Download - A.J.Rao's Poetry Volume 5
A.J.Rao's poetry Volume5
A.J.Rao
A.J.Rao's poetry Volume 5
Poetry written between 1stApril2001 and 30th July 2001
A.J.Rao
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Contents
Authenticity 1
Climate change 2
Metaphors 3
Phony vision 4
Scream 6
Holes 7
Children in the rain 8
Bridge 10
The temple of shadows 11
Skin 12
Morning at the Tirumala temple 13
A semblance 14
Facts 15
Layers 16
The parcel 18
Goats for goddess 19
Arguments 20
Shapes 21
Circles 22
Rites 23
The silence 24
Collage 25
Flamingos 26
Pieces 27
Stub 29
The internet 30
Reality 31
Knots 32
Now 33
The hall of mirrors 34
Children in the afternoon 35
The messenger 36
The day’s truth 37
The temple god 39
Morning in Begumpet 40
The idiot 41
Secret 42
Glass 43
List 44
Scribbles 45
Ghosts in our sleep 47
Free will, free fall 48
Identity 49
The beggars 51
Tautologies 52
Room 53
The girl’s song 54
The grandmother’s narratives 55
The metrical memoranda 56
Ear pain 57
Snakes and planes 59
The ceremony 60
The horizon 62
Making sense 63
On the night of the lunar eclipse 64
My mother 65
Passages 66
Frames 67
Hands 69
Dance 70
The bearded painter 71
Walking 72
Strangers 73
Sorrow 74
Humor 75
Home-sickness 76
Stones 77
Fish 78
Monologue 79
Television 80
Poverty for poets 81
Abject 82
Lamps 83
The road 84
Overwhelmed 85
Caricatures 86
The bullock’s geometry 87
Shame 88
Murmurs 89
Coherence 90
Doubts 92
Metal 93
Power of attorney 94
The button rose 95
The dreamer 97
The clouds 98
Highway 99
History 101
Torpor 102
Mirrors 103
Voices of innocence 104
The tunnel 105
Suffering in poetry 107
Temporary 108
The parapet 109
Misconstrual 110
The window 111
Wind 113
Poetry without thinking 114
Sanchi 115
1
Authenticity
July 31, 2011
I am often confronted by a feelingOf lack of authenticity, in this river,Of not feeling like a subject, spuriousAgainst mountains that sit in the farWith river waters beating on my ears.
I am words from vaporous thoughts,A prose-poem thought in dark nooksOf the mind, mining word after word.
The mountains belong to the earth.I, waving in breeze, am a mere babyA cry-baby in quick mountain wind,Flying words against its rock solidityIn its flowing wind and night silence.
The mountains are authentic in spaceWith river about me, in daily ripples.They had come here much before meWith the waters from skies, daily sun.I exist here in the river, as a thoughtA passing thought of a real mountain,A thought in river, a temporary rock.
2
Climate change
July 31, 2011
We spoke all our recent dialogues nicelyVoicing apprehension of the big change.Our struggle had continued underneath.It was a monotone speech in a gray skyWhen the line of trees came to a freezeIn their hostility, where they stood tall.
The gentle summer breeze did not matter.The trees sniffed autumn and looked away.Emaciated street dogs barked incessantly,At hooded strangers coming at us from hillsFrom the edge of the sky, in clouds of dust.
Our dialogues went on in our dark robesAs our culture bristled riskily in our back,The culture of reality, in our failed heartsWhere several realities came up togetherNot as a single earth-reality in silk threadBut a failed reality of a fluid mind-stateA sky of treeless vapour, sea of flake-salt.
3
Metaphors
July 30, 2011
We are nowadays happy with our new doorA membrane bathroom door that now shedsA certain mauve hue on baths, while in song,With the shower flowering on our cool backsStreaming as if from a rock skirted by treesIts vapors swirling like their winter breaths.
Our song is under breath, in some mutters.Our vapors are on glass that hides in smokeOur rather banal faces, their jejune laughter.We are, in fact, searching for our metaphors,Being upbeat about our recent turns of phrase.
4
Phony vision
July 29, 2011
I do not know if the thing is phonyGlass-like, with glistening dew-dropsOf a morning vision on windshield,Pearl-glass that breaks in little coinsOn endless highways, on mild impactOf metallic bodies with drunk men.
Some cars have steam on bonnetsLike bees, in spring, on the stone.Our vision is partly crowded, you seeWith birds hiding dust in the eastThat has turned orange at sunriseA phony vision, it is partly clouded.
On the highway there are no housesOnly string cots for our dream sleepOn glasses of buttermilk, hot breads.We have whites on our mustachesOf too much buttermilk in throats.
You crinkle eyes enough and you will see Wet buffaloes calmly chewing their cud
5
In tin sheds that jump out of green fields Their milk sloshing in their pink udders. Luckily their tail-flies and smells fly away Into tree-tops, waking the morning birds, A phony vision indeed, partly clouded.
The sunflower beds have darker kidsThat smile nicely of a little alphabet,Like flowers that turned deep inwardWhen the sun went behind the hills.Their little bees have nowhere to go,Wait; let the sun come from the hills.
The village school is closed for todayIn honor of the guests on the string cotThe sunflowers will open with the windAnd the shadows will creep up slowlyBehind the buffaloes, with eyes closedTheir mandibles moving up and down.The vision is clouded, a phony visionCaused by much emotion in the eyes.
6
Scream
July 28, 2011
In the bone house it would appearThe lower mandibles were stretchingAnd stretching to produce a screamThat would fail to reach down to ears.Actually they were trying to bite sarcasm,Surely a futile endeavor, especiallyThey do not have tongues in cheeks.
7
Holes
July 27, 2011
We are talking of holes, mere lack of matterSubsisting in matter and surrounded by it Of words that exist in crevices of thoughts,Words making the world’s holes in whole.
My dead are matter in lack of it, globe-earthsThose spin in lack of space, in crisp night air.They spin in the space of time, holes in space,Phosphorus glow-worms roaming thin nights.
They are holes in space, where they had lived.They are now words that will live in thoughts,Those remain in my mind, as images of realityTill I become a hole in space, a picture, a word.
8
Children in the rain
July 26, 2011
We wanted clearly laid out pathsBetween thin strands of July rain.Our faces were drowned in hoodsAs the rain fell softly on our heads.Its sounds came as from the ocean.
Our puny judgments took a beatingIn such a steady patter on our earsWhere they seem to be beating usLike angry fathers, back from office.As we walked we made tiny circlesIn rain water, under our umbrellasThat saved us from an angry sky.
The houses were a blur in white.Our paths ended in green of trees.Rain-mud spattered on black coatsSurprised by blurs of passing cars,Their wipers saying no to the rain.
We had left our school in the street. Our home of angry smoking fathers
9
And soft grannies in loving egg-heads Seemed to vanish in the fuzzy rain. A scruffy dog shook its body of rain.
Back at home, we bath our wet bodiesIn eucalyptus steam, as its vapors riseQuickly to drown the rain in its smell.
10
Bridge
July 25, 2011
We had passed the bridge spanning a river of sandAt dawn, when our noisy train spoke to its emptiness.Once out of it, the train was bending like a centipedeAnd we took a long backward glance to see the bridgeNow smarting under noise injury on its deaf,deaf ears.
The buffalos on its sand-bed looked up, unmindfulOf the bridge, of the noisy train that passed, and of usIn the train that saw them as mere globs on the sand.Their black bodies longed for green puddles of water.Their eyes seemed vacant, as their tails swished flies.We saw they had not even once met us in our eyes.
11
The temple of shadows
July 24, 2011
Men and women live here with stonesTheir shadows live with them in daylight.The shadow phalluses of shadowy godsLive in the musty smells of kings in silksTheir soldiers in attendance on swords.Women have their foreheads on red dots.Priests move throats up, down like birds.Their prayers fly like shadows to the sky,Their hungry stomachs touch their backsWhere they produce shrill incantations.Here god is crying inside, in the shadow.Beauty is hunger in distended stomachsDrunk with soft palm wine from the sky.
