,when the years seem to pass
And one is swept into new time-spaces ,hair blown
Bones jutting through the soft malleable muscle-heart
The doctor’s tail on the chest quickens the thump
The red liquid flows in the ducts against gravity
Against the will power exercised by a fistful of flesh
Ticking away in the bony spaces of the brittle cranium
One falls headlong into uncertainty, with the balloon
Simply not opening up against the rapidly falling sky .

Prayer

In the rock lay my lovely child-God
Who was born today morning.
There is this saffron-robed monk
Under the folds of water in the rock
Lighting the perfumed camphor for him
In the dark recesses of my mind
Whenever the orange sun is missing.

he threw my camera in the well

this is a dark copy  of the midnight’s train
when my face opposed the overhanging steel roof
and images crowded like people ,in the mind,
as the noisy train fan whirred pointlessly.
on the narrow berth there was a bellyful of dreams,
the dream-son who threw the camera in the well-
opposed to the son who would do no such things-
the very glass eye which captured a made up past
the white robed monks came from nowhere
they were not dream stuff ,but real men
with real cloth bags full of  worldly possessions
a woman with the hair mop of a daughter in her lap
my recent past is now  made up with my camera
my remote past is made up with colored dreams
my camera I have now retrieved from the well

The other woman

Her white-washed house,on the town’s edge ,
Was warm and luminous in the evenings
Her window-shades hosted dancing phantoms.
The hibiscus tree in her backyard yielded
Deep dark red flowers meant for worship.
She complained of green snakes ,now and then,
These green snakes,they do not harm.
Children played in the compound,collecting
Warm twigs for the ensuing festival bonfire
During the festival , colorfully caparisoned bulls
Came accompanied by frenzied drumbeats.
Love was truly a splendorous thing
Behind closed doors and drawn curtains.
Colored bangles broke piercing her wrist
And the muscular elevation of his chest.
At dusk light cream-colored mosquito-nets
Hid shadows coalescing into each other .
Outside the window, the autumn leaves fell
One after the other, carpeting the garden floor .
The fat book on the table opened its mouth
With wide-eyed wonder at the trellis of shadows
On the marble floor cast by the chandeliers.
At night she burroughed her face in the pillow
As they dreamed together their joint dreams
And some times their separate dreams.
Green snakes haunted her dreams,slithering
All over her, dropping from the hibiscus
Of course they do not harm ,these green snakes
But their slither-feel is so much disagreeable
And they merge so effortlessly in her shadows.