We love nights because they cut out frills
And get down to the bare bones very fast.
They soften the contours to gray outlines.
Like poetry they suppress needless details,
Abolish borders; make a sky of the earth.

 
The tree stands there brooding in the dark
Forgetful of its death by last year’s lightning.
They even put night birds on its branches.
The night fields become a vast promontory
Where the sky and the earth become one
As if the paddy is actually grown in the sky.

 
In the night the bushes behave like moving,
As if they are lazy bears on the wait for food.
The mountain in the distance stands abolished.
God knows where the clouds went from its top.
Everything is drowned in the night of the sky.

The poet reiterates the past is a dream.
Our body being of the past is but a dream
A mere dream in somebody else’s dream.
His dream was part of my dream, being
The grand dream of the cosmic scheme.

 
I have come to know the past did not exist
But I merely seemed to have dreamed it.
We are such stuff our dreams are made of
Not just in the bard’s sense or in spirit-talk.
Our dreams are so much inter-connected.

 
When spirits talk ,bodies vanish like spirits.
Our bodies disappear in chloroform smell
On the table under a green cloth of scalpel.
Some times they just disappear in clay-pots
Into flowing rivers, melting snow-mountains.
Our spirits are mere words, some tautology.
Our bodies do not exist except in dreams.

When we say a tennis ball it is a ping-pong
We love hyperboles for their graphic quality.
We know the tumor can’t be so large inside,
When the body believed it was a pin-head.

We are playing our little dramas in our head
That is how the thing plays out in our script.
Our script is black comedy, a fun thing we play
When we are desperate about people we love.

 
We see several hands stretching to the helicopter,
Of dry mouths that quiver with hope at its whir.
A mystery how bodies can pile to form a pagoda.

And why some bodies are always found on the copter
While other bodies rise from the dusty ground-earth,
And the bodies here have to reach out to bodies up there.

Inside we were afraid to diminish.
The flowers have come to bloom
Tiny green mangoes are on the way
It is now March and hot is less yet.
Soon there will be a rain shower
That will diminish their flowers;
There will be diminished fruits.

 
There will be diminished images
Their colours shall become shadows
A few mere greys of March summer.
Mist is migraine and fallen leaves,
Unripe fruits helpless on the earth.

 

We are discovering needless things gleefully,
The hidden light behind things, under stones
With unusual creeping-crawling creatures.

 All we love is the other fine things in our homes.
We may eat them now or consume a little later.
Our tongues will wrap around them softly in tip.

That man under the tree has a halo around him.
But he deals in violet light of an exquisite variety
That shows up our bones as in an x-ray machine.
Our flesh erupts in goose-bumps if we hear him.
All we want is light to show where our eats are.

Wonder if I can disappear from this space

And feel my absence in things, in walls

In the wall pictures, in the trees outside

And in the blue sky that rises above them,

Like a sparrow that pecks at the mirror

And hops away into its silver innards.

Here I stand before the computer tube

And disappear into it sometimes, vaguely

Touching the outer walls of the world

But come back soon to its inner walls

That  have my absence etched on them.

In the evening we smelled talcum
And tiny white queens of the night
As we passed by the stairs of room.
Once out we saw talcum-fresh girls
Who giggled for nothing in the sun.

 
Their eyes had memories of the noon
When their books appeared too heavy
And their eyelids dropped for sleep.

 
Their eyes had memories of nights
When they sat reading by the bulb.
They had memories of rain-moths
That had embraced dark death on it.

 
Their faces had memories of soft mothers
Waiting to cuddle them for the last time,
Of noisy horse-carts that took them home
To toddler brothers with running noses.

 Her story has become a mere pain in the rear
A sardonic statement on death’s smiling face
A lecture-to, a curl on lips, a verbose dictum.

A mere smear from her brought a smile on him
In all that was going on, the white halogen lights
The fragrance of silks, the whir of beauty-dance.

 

Sticking to the point is so tiresome
Like an old man’s fixation on wearing
A woolen muffler in the evening walk,
The one that shuts out all street noises
Making him prisoner of the inward hum.
You get into the streets and ramble on
In the dusty labyrinthine town streets.

 
I see absolutely no point in sticking.
That makes you committed for life.

 
In the end we come to the same thing.
On the side street people sleep on cots
Not to admire the moon but rest backs.
Buffaloes stand there with vacant eyes
Their udders full with reluctant milk.
The old man is groaning in his blanket.
He is still sticking to his point, his times.
The train yells at people on the tracks
Its flanks burst with hanging men.
The train sticks to its point, they to it.

 
It is fun to ramble, when other people
And other things stick to their points
That way you are sticking to your point.