12
Skin
July 22, 2011
Here my life began in a belly- fear of the darkIn a sky not visible, filled with fearful locustsThat comes in swarms, across the snow hills.The swarms eat up all our grasses in the way.But woman-insects begin life in the same way,Afraid of the dark in their own womb houses.
I now swim in this my pool, where I had comeNot of my own, my dad being of different skin.When I come out of these waters into the sunMy skin shall wear all those paints in the sunSo it can please the leathery skins of dad’s classAnd I can build my own womb-house to hostA tiny swimming tadpole, with a swaggering tailThat shall never have belly-fears of the dark.But I only fear that my oxygen will be cut offBefore I open my eyes to the sun in the hills.
(Female feticide is practiced in some parts of India due topreference for the male offspring, ostensibly to carry on the familylineage)
13
Morning at the Tirumala temple
July 22, 2011
The morning starts cawing in its throat in sleepAnd the silky song of God’s morning shall waitFor worship flowers to come in the flower train.Flower trains are full of milk cans and turbansAnd women in colorful costumes smelling milk.The pigtailed high-rise throats shall begin nowIn god’s praises, he bleary-eyed from late night’sJumping across the night to wife’s house below.
The shepherd is tending sheep of yesterday evening.The morning shall begin when the clouds move awayAnd stop threatening the shepherd with cloud-rain.In the meantime of morning, let rolling people rollLike waves in the midnight ocean, their wet bodiesMaking silent noises against the stones of the temple.
14
A semblance
July 21, 2011
I have decided not to call on her in his deathIn order to create a mere semblance of as was.My ghost would continue to exist in this far,As a mere shadow of a reality, just a figmentThat would create a flimsy semblance of fact.
His death is now, for her, a mere semantic fact.Let the existence of my body be a semantic fact,Just like his lack of body in her drawing room,Till my lack of body is a similar semantic fact.
15
Facts
July 20, 2011
These facts do not really speak for themselvesIn the cloud cover of this weather, on a rainy nightWhose dome still stifles us beyond mortal breath,While pursing our lips, brooding in blue thoughtSpeaking musty history words, empty hypotheses.
They do not hold in the crisp air of night dreams.Truth is our viscous reality in the lower abdomen,An open space where the breeze blows regardless.Beauty is a reality that lay beyond the body’s crooksIn a niche where it all adds up under a petrified bone.
16
Layers
July 19, 2011
As we had opened eyes we saw ourselvesIn the mirror, profoundly struck by the nightOur faces serrated by layers of collected time.The holes there carried lightless rain waterThat went green in the lazy years of old fish,Tadpoles that, by morning, turn green frogsIf only allowed their photosynthesis by day.
We then peeled our white faces layer by layer.Our war paints then came off and snow cream,The layers that revealed our first fears and godsAnd our demons that shrieked through the day,To be liberated from the good wishes of gods,And placentas of unborn kids that had carriedBorn sins of our fathers in their ugly plasticity.
We saw the serrated sands of the Thar desertThat had cumulated over the oceans drowningThe fish, the tadpoles, the frogs and the oysterAnd all other aquatic creatures under its silica.We saw nights piling on nights, years and agesThe grass that covered our millennia in layersOn broken walls of our cities, the moss growingSilently on the trees, the hills covered in mistTheir peaks entirely covered in forgetful snow.
17
18
The parcel
July 18, 2011
I had received a white parcel in my dreamYesterday from the bank at the street-cornerWhere my address was intact in ledger foliosAs a man in swivel chair, gold name on door.It will be delivered at home, when I am awake.They have to know their customer, you know.I have to know my balcony from where I lookWhen the man’s bicycle bell rings from below.My balcony has no number, in wind and rain.These days my name on the door is too faint.
19
Goats for goddess
July 17, 2011
We looked at our goddess closely in the mind.She was much in our step, on way up the hill.There were no snakes, no crowned peacocksWith tails that danced oncoming rain-clouds.We only looked for our yellow-faced goddessThat stood in stone niches in the ancient hills.
We tied flags of red cloth towards loving motherAround gnarled trees , for our women’s fertility.When cholera struck our village we had soughtHer help in her stone temple of exquisite beauty.
On this festival day we seek her maternal blessingAs we take pots of food to her on women’s heads Dancing our way to her heart in crowded streets.We wish our goats to join festivities, when alive.
20
Arguments
July 16, 2011
The sky is dull gray, with rows of v-birdsStitched on it in round silken embroidery.Mountains sit there prettily, with a lone treeThat stood at the curve, bending in the sky.
The arguments went on a bit tediouslyIn a boring persistence by some guests.Their chairs are now warm with victoryThis side of the table as the papers rustle.Their news emitted in the room to the roofReturning slowly to the other side of legs.On their laps are napkins wet with lips.The arguments wear thin like mouth-spit.
Outside, the tree stood bare and naked.Frogs argued with the bog interminably.The tea ceremony has started in our eyes.The sky is still dull gray with three rowsOf v-birds dotting its embroidered clothTheir wings stopped flapping long ago.
21
Shapes
July 15, 2011
Newspapers jut out from spaces, their wordsHaranguing at noon, awaiting sleep in our eyesOn stomachs well-fed, cutting the day in two.The first part of the day is stored away, at noon.Some words loosely fall away in the daylight.
The day soon changes to a misshapen eveningAwaiting its night, beyond light, of a black sleep.The night will be round in shape, curtains drawn.My train will lose its shape in a curve of its line.
The line will lose shape as the train cuts it in twoBecoming two lines, two shapes, two phone lines.The birds on the phone lines will go up and downLosing shapes, every now and then, triangularly.The world will lose its shape, in the dark of sleep.
22
Circles
July 14, 2011
We have come down to the earth, concentricallyIn our circles, ever decreasing, blazing in space.The circumference is always in view from centerBut the promontory remained outside our graspWith little dots that flickered unmindful of us.
When we made circles we would run in themIn ontology, our circles shrinking progressivelyIn spherical perfection, their penciled geometryImplemented on our puzzled feet, never too farFrom the centre like the cow grazing in its tether.
23
Rites
July 13, 2011
Among our thoughts are rites, following wordsPrescribed by pigtailed pundits of yore, talking,In the bombastic language of our ancient godsTo airy spirits who had bodies in the olden days.They understood us mostly in difficult language.
As words went, our hands went, our eyes wentOur tongues moved, our bodies stirred slowly.Our thoughts remained on the dead, as if dying.We stared at the sky in its lifeless continuumAnd we took water to lips, thrice, thinking of herAmong the ones who once had bodies like us.
24
The silence
July 12, 2011
The silence strikes again like faint flint sparks,That do not readily open up in fires of dry sticksOf our old men, behind deer running for arrowsFrom caves of early pictures, with a blazing sunIn the day and a moon at night, in liquid silence.
The silence of rain falls on the night, on cricketsIn corners of homes, along with silent brooms,Brooms that will play song with the road at dawnOf women whose eyes are limpid pools of silence.
The silence of words strikes, their images silentIn their fury, passions of a deep night, like wavesThat broke on lonely beaches with sleeping gulls,The silence of death on eyes closed, on seeing .
25
Collage
July 12, 2011
In our beginning there was this whole thingOf a face which loomed large, a large houseBefore everything happened, an empty airBlowing it inside out, in a comically funny act.The absurdity was our serious thing of heartThe body was ludicrous imitation of an ideaA funny caricature of living, a slowly dying act.
The images were wholes, just shattered soundsAnd mere smells that struck an upturned noseIn a mind-state that absorbed the largely funny.The critical mind dissected holes in wholesAs desiccated bodies that lay on green tables.
The naked blue bodies that lay on the floorStared at the ceiling fan, in a final love actOf science and poverty, among other funnyImages of bodies, not yet blue, not yet naked.
The grotesque faces then came laughing at youWithout their torsos, in a view of the big pictureWhen you saw funny patches of hairless headsControlling the world, others in tiny fragmentsTheir bodies quickly vanishing in vote machines.But fragments do not make sense, a collage may.
