15 Mar
These flowers would not talk to us
About their previous night’s growth pain
The pain of their petals unfolding
When the stars sprinkled dust on our roof
And the night’s queen whitely bloomed.
All the while our pleasures stuck to us
There was déjà vu in the night’s smell
The left over one of the previous day
That had mixed with tar and hot sun
Which had in turn mixed with bodies.
That night was hope and some angst
While nothing ever happened , it would.
5 Mar
Transience echoes and re-echoes, branch upon branch,
In the peepal tree when you look up in its spaces
The tree had been there before you started existing:
Only the squirrel knows when and how it began
After several secrets it shares with the wind.
Actually there are no secrets ,only knowing light
In its deep-set eyes which stare at the hills
There is no hint of dissolution in its fixed stare
Nor a logical incoherence in its ponderous shadow.
As it stands the earth knows it and understands.
It is you who think of dissolution, its earth-to felling
The dry leaves on the ground ,rotting twigs
Animals leaving traces of their decaying smells
That is what you think and become, all the while
Carrying the cloud-shred of transience above you.
This spiritual stuff is warm ,boosting selfness
The arrogance of understanding ,purported eminence
You then pan your self-deluding energy, by the hand
Suffer death and birth pangs, cells overgrowing.
Here, on the boat music flows in drum-beats
The lake is resonant with the city’s vulgarity
And shadowy figures enact transience in its night
Their beauty-dance flows in absurd movements
Their arms and feet are hurled in the air helplessly
Their shadows crouch in flesh and blood transience.
18 Feb
Between us falls this plastic curtain
with tiny floral prints and glistening droplets
I see your lips moving through the interlay.
there is work, overdue debts, deja vu
there, on the riverbed, a thought came-
no words ,only an electrical presence.
nothing much has happened ,then and now
will you repay my fifty rupees to the barber
for the hair which once was, flowing in the river
to the oceans ,its sound muffled by the waves.
I only appear in dreams on restless pillows.
On the other side are flowers etched in plastic
they don’t perfume beyond the riverbed.
23 Sep
At the vaulting dome waves refused to travel
Unless on a few pieces of silver and a name.
The flying metallic bird will take two full hours
These angels in turquoise will feed our appetites.
There is fear lurking in our minds behind bravado.
We try to shut out noises of after-death and failure
We blame ourselves for all our stupid failures
As though they really mattered to us and the dead.
We then read patterns in the greyed whys of decay.
As though the whole thing is a science of death
And we have nearly mastered the art of dying,
Of succumbing to the need to maintain transience.
We smugly wear the polyester film of transience about us
We read poetry in the trivial tragedies of their tatters.
17 Jul
You were talking about walking, barefoot,
Into the sea, with orange fires between eyes
She was last seen behind the customs warehouse
Chanting skeptical mantras with a lisp
Lips trembling with fearful doubts
The shadows there gobbled her up
Actually the sea only gobbles up shadows.
As had happened with that man
Who returned bloated at high tide
You see we have never worshipped
These small Goddesses who become angry
There a bald man walked into the sea
The sea of emptiness beyond the window
Wanting to get back to the mother fast
Inside, a greedy woman , a son in fog
At the end of the street they all disappear
Where there is a blind turn, a dead-end.
8 Jul
Invisible are their powers, unfelt and secure
The mountains lay there brown and puffing
In the mid-noon sun among yellow-dropped leaves
The scrolls on their walls dated back to eons
Brown-skinned ancestors shrieked, ghosts,
Their smelly wings flapped in cave-silences
Several worn-out paths winded to forgot ruins
There they stopped midway vanishing in bushes
The temple bells were heard under the banyan tree
The tree spread its hair reaching the steep slopes
It was the clouds that brought the brown haze
The sky ended up in blue torpor in penciled hills
There in the wilderness shrieked British ghosts
Collectors who had rested in lonely stone buildings
Pondering deeply on history’s ghosts lying supine
On broken temple foundations with missing walls
There in a stony niche slept God with his eyes closed
A lotus emerged from his navel, mysterious and born
In fact the whole of the world burst out from there.
6 Jun
This wordy struggle went on for too long
It is airy words which chased beauty-thoughts
While several filigreed images filtered light
At the back, a flung radio played on the roof
While Bukowski watched the sun shine
On the woman’s behind up in the air,
In the garden, his folded figure on the window.
A little heaving bird on the electric wires
Played high drama in shrill baritone, you see,
A real thing, not an insubstantial phenomenon.
Poetry came and went with wind and rain
Premature and dusty on fragrant creepers
Their flowers became stars on moonless nights.
(Reference here is to the poem “A radio with guts by Charles Bukowski)
16 May
Thought heralded a boatful of laughter
Checkered, courageous, fishermanly
In spray-powdered, sprinkle-diffused
Froth seething with salt and blue
As though the sea horizon heaved
In musically multi-colored sound
Steeped in dead-dry- fish smell.
A boy walked away from the sea-sun
And idly prancing about crows.
Vasco Da Gama’s stone tablet stood
In history’s powdered rock and sand
And broken -colored boat masts.
At the corner glistened wet sand
In tree shadows falling in sea
Their dark hair hiding red agenda.
These white buildings sat idly
In history’s tiled canopies witnessing
Communism’s capitalist fortunes.
The French windows hid much beauty
In the shadows of mosquito nets
While hot pepper creepers snaked
All the way up the statuesque teaks.
In the slush coconuts proudly stood
Spreading dark hair in the night.
Here, rain happened quickly
Rocking moist coconut fronds
Hiding still, hairless sea-eagles.
(A poem which happened on the Kapady beach in Kerala)
22 Apr
this summer is not hot,only the remembrance
the leaves are sometimes dripping with dew
by the road tall thankful trees stand
their dignity enhanced by the shrubs under dust
the city sits lazily in the afternoon
in unfinished perfection, under a coat of fine dust
in the car the poetry book crackles
under heavy ego and self glorification
Sanchi’s golden brown stone dust settles
on the beauty-things of the hazy mind
here in the attic of the mysterious mind
the evil man cometh rankling, digging
the black coalmines of despair and darkness
our weapons are only a few mantras
clouded under black coaldust, saying sorry
somebody close to us is dying, surely
the clouds are ominous all the time
laden with bloodlust and bellyache
in the pit of my stomach is vomit-disgust
now the rains are here ,balls of snow
we catch them in our palms ready
only they are slipping through the spaces
we cannot hold our fingers together
and our white- clouded glory fizzles soon.
23 Mar
In the Sunderbans* the shadows were long
And diaphanous, reaching up to the grey skies
Outside the huts the trees were crooked
And leafless, bearing the burden of our sins
Against the child’s shrieks at the phantom’s coming.
In the city, the nights are dreamt once again,
In broad daylight, among several theses;
All the while, in the backwoods, a yellowed day
Was witness to cultural history being re-enacted.
Meanwhile, there was fever rising in our blood
Strangers at midnight attacked us for our secrets
A little girl laughed at the dreams in our head,
Outside the room, from the fever of her own blood.
*( literally ,beautiful forests, the estuarine forests of Bengal, the home of the royal Bengal tiger)
|