26
Flamingos
July 10, 2011
What came to me was an ornament, mere.Its functionality extremely suspect in eyesA high role in its augustness, silk-borderedAnd flamingo-like from the distant swamps,Little specs of whiteness, flying in the blueFlamingos that have no use for me, in bread.
There was a light tree in the middle of the road.Our memory spoke of a cherubic kid on its crookAnd grandmother holding him aloft in the air.Memories are flamingos, of no use in bread.
Kid is no kid, now a larger pain in his big backAnd in our backs, laden with the silver of hair.Our memories are ornaments like flamingosThose have gone back to their Siberian plainsThey have roosted and gone, vanished in blueThe whites now in the blue are new flamingos.
27
Pieces
July 10, 2011
The morning went into many piecesA cuckoo’s call to rain, rain to come,Thinking of new ways to neighbor areaWalking on mud to explore fresh skiesIn visible light of yet-to poetry, photo.
A fan in room had a touch of the coldThe cold death of the tree that has been,The sky spaces between the other treesWhere birds will speak in parliament.
In the streets are footfalls of men’s walkA distant sing-song of morning to godAnd flowers smelling from felled creepers.
The lake that cried in our filthy watersTo the machine that silently cleaned it.Beyond the lake are its borders of flatsWhere people sleep in lake mosquitoesThose have their history mixed with us.
In the meantime women sweep streetsTheir broom-sounds assailing our earsIn the liquid treatment of dusty roads.Their husbands have froth at mouths.Their kids get up bleary eyed for school.
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29
Stub
July 09, 2011
I see this stub, a broken thing from wind.A vertical thing, rising to the sky, de-frockedSprawls on the earth, its mourning motherStaring at the sky, above the electric wires.
Children dance on its body, in school uniformThey have learned how to dance on short stubsIn the school of lunch boxes, topied teachersWith horn-rimmed spectacles on their noses.
The trailer comes spluttering, this organic one,Separating windy things from inorganic stuff,The leaf from the wood and pick up living matterTo grow new living matter, in large windy spaces.The stub remains in wind, still embracing mother.
30
The internet
July 08, 2011
The internet is a not a thingy but just mental stuff,A few electric charges firing up from so many spacesIn assembly of plastic boxes and optic wires runningUnder sea, reaching our houses here via our balconies,Where we hang our wet clothes like many-colored flagsQuietly announcing our identity near so and so tree.
Simply, it is a skull-thing linked to several skullsFrom other places, other holes in air, their balconies.In the internet we speak to the vast oceans of peopleThose have no faces worth their names, their fathers.They move in waves, hair on brow, tails yet hanging.Their words are early promises, forgot by dusk timeIn an after-glow of pretty rhetoric and purple prose.
31
Reality
July 07, 2011
He woke from sleep in order to experience reality,Waking being a reality when in a fluid state of sleepAcknowledging sleep had been a greater reality,Immanence in body, a severe presence in mind.
He had to listen to the whistle of the night guardThe bark of a hoarse dog, in its throat of hill echoAs if on the edge of the hills calling down the skyThe stars having come to doze in nightly flickers.
Reality begins as solidity, continuing its descentTo the fluid and thence to vapor and empty proofOf an existential fact, a shriek from night cricket.The phosphorous of our bones roams in the skyAs night lights in the vastness of a cold desert.
32
Knots
July 06, 2011
A tiny insect is now taking a tour on my mouse pad.A machine whir heard in its wings’ flapping soundEnters my conscious in the yellow light, in morningSounds of the gray sky outside, its rain yet in pouring.My thoughts overflow my ears, along ropes that knotIn the middle of the air, in the blue spaces of sounds.These are silver ropes that glisten in the day’s sun.I have to pay their price in my family silver, my love.
33
Now
July 05, 2011
Your clothes balloon in the increasing wind.The brown hills look bloated with spring windAnd now is merely in your future and my pastAs my eyes drift past the hills into a blue sky.
A sky bird swoops upon the grass, on deathLike the swirling plane that crashed on roofsIn yesterday’s dream and today’s newspaper.The bird is in the now, in ballooning clothesWith the wind that brought it down in circlesTo death in its putrefying smells on the earth.
Your silken clothes balloon in a gust of wind.You look bigger in flowers and fragrant loveLike butterflies in a fragmentariness of nowIn refusal to meet with past, its smelly deathAnd set on fly-wings of future in a sky of now.
34
The hall of mirrors
July 05, 2011
Our faces appear funny in mirrors, looking clumsy,Bursting quickly into loud laughter without humor.On our way up, we hold our rusted banisters looselyStooping, with a hand on our hips, as if in a dance.
Here we have laughed, in hollow sounds, in spacesBelow the stairs, full of dust and in obscure cornersFilled with our dead skin cells and our stale memoriesThose have remained on the attic in our long historyIn cloth bundles that shrink like our faces in mirrors.Their knots on top stick out like pigtails on our facesWhen, at night, they enlarge in grotesque convexity.
35
Children in the afternoon
July 04, 2011
We played seven stones game, piled one on anotherToppling them with ball that would fly into bushes.The lazy afternoon heat beat on our sleeping trees.The birds had gone on to their own afternoon sleep.We entered the scrunching leaves sending the lizardScurrying to the hole of its wall, its triangular headPopping out a while to hear our tiny feet in the leaves.
Up on the mound we deeply looked into a dark holeTo look for the slithering sound of the resident snakeWe would then run down fast, afraid of its unheard hissAnd fall to the ground with coins of kneecaps bleeding.
We then climbed the guava tree to its highest branch.We caught the squirrel eating the fruit of our ripeness.In the evening we played badminton with the marigoldSmelling yellow petal shreds as they spread in the sky.
36
The messenger
July 03, 2011
Here I am stuck with the thought of a messengerSans his message, my life’s meaning, sent to meAlone in this desert, by the mighty China emperorFrom the royal hall, written into unhearing ears,By a dying emperor on his imperial death-bed.The messenger had a rising eastern sun on chestWhere froze the possibility of his ever reaching meAcross the vast people in the expanding hallways.
There is no writer between the emperor and himOnly deaf ears and the quivering lips of a dead manI know the message is oncoming in the vast lands.Here in this window, I feel the wind in my bones.I smell the smell of a silky scroll as it softly opensAnd I can dream its contents as the evening comes.
(Reading A message from the emperor by Franz Kafka)
37
The day’s truth
July 03, 2011
The truth seemed in the half-eaten guava of the parrotsThat flew away with their happy truth cracked halfwayTheir colors were not the truth, but their trifling facts,Their petite nothingness, in the tree, they ran away fromThe waffle of their living reality in the tree they flew to.
The fragrant guava that fell on the wet ground bleedingFormed the truth connected to the waving of coconutsAnd the rain that came from the other world on its cloudsBearing facts of the other time, other space in its dropletsThe night they had embraced ,in its amorphous darknessWhen the stars refused to come out yet in their deep sleep.
The truth was the middling reality of a cobbler’s broken lifeIn a leather bag he stitched in clumsy seams on a daydream,The cussedness of a sitting reality on the road of shuffling feet.The yellow and red bags, like green parrots, were his truthHalf –cracked in the afternoon sun ,waiting for his duskWhen all truth shall lie buried properly in drunken stupor.
The truth was the broken reality of the six ‘o clock train That had disgorged people like ants, from holes in its wall Their truth lay in the broken lives that would come to night From the aggregates of other people’s broken lives of the day Their truth lay half-cracked , in the train they just left behind Climbing flyover steps to home truths of mamas and wives.
38
39
The temple god
July 02, 2011
It has rained behind the tree and the evening sun comesIntermittently in waves of laughter from clouds, splittingThe vitreous evening sky into inconsistent blue and orange.The light from our bodies crosses its threshold rebelliouslyIn a lightning of the world, like a click of the flash camera.
All that we required was a god safe in his temple laughingAt our fables, at our immature art in the shadows of lightWhen we fail to create life, flesh natural, bones breaking,The pure immanence of life, its glory on the lonely nightAnd then we are answerable to none in our question hours.Quietly we cease to exist, with no words trailing behind us.As if we are stones of several insects breathing under us.Like him in the temple we wish to laugh anonymously.
40
Morning in Begumpet
July 02, 2011
Behind the coconuts the trainArrives with a night’s memoriesHidden in its noisy under-belly.The clouds have come and gone.That seems another rainless day.The flies, expectant of fresh rain,Actively seek the night’s refuse.The first train is heard in arrivalIn a monotone of announcement.The wind rustles in the coconutsQuietly dropping a baby coconuton the roof with a crashing thud .Train commuters, fresh from nights, Descend station steps in a dream.
41
The idiot
July 01, 2011
A girl makes you the idiot you are , againstThe stone-pelting of children who will love youOn your grave, their flowers sprinkled as if rainYou are the bright idiot weighed down by loveA diamond pin you will sell for a little outcaste girlWho loved you in delicate hanging of five minutesOn a scaffold of death, the priest of a crucifixWho will say absolutely nothing for your ChristLife comes to the idiot in fits, paroxysms of joy.
(Reading The Idiot by Dostoevsky)
42
Secret
June 30, 2011
We share our secret with the dead in their yellow leaves.We feel it softly touching our bones in the deep lightOf the shopping mall where we go to pick up beamsOf light that need to be colourfully knitted in our ownShadows at home, the ones we buried under our walls.
In the urban glass-palaces we feel it in our vacant eyes,In our ears, when it touches their drums beating themTo bring out their fine city music, in its singular rhythm.It is in the fever of its wood and glass, in its electric frost.
43
Glass
June 29, 2011
Now I think of the crash of the body, its broken splintersShining in the afternoon rain, like tiny mirrors for clouds.I think of birds that are glass pieces embedded in the wallThose were once airy souls living in bodies of glassy flesh.I think of fistfuls of birds that beat like mad in glass chestsTheir pace-makers, working overtime in solid plate glass.
44
List
June 29, 2011
Let us list things of that evening when the dusk lightFlooded, through the tree, this wiry man and his womanAs they were winnowing for the day, sifting wheat of goldFrom its powdered chaff, against a light-powered windIn a muscular swing of the male arm, an upturned faceTheir bodies synchronized in an exquisite wheat-danceAs happiness lay somewhere in this jumble, in this list.
45
Scribbles
June 28, 2011
Between then and now is a mere scribble lostInto an indifferent writing, by a little fingerOn the night of time, some sand sculpturesOn beach of ephemeral gods, lost in waves,Some writings on waters, with wind on backAgainst waves that break only to be countedAs fuzzy surf that will vanish in rising people.
A scribble in the sun that would vanish soonIn vapors of white clouds, above the blue hillsInto flying white birds that drop their whitesIn calling fingers, fists raised, noses upturned.A scribble on the slate of learning in our villageBehind shuffling buffalo feet, in udders of milkOn the silky brown sands of summer-hot riversStaring at the far hills emptied of their green.
Between now and then is a mere scribble lost On faces in pony-tails, in tiny brick-red flowers Wedged in hair, that jostled with white fragrances On evanescent blouses, on backs smiling directly To celebrating trees that shed many a tear of joy
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In yellow leaves, on their own circles of shadows.
47
Ghosts in our sleep
June 27, 2011
These ghosts make you deeply afraid on the pillow.Their torsos are human-like but bottoms taper offLike the blurbs they speak into, in cartoon stories.Our childhood ghosts are now dead in their treesBut new ones from cinema pop up, in wind and rain,Under doors, in their creaky hinges, now and then.
Our ghosts these days do not have tapering bodiesTheir bodies do not now laugh in tiled mortuariesIn the outskirts of town, where they cut up bodiesNor live in tamarinds in shrieking street-cornersWhere suicide ghosts once lived with their families.They sleep quietly under our skull-plates till midnightWhen they come out in moonlight for a ghost-dance.
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Free will, free fall
June 27, 2011
I land on my free will this eventful nightLike the cat that lands softly on its rubber feetBefore getting up to pick fight with anotherScreaming cat in the dark, as the night swells.
Here I am doing things, falling on my ownWith no other sons of mothers in betweenStopping my free fall, so I nicely land on feet.I get up and shake the dust off my clothes.
I some times land on my two feet for nothingAnd the prospects of bound legs loom large.I am no feral cat from brooding jungle treesJust a hospital cat with high- slung legs in air.
Free fall is not free, merely gravity-bound.Actually there is nothing free in rarefied airOnly a crashing fall that comes entirely free.We are bound to act according to free will.
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Identity
June 26, 2011
In the evening some identity questions popped upIn the tinkle of a few china cups of rising tea steamAnd stainless steel spoons of sugar in place of cubesBrought in by two whitely dressed men from Kolkata.Themselves plagued by identity in their white dressThey inverted bed ,took out your air in the broadsheet.
Their fathers have their unending tales to unwindTheir wind fresh from the marshes of SunderbansWhere tiger tails deftly elude experienced hunters.Their uncles are government clerks in frayed red filesTheir brother’s wives doting mothers of soft loveWith saree over heads, of wholly hidden identities.
There are others in the room that do not have facesThe ones that seem to speak out in clanking soundsFrom the corners, their spanners at work on the wallThey may be spiders who have just woven their webThey will climb the wall, their shadows on the roofOver the electric fan coaxing it to whir in its shadow.
The taxi man to here was a communist with dreamsHis son painted slogans and politicians that staredFrom stately billboards rising above electric wires.A communist has no identity apart from the stateThe state just stares in empty space from its heights.
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The beggars
June 24, 2011
These beggars tug at your sleeve, smelling your moneyIn thin sheets of small paper, lying in your leather walletsWith decisions about their life, marriage and God inside.
Their thoughts mainly look into a sitting plastic tumblerOf loose change, where water should have flowed smoothly.They dream of scraps of music, sung in trains, with breezeThat came in and went out, through a whir of train fansAnd a sad song could easily flow to a single wire of music.
Outside the temple their cloth spreads like the night skyAnd the coins glisten in it, like stars on a moonless nightLying loosely with decisions about life, women and God.
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Tautologies
June 23, 2011
The world eludes, sleep to sleep, in the deep night.Cobra-snakes writhe and flying planes from the skyCome crashing on house-roofs, the logical consistencyOf images in serious doubt, their semantic context.
Flowers open in pearl-white, their petals unfold,To golden sunlight from the hills, to water mirrorsIn early morning lotus fragrance from the pond.Women in colour return with plastic vessels of waters.The lotus stems in knots writhe like green snakes.
Here the pillow turns upside down, its rectangle of restChanging its sides, scraping the ears, ruffling your hair.The mosquito buzzes night’s happy mosquito songEnters the cave of your ear, restless on a thinking pillowThe rectangle of rest, outlying on a square of the night.
Our cobra-snakes are a tautology and our flying planes.Luckily the women images are not of widow women.Our dreams continue, sleep to sleep, in repeat imagesTheir underlying vocabulary many times tautological.
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Room
June 23, 2011
(Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even beproved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fastand one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, wheneverything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattlingof a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.- Kafka)
Everyone has a room he carries about him, within himSurveyed vigorously, some times, by a friendly night insectOn its white wall, a tiny friend from an unfathomed nightThat makes wing noises of friendship in a proposed deathOn the wall, its carcass to be untraceable under our cot.We then carry our room with us, about us, into the balconyFor a free fall from the heights of vertigo into darkness.
Everyone has this room in him and he carries it about him.Its whirring electric fan noises keep him from actively dyingIn the pool of darkness, in the vastness of night’s anonymity.We only die in others’ rooms, like the friendly night insect,That had come to die, in its immensity, on our white wall.
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The girl’s song
June 22, 2011
Her song begins abruptly, being born and raisedIn a forest of words that has not seen the blue sky.Her lyrics are stewed in myth and grandma’s talesWhere fish remain to dry for ever and they are sevenAnd seven of king’s sons brought them hunting.
It is all in an icy tingle of magic words, ice cubesOf music- notes on the soft downy back of a girlSlipping through the unreal magic of girl-thoughtAnd now she is slowly riding on your back with hairFlowing in an autumn wind of ripe fruitfulness.
Her song trails off just like her girl’s abrupt bodyThat has floated into the room in a bottomless danceHer feet vanishing into the mosaic floor in its mistHer body’s contours merging in the morning sun.
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The grandmother’s narratives
June 21, 2011
Sitting luxuriously on a string cot in the moonA lovely grandmother spoke her long narrativesTo the little ones at her feet, as a soft liquid nightTouched their baby cheeks through many holesIn the moonlight that fell on the coconut’s head.
The night bristled with unanswered questionsBut that will be for later and in the meantimeThe ghosts cannot wait in the washer-man’s ghatThat had clay pots seething with village laundryAnd the black stone on which he had beat clothesWas in fact a ghost by night, living in the palm .
There were of course kings who had seven sonsAnd all of them went hunting and brought backSeven wet fishes that refused to dry in the sunA probe revealed the tiny red ant to be the culprit.
The narratives went on till the night owl’s hoot.The herons settled down in the tree’s darknessBut their wings fluttered intermittently in sleep.
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The metrical memoranda
June 21, 2011
In meter and music we make our many memoranda.
Our language is orchestrated, as in the green houses
Waiting to accumulate green air, as they quietly grow.
Our language is after-thought, mere shadow of reality.
In enclosed space we enact shadow-plays, on cave walls
Like Plato’s prisoners in the cave, confusing shadows
With their reality, to imbue souls with aimless vapor.
Our memoranda, like our words, are airy pretty-nothings,
Mere echoes like the cuckoo-calls that do not bring rain
But just document the existence of the bird on the branch.
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Ear pain
June 20, 2011
Ear pain comes out of too much thoughtWhen thought contradicts logic in a mazeOf words that strike you as so many mothsFrom the rain seeking light in your patio.
The doctor of the ears sees too much in nose.His obiter dictum says the nose, in its septum,Is deviated from its straight, primrose path.He is a doctor with a sharp nose for money.So if you have too much ear pain in the drumThe nose is corrected from running astray.
The tooth doctor sees fault with the gums.He will try to get to the root of their canalsAnd both your ears will be made to behave.Surely money lies at the root of the canals.
Actually ear pain comes of too little thoughtAnd far too many words striking eardrumsFired, at once, in excess parental enthusiasm.
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Snakes and planes
June 20, 2011
We dream of snakes that hold top gods in their coilsAnd the ones they stand on in green ponds spewing fire.We love them all in our eye- sleep and white daylight.Snakes and planes, coiling and flying, green and blueHappen in libidinous dreams, in wet life and dry death.
Our bearded professor called them from our inside,The dark cave where they all arose in their angry hoodsAnd the planes, all of them, fly about houses helplesslyIn three sorties, looking at us from their window-holesOnly to crash on our pitiful houses of mud and earth.
Some times we catch our snakes by tails in the planeAnd whir them in the air in childish triumph of powerAnd the planes will go away catching their breath againThese incidents are few and far between in our sleep.
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The ceremony
June 18, 2011
We all went into a tedious little ceremonyOf lost innocence, in our rainbows of wisdom.A man issued his words that touched soulsAnd softly spoken in the smells of turmericAnd a faint fragrance of innocence and flame.His words flowed from his soft liquid eyesAs though he was child entering knowledgeWild-eyed and with tiny bits of the blue skyThe earth having lost its contours in spaceWater and fire emerging in a litany of words.
It was a child who sat in his lap, with fingersIn a bed of rice grains that filled stomachsAs though it was food that fuelled wisdom.He wrote his first letters as if in a secret codeTo the treasure-trove of burning treasuresSearing to the eye, hot on the painted browA certain secret gold thread on the little chestThat qualified him for the arduous journey.He then gurgled first letters, word and song.
(The initiation ceremony of a child’s first learning in which the Goddess of learning bestows her blessings on the child before his
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long and arduous journey in education)
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The horizon
June 17, 2011
The train passes in the station without stopping.Its hanging men in blue cloth are a mere blotch.The woman talking on cell phone is now horizon.The horizon that had shifted this side a while agoIs back to the wall behind train with cinema postersOf a hairy- chested actor lying sprawled on boobsNot his, of a buxom heroine of dreamy shut eyes.The train comes again and stands, emptying people.The horizon is now bursting with people in colorTheir dresses hang out as a rainbow of many hues.
(Looking at the Begumpet Railway Station from my roof)
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Making sense
June 17, 2011
We try to stitch together desultory fragmentsOf what have happened, on the tongue of nowAnd find a common thread with what existedIn the airy minds of then of us and those othersAs if there is salivary consistency about them,A continuum of space in their holding togetherWhere time and space hold hands in bodies.
We try to make sense out of our mere being,Out of the sound of words and their ceremonies,Symbols that hold race memories like crucibles.We try to build corridors in the spaces of time.We then destroy bodies to make sense of it all.
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On the night of the lunar eclipse
June 16, 2011
You have two faces, city, like JanusOne on either side of the rail trackThe incoming train divides you in twoThe rain-breeze soothing your sorrow.But the smells of morning milk packetsAnd the buffaloes waiting to be milkedOn either face speak the same story.
The city’s sorrow began in the nightWhen the moon hid in earth’s shadowFor no fault of the moon or the sunBut our own, of our own green earthIn our midnight wakefulness to cloudsAfter an evening of togetherness in mealDisturbed by a threatening wet rain.
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My mother
June 15, 2011
I have now managed to fix my mother in soft silksAnd brocades of years ago, that smelled of mothballsThere was nothing else in me to slot her absence withIn the recesses of my own history in the mind’s foldsExcept a pallid figure, in pieces of bones and ashesIn a clay-pot in waters that came from the snow hills,Yellow marigolds and fickle flames floating on watersA clay-pot that had overturned to the bottom of a boatIn a watery sound that came as if from my drowning.
It was now the rustling silks of her wedding, a clarinetOf silky tunes that flowed sweetly in jasmines and scents.These now prevailed in my thoughts of her long absence.It did not matter I had not been present in her wedding.
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Passages
June 14, 2011
I hear these passages in my waking momentsOf clicking shoes, hands on banisters, shadowsOn infinitely white walls stained with lizardsThat seemed to know me so well all the timeThe way they wave their heads up and down.
I have my eyes to look up to a hole of hot sky.Some times the rain is very angry in the stairsLike the cat that purred under the dusty stairsTensing for the roaches from the kitchen sink.
Here I am and now taut with the sounds of fearFrom the falls of cockroaches that defy deathNot the scary ghost-creaks of old house-doorsBut doors that are never there but mere holesWhere the wind hisses angrily as in a hill bush.I dread these very passages and this very page.
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Frames
June 13, 2011
My frame is ephemeral, just an illusory screenThat existed for a mere eye-blink on the roadLike a miasma that shimmered in afternoon,As I walked past with my eyes set on the road.The mountains there rose above human headsThat talked in phones to other human heads,Heads of hair with things to do, trivial events,Politics that provoked the laughter of historyOf humankind, in sheets of crackling leavesThey made out of palm and bamboo of jungle,In movie- tales, smelling of money and powerThat bought the comfort of tomorrow’s love.
My frame is ephemeral that brought it all togetherInto a single world, a coconut, its shimmering lake,And the shadows of mountains, boats overflowingWith men in tucked lungis that harvested hyacinthThe silent paddle-sounds in a lagoon, smug birdsThat sat cool on wooden poles in murky watersA white girl who chased the whiteness of a rabbit.
My frame is ephemeral that brought it all together The tree in the temple that arched over its pagoda In clouds that floated above the sun-gold of its top
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A shirtless man who hung in the sky to fly His flag The amorous couple who made love on the stone The Gods of wood who looked with lidless eyes At various follies done in the dark of our souls.
My frames are ephemeral, just fog-screens of beautyThat fizzled down between dreams and wakefulness.
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Hands
June 13, 2011
We dance with both hands and grab space rapaciously.At the same time we kick space sideways into the dust;Our hands are supple fingers with sound tales to tellAnd fine colors to mix on white surfaces of silk finish.With our fingers we claw our way into blue sky space.
We love our earth-space, brown and oozing with love.We love our earth and we dig it up and make scars on itAnd whomever we love we destroy them in quiet hours.
We love women with our hands clawing into their bodies.Our hands are fingers that make music from their bodiesBut our fingers tear up their bodies leaving scars on them.We make surreal paintings of their scars for art auctions.
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Dance
June 11, 2011
She was her mom in fullness of danceA color complement to her in spaceIn wind and rainbow hues like thoseOne would imagine in grease-bubblesOn a rainy evening at the gas station.
Ephemeral are her steps that flowedExactly as daughter’s, viscerally flowing,The same way as her mom’s, to facesAs lines of rain slanting to our faces inClosed eyes and sticking-out tongues.Together they poked our innocent eyesIn the middle of space where inertia restsOur hair flowed upwards as if Shiva’s.
(About the Kuchipudi dance performance of a mother-daughterpair ,Vijayanti and Prateeksha Kashi I had witnessed in Bhopalsome time ago)
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The bearded painter
June 11, 2011
It seems his bird went away in the early hours.The Goddess he had made naked with his beardQuickly got up and went her way to her Creator,Leaving sophisticated critics with a memory holeAnd with nothing that they could stop to conquer.
He is now laughing behind his enormous beard.He would no more paint all those pretty picturesIn pastels for society women of perfumed leisure.But the hole he made in art-space is a lasting oneAs white in the dark night of oblivion as his beard.
(A tribute to the memory of M.F.Hussain, India’s famous painterwho recently passed away in London at 95)
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Walking
June 11, 2011
The waters walked slowly, from the red mountainsEntering the parched plains, with wind on their backs.Their forked snake tongues proceeded smoothly,Exploring, gently patting short grasses on their headsAnd feeling for living creatures, their thingy existencesUnder the sky and on the earth, brown with the sun.
The mountains bled with muddy water in their heartsAnd renewed the lives of our rivers for one more year.
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Strangers
June 09, 2011
I find my strangers are perfect almost alwaysWhen one would meet them on the road at dusk.They become perfect strangers, perfect in wordsPicture perfect in white shirt and student tie.
As their words issue ,strangely they are perfectLike the stranger I saw yesterday assaultingMy space with words about a certain collegeIts location on a road at right angles with mine.
My words strangely collided with him in street.His words were strangely at perfect right anglesWith my old man’s life which was in a rectangleOf a closed space of vegetables and evening rain.
When I intersect their brief spaces on a busy roadThe text is always empty but the templates remainAnd they become perfect strangers to memory.
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Sorrow
June 09, 2011
One tends to culture a veil of sorrow in bodyOn a cloudy day, as one would, in sericulture,Where boiling cocoons are cultured painfullyFor drape as filaments in weddings and regalia.
Garbage bells here keep chiming in with sorrowOn a trailer, to which watchmen from basementsAdd their sorrows, one by one ,in fetid garbage.The silk that comes out of it is soft and smooth,Happy to touch but smells awful to a deep nose.
On a cloudy day mankind turns deliberately sadUnder a mournful banyan, sitting cross-leggedTo avoid the much deeper sadness of ancestorsWho stood on one leg in the hills for soul-freedom.
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Humor
June 08, 2011
We remained alive to humor possibilitiesAs we gurgled toothlessly in the cloth cradle.Later when we would piss in our half-pantsWe felt wet and were rather pissed off at lifeLooking for dry answers to wet questions.But we learnt to look at non-existence of pantsOn others’ bottoms to have a booming laugh.
Our humor was black like night, at night.At times we looked at a mental possibilityOf separating real pants from wet bottomsFor their dark potential for night humor.
Now, back in diapers, we are wet in bottoms.Our humor is smelly, our jokes are not funny.Our words now come with tongues held in cheek,As our eyes go blank, brows grotesquely knit.
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Home-sickness
June 07, 2011
Now, as we lean on the parapet in rainWe become home-sick, way beyond the lineWhere the pipal tree meets the blue sky.The tree’s hushed whispers at midnightIn windy rain will catch us in the stomachLike dad who once slept on the verandaWith his night growls of half-rememberedWisps of dreams about his children playingOn the memory wall of a winter sunset.We become home-sick of him of years ago.
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Stones
June 06, 2011
We were surrounded by stones, in steep steps,And taken by surprise, in their sun hues and skyClimbing the sky like birds to the sun in clouds,White fluffy clouds that came from somewhereFrom beyond the west hills, for just a day’s rain.
Rain spoiled them, blurring outlines luxuriouslyTo make them glisten like silks, finery of wedding.Bush and tree towered over them stifling their soulsAs they sat cowering in dread of their aliveness.
We were two, me and shadow, against their many.Beyond the bush and fire, a black- ash stubble Shone on stones covered in last year’s dry grass.
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Fish
June 05, 2011
In the fish spa you have your foot nicely eatenBy schools of fish, in the blue aqua- transparencyOf the tiny creatures swimming around your feet.For a change they eat you instead of you them.In the fish eyes your foot is the whole of a whale,A foodstuff of alive -stomach filling dead cells.They tickle your under-feet to make them laugh.You have a foretaste of the spa of the maggots.
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Monologue
June 04, 2011
Monologue is a threat to sleeping innocence,A revival of lost innocence like the cruel AprilBreeding lilacs out of inherently dead landRe-mixing memory and love of pretty words.You threaten the world all the time in lips.
The world cringes before their pouted wordsAs if Mount Etna will explode in orange fireAnd the expectant sky rumbles it right now.Little birds speak about it from night treesTheir monologue remains a nocturnal wail.
Monologue comes in white froth at the mouthWhen a frail body speaks black words of deathFrom a deep sigh, a rounded end of the word.
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Television
June 04, 2011
Sleep flows softly with the sun, eyes half-shutWith thin fragments of dreams under the lids.Weary- and bleary-eyed, I look at the solid worldOf furniture wood and wall television for spaceFor a release of wall space from concrete pillarsInto the air like tiny birds flapping their wingsOf avian freedom and heavenward ascent in sunAs their puny bodies rise against his golden glory.
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Poverty for poets
June 03, 2011
Actually there was no poverty in the beginning.Later innocence had begun and started to growTo be a fiery youth with soft-figured girls in mind.Girls then took shape in sinuous bodies, floating,In diaphanous silks, chiffon and yards of length.Their pink bodies rustled like bougainvillea in breeze.And poverty happened because they needed to storeStuff for tomorrow use, to tell girls what they own.
Poverty becomes less glamour below the hem lineFor poetry when body-cloth barely covers the bodyAnd grubby hands poke eyes at the traffic junctionAnd their nose runs in to the mouth uninhibitedly.
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Abject
June 02, 2011
At what level does one become abject;That is our question for a mere askingIn polite gatherings of people, with kidsCluck-clucking when asked if they careFor history, of race, of future mankind.You see it becomes real hot in the collarWhen the child asks what is there in itFor us, if you guys who have brought itAll about, the fire-clouds of destruction.
You play silly child-games in adult worldOf child-like white innocence, yoga-gamesIn ochre robes on indecent rolls of stomachsShaking as though innocence is restored.All you say is mere air-words, double punsQuickly thought up in musical bathroomsAs you come under the shower thinking.
We are abject, below poverty line, the lineBelow the navel where it eminently adds upOur poverty line is a few statistics of breadAnd some fry-oil, in the tents of non-work.
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Lamps
June 01, 2011
When lamps are lit in oil and flameThey flood our smells in early morningWith God’s jasmines, sweet cardamom,In offerings of fruit and leaf to pictures.Gods are smiling pictures that smellOf camphor fragrances, of lamps dyingTo be re-born as our next mornings.Our Gods are kings of bow and arrowTheir wives flanking them in blouses.When we do not smell our lamps dyingWe die like camphor with flames gone.
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The road
May 31, 2011
In the road lies being, my essence.The leafy banyans on both sidesDictate the timbre of my wordsWhere they bristle at their edges,In their leaf-ends mired in blue.
A miasma in body affects my timeAnd eye-sight of mind, in its purity.Like the illusion in a flamingo landWhere a boat is tucked in the bottomOf an afternoon bog when flamingosYawn in the sleep of distant lands.
At times a bearded traveler arrivesWith no sheep, only ancient drums.His sheep will not nibble at our leaves,As time hangs heavy in the blue sky.
I take words out for their meaning,And for examining mind’s contents.The road for my journey has its endHanging in the loose sky, remainingWherever it is, with its feet boundAnd extremely mired in memory.
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Overwhelmed
May 29, 2011
I am overwhelmed by a golden morningWhen it comes with the sounds of cattle,In the distance, of dust from angular hoofsOverwhelming mud-tracks up to the sky.The cattle are overwhelmed by their timeBy milk overflowing from their red uddersIn thin jet-streams that will overwhelm usIn our faces behind morning’s hind legs.The fleas overwhelm them in hind legsOf a tail that seems the end of the world.
Sometimes I am overwhelmed by wordsThat flow smoother than milk streamsFrom a cow’s udders of a recent calving.
In the white halls, when I leave the world,I shall be overwhelmed by its milky imagesClothed in no words, only derelict thoughts.
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Caricatures
May 29, 2011
The caricatures in our mind are we that roll,Roly-poly creatures, eating other people’s foodFor our bloated forms, far removed from life.The child is not father of man that is not manBut an aesthetic disjunct between life and art.A child is life, father art, beguiling and artful.Our larger than life bodies eat largely fromLarger than five-story steel carriage boxes.Our hideous mane waves yes-no when asked,A yo-yo, between seminal, unformed views.We have our quick-thinking survival games.We have to live after all in our larger tummy.We shall ask our child to caricature our forms.He alone understands the immensity of our lives.
(After watching a Hindi movie entitled “Stanley-ka-Dabba”)
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The bullock’s geometry
May 28, 2011
The bullock looked up from its creaky grinding.If only the grind-stone were square, less roundOr the hole were not a circle, but a straight lineThat remained open-ended till the yonder hillsOr the stone would go on a tangent of the grooveAnd trundle on the high road to the green hillsWhere such fine cud is waiting ,such cool shadows.
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Shame
May 27, 2011
In a coma of sleeping, of ticking life of death,You have your fantasies of two eventful daysCut off from the world, like unwanted pages.Between then and now are two forgettable daysNeatly cut off from its sheaf, its bound volumeOf eighty years of life’s pages, dog-eared of use.But when you finally give account of yourselfYou have to explain two stubs in the epilogue.
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Murmurs
May 27, 2011
Often we hear a crowd’s soft murmursLike a wind that arrives in the pipal leavesThrough the hills, from the sea down there.
On some days, at midnight, they soundLike the howl of a midnight wolf at the moonLike a plaintive cry from an atavistic past.
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Coherence
May 25, 2011
We soon realized we had to be coherentWith what we spoke in the night air,Shining words dropped in the thicket,Fireflies that flickered on hill bushes.Our words have to cohere with historyOur bodies and of our gone ancestors.
We have to think in essential assonanceIn nature of things, under a nothing- sky,Tiny insects that bore witness to our deedsTheir hum of filigreed wings in night airTwigs that fell on our silence in the woodThe birds that spoke on a dark morningIn the grays of a golden dawn spawning.
We are not singing. But to our thoughtsThere is a scheme, an unsought cadenceTo our actions, alliteration of beginningsIn five iambs of meters, some blank verseWrapped in scintillating speech rhythms.
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Doubts
May 24, 2011
On a clear walking day, a gentle breeze trailed us softlyLike a scruffy dog that sniffed our pant-leg in the slumsAnd took us for genuine friends all the way to our home.
We would shut our doors on it , afraid in our deep lungs.We had doubts about its friendship under a winter skyFor the wetness of feelings, its moist love for our bodies.
But we had no doubts about the white anti-histamine pillWe would surely take to secure our throats against its love.
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Metal
May 24, 2011
Our lips pressed on the window bars smelled iron.We heard bells that rang and rang in the far templeIn brass domes that had fevered tongues in them.
God’s tasty food went behind the red silk curtainsAs camphor flames illumined His black granite body.Many strung flowers went in a thread for His beauty.
A pigtailed man sent words up and up to the skyIn a canopy that had hideous demons on the side.God’s water smelled of shining copper and flowers.His food tasted delicious, of jaggery and cardamom.
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Power of attorney
May 24, 2011
His deed is black in the dark of a hotel suiteHis words are white and violated her body.
Here is a white moneybag with power to hurlKhaki food packets from whirring helicoptersTo black bodies of hunger and fly-ridden diseaseA white body with much power of greenbacks.
What is the big deal, ask white countrymenA man-woman thing, the story of a lowly clerkWillingly submitting her body to a higher use?
Black bodies can always be used by white onesAs those bodies deem fit, for white pleasure.Their forebears had taken a power of attorneyThat authorized all such uses of black bodiesBy white bodies at all times and in all climes.
(The Chief of the IMF has been arrested on charges of assaulting ahotel maid)
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The button rose
May 22, 2011
It is a moment’s rose
Just a button in leaves
In a hole of memory.
A button rose in a hole.
Button it up, will you.
It rose in a stair-space
Of shuffling feet of time,
An idea of button-smell
Like a new cloth smell.
Before it reaches God
As incense not offered
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As oil-lamp not lighted
Button it up, will you?
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The dreamer
May 22, 2011
We are dreaming of the dreamerOf whose dreams we are figments.When the dreamer opens eyes after,We vanish in fragments, snowflakesThose that fly about in lazy thoughts.
Silk, flowing garments fall smoothlyTo heaven’s music as broken clouds.The tree’s shadows are transient till noon.At noon they slowly vanish in the tree.They were the tree’s dreams at dawn.
The boulder-hills flow into each otherTheir paths quickly vanish in bushes,At the end of the world, near the sun.They are the sun’s dreams at dawn.
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The clouds
May 22, 2011
We went on from being lazy, inert crocodilesTo broken white clouds that moved in our mindsAmid poetry’s bird-calls in the morning window.It was poetry again we tried in nature and menAs red anger could not be worked out in nature.
You know we have become friends, by a chance,With fellow-creatures like busy red ants in a line.They have lived as easy as ever, with vulnerabilitiesAnd tiny helplessness they are not worried about.The sky-clouds are helpless , crazily driven in thereImpelled to rain plains, beyond the red mountains.
The plains exist there in their broken watery mindsIn the thoughtlessness of a few tatters in the blue.
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Highway
May 19, 2011
The black asphalt goes broke in the skyAmid gray trees that vanish in a dense fog.Tea steams in mud cups, near a shack;A few fry-oil smells assault hungry noses.Man sends leisurely smoke swirls in the air.Urchins swarm around acrid old tire firesTheir palms held up to warm to their heat.
A rickety bus kicks up dust in the distance.Right, said the old conductor to his skin bagFull of new currency notes and ticket stubs.The cleaner-boy stood on the foot-board,His tattered shirt flying like a windy flag.A man motions to slow down near the village.The man speaks steam into the winter airOf stale village politics, of women at homeOf crops failing to suck vapor from the airOf babies that are yellow- wealth goddesses.
Giant trees disappear into the red earth. Their bodies are now and then sprawled Across the roads of progress, their leaves Easy food for the passing herds of goats That will give white milk in the villages
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And warm red flesh to hungry stomachs
In the afternoon the bare hills breathe fireTheir trees stolen by greedy contractorsThey now stand naked to the sun, exposedAt night their thorny shrubs are set on fireLeaving black stubble on their bleak faces.
Giant trucks rumble on the potholed roadWith Tata and Okay on their painted behindsTheir stomachs are pregnant with overloadsThose with an evil eye shall have black facesAs their drivers stop for a bath in the canal.
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History
May 19, 2011
At this point we are largely concerned with the historyOf our unmaking, not of what unmade us but of whatWe have unmade, in life’s freedoms, follies and foiblesWhich is, of course, the same thing as a private recordOf our unmaking, some reverse engineering of bodiesAnd pattern readings of free minds stuck in mere bodiesThe way our stomachs grumbled to hide comedy of ageAnd our temples throbbed to a little love and some follyTo run away from an overwhelming blandness of reality,Truths that overwhelmed souls like brittle autumn leavesThat came in thousands and buried them in their color.It is a history of hypotheses, of had we been this and this.
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Torpor
May 18, 2011
Torpor is what we all begin with on some daysWhen the pain of thinking percolates in the bodyWith not even blue blood dancing in the wrist
As when you stare , behind white enveloping sheets ,At others in their slowly enveloping whiteness.
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Mirrors
May 18, 2011
Our eyes are our own long- standing mirrors.There we preen our feathers and see through our daze.But our history brings lugubrious tears to them.
Our eye-line defines our being and plots our soulIn the vast promontory of a luminous night sky.
Our faces are but extensions of their soft wetness.Our eyelids have dramas unfolding behind themAs if there is a world out there hid in a silver back.
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Voices of innocence
May 16, 2011
Their words are spurious but most of innocent power,Of silky-white voices from soft wet drooling mouthsFrom the corners of lips, shadows of unsaid meaning.
But shadows fall on voices to make beauty- rhythmsLike morning birds bleary-eyed from night’s tree-sleepAnd voices that gurgle, from repeated toothless laughterVoices that crawl effortlessly with no defeat of hurt And no scraping on knee-caps of floor-dust and sand
Above all voices that imperially take others for grantedThose others who exist merely to attend to their comfortAnd their annoyances shall quickly bring about redress.
105
The tunnel
May 16, 2011
Disjointed images crawled, in the mind’s wanderings,Recalling roadside snacks eaten near an old monumentWhen the light was at its best and life’s misty shadows.A tunnel took shape ,again and again ,in musty pagesAnd in other thinned out memories of a short story
Of a certain Maxim Gorky who saw what happenedIn life when they dug the earthy mountain from bothSides of the mountain and they had not yet come to meetIn the bowels of the mountain to say hello to other.
He that dug the mountain is dead, his yellow handNow jutting out of the white snow, waving in the coldAs if it has conquered the mountain in its deep heart.When you meet, come tell me on my grave, it had said.Such things happened in literature, a maxim of Gorky.
Such things happen in life too due to a design mistakeCome and tell me over my grave, says the poor engineerWho has been fined one rupee for the design mistakeAnd he then dies of a one rupee shame on white faceThere is not even his tragedy, but poetry of the unrealA farce that will leave us terribly crimson, in late hoursAn absurdity that will make Maxim Gorky turn in grave.
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(Reference is to the short story “Tunnel” by Maxim Gorky and to anunrelated real life incident of an engineer named Barog in BritishIndia who had committed suicide out of the shame of a one-rupeefine imposed upon him when the tunnel designed by him nearShimla turned out to be a disaster with the diggings from both sidesof the mountain not aligned with each other)
107
Suffering in poetry
May 14, 2011
When in poetry, we willingly embrace sufferingAs we do at home, in the music of the television soapWhere bongo drums sound as if someone is deadAnd there is suffering in belly, in dry eye-whites.
Poetry happens at mid- night, in a whir of the fanIn a shred of white cloud, in a spiked leaf-end,Where it must fall before season, in eyelids closedAnd staring at the sky operating above the basement.Poetry has to celebrate suffering under the navel.
108
Temporary
May 13, 2011
What is temporary in time is but a swallowingOf a little chunk of time by a cavernous holeA crater-hole formed by the collision of eternityWith our fleshly existence, in itself a tiny holeFormed by a chance collision in inner space.
We are temporary existences, tents in the desertErected for the night before moving the next dayTheir spaces quickly eaten up by an endless desert.
The spaces of our people have all been eaten upBy the deserts of time, temporary space-timesThat have all vanished in space leaving no trace,Except a beer-can, a tooth-paste tube, a rag dollThat would now exist in their temporary spacesOnly to be swallowed by the desert in the night .
109
The parapet
May 12, 2011
The moon climbed the sky in shreds of white clouds.The coconut tree dealt softly with our parapet wall.We saw bunches of coconuts sitting heavily in its bosom.Water sloshed in their shells shaking in the gentle windLike in a baby’s head we shook with our both handsWith tongue-clucking in mouth for the water soundAnd as the baby gurgled, we laughed in waters of love.
At night the moon was badly caught in its branchesAnd for a while we thought it was devouring it slowlyUntil we would see it back in the sky with a silver ringThat would mean monsoon clouds later in the night.
110
Misconstrual
May 11, 2011
We then deliberated to impose a meaning on our worldAfraid there was a setback in the matter of perfection.Deliberated misconstrual should enable better meaning.But in the end all that remained words, much semantics.
Spherical perfection is a needless appendage we carriedThrough our lives, to our lonely years and dark nightsWhen the worn smell of age, face-scowls of cussednessWould make even our misconstrual bereft of meaning.Well, we have lived our empty years and got nothing for itNot even once could we put a construction on its meaning.
111
The window
May 09, 2011
You open the window only to smell wet dewOn brown ant-earth covering a decayed bark.You better let in a bit of air-conditioned windSo you have time to forget the dew on tree-rotThe day’s shuffling of feet, the smells of decay.
You know she will not live long, now talkingOf pumping of water in an unreal backgroundTo thriving banana trees near the well hangingWith banana bunches with ripe yellow in them.I see ants creeping on her bark, on shuffling feet.
I see an unreal rot in the sky, a poet’s thoughtWhere poetry rots in an unreal green of the sky.I see a large conspiracy of rot in sky and earth.Behind our backs tiny creatures of decay workAt night to bring about our rot in small pelletsOf brown earth completely covering our barks.
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113
Wind
May 08, 2011
The wind brought the dead leaves of a new autumnAnd duly rattled our windows, in gaps of their hingesThrough which eerie old ghosts shriek at midnights.
In the bare hills the wind seemed still in sunny shrubsBut the ancient caves echoed with the manacled windOf history, within walls that bore many marks of menWho had brought their wind from the parched plains.
Migratory birds brought their wind from the far landsA sticky wind that slowly settled on our drying puddlesAs they made themselves comfortable in the new homes .
Our old tree ,failing to sprout leaves, pretended to swayTo the wind as if it still tickled its funny bones in the dayAnd made scary whoosh sounds in its leaves at night.
114
Poetry without thinking
May 07, 2011
We begin it from beginnings, from a chaosOf darkness where you had not even onceSuspected existences, all that flimsy matter.In the dark night it would end up roundlyAnd as the east reddens it would begin againAnd several beginnings form in amoeba –likeExistences and word-shapes of free volitionTheir false feet, like lies to be spoken in the day,Wiggle to make our existences daily poems.We write without thinking, do not even write.When we think, our writing stops at our lips.
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Sanchi
May 07, 2011
This is the time of the fallen leaf of our timeTo turn over a new leaf, when there are onlySharp needles of tree-stems, their bare armsSupplicating to the sky to utter camera delight.Beyond the undulating hills a fallen leaflessnessPervades a monk-less silence, perfect in sky,An ancient absence of silently scurrying monksOf ochre robes in pursuit of white Buddha-peace.Buddha sits there, broken in piece, his eyesFixed at the gnarled tree-back bursting withBrown skin eruptions of painful knowledge.
(At the ruins of the ancient Sanchi Buddhist monastery situated 60kilometers from Bhopal)
