Ranting on a brain dead day.

**
and so far,
in keeping with the religiosity of
things both great and small-

my brain is masked by the
impurity of my words,

severed as they are,
from the sky, and dressed up

like salad on a banal Sunday.

Born in the Summer

**

I see the first rush of summer,

knocking furiously on my door.

I feel the passing of the incumbent winter,

scraping off what's leftover.

On a day like this one, without excerpt, 

injecting the air with our tales of imaging,

we were born- docile and dissolute-

out of the loom of our youth. 

It was an eager time to be born,

Succinct and sufficient- time eluded us,

a renewed anxiety annulled that rheumatic discontent

the long winter had pierced.

And so on it goes, rendering each day

to the flood of human faces,

a story of decadence of the end of the clock,

beknown to many, but awarded to one. 

Upon reading, writing and entrapment that follows.

The prodigal feelings are coming,

I can tell

Because when I look to my sides,

I look just like the runner. 

the bitter mechanisms, like this one

has made this city

spring from a thousand gallops-

down at the end where an inept hand lay broke down

at the turning of the page.

Now the lull in my head is of a delicious kind

I see it as it bends to follow my gaze. 

Without ado, these cast of shadows

will now be 

smuggled onto

the chasm that has set itself apart in anticipation.

Captive- Upon a fragility.

I tried reworking on this old poem of mine. I initially liked it, but upon a revisit 3-4 years later I couldn't help giving out a slight chuckle. Anyway, hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed chuckling. 

Benny.

I look at you from
the crack on my wall
like a silhouette
of crass glass
moving, dancing
as if in-habit
as if intrigued by something 
beyond this wall

Are you looking at me?
I sit
in the burgundy of my room 
like a convict
with a case, a fruitcake
and a crackpot, awaiting.

I see your room
brighten into a red,
from flaming purples
and green dots
plain only at one
spot.
This is the place laid out for me
to watch you look

at me
at you
and laugh idly at
the songs you sing
while slowly you
break away
from the crass glass
that made you.

Kind face woman

There was a woman with a kind face,

Besides that, I believe she had no grace,

How she came to live there none knew,

Behind the church, she lived smelling like stew.

The woman with the kind face,

Had no friends, family or stake

Every Sunday she went to the market

Spoke to none, pointing only to the potato packet

One day, the woman with the kind face,

Walked amidst the children yelling, Hag! Craze!

She walked with a spring, a limp-a kind of churn,

Cracking her fingers at every eye’s return.

The woman with the kind face,

Her face, I believe, ripened with rage

Before they knew it, she hurled over the banister,

and kicked them all to the gutter.

This woman with a kind face,

All around the village, she hurled bullets,

Some were pickled, some were rounded,

As for the rest of us, she left us confounded.

Summons

I clasped the pen,

And two roads emerged.

I summoned my thoughts,

And street lights flashed across.

I wrote it out,

And children danced among the floodlight.

I paused to hear a sound,

And sleeping dogs awoke from stupor.

I closed the book,

And broke into the stillness of the room.

I felt that lull crowd in my mind, Plop. 

The poem fell out of my grasp.

Quicker than an amplified fire,

It had attached itself to things around me.

Hands - A geography of us

:::::

In this country, it is said that cartographers

die of rheumatic minds. A wayward stream contending

for an astrologers’ fancy, a colonial boldness

trace tributary over tributary

a saga of youthful wanderlust. It is the country of our

meeting, an uncharted terrain of history making

the languor of our youth married to the earnestness of

our absolution.

The signs of my time has been grafted on them but

the complexions of our youth are yet to surrender.

Trenches and trenches through each of their fissures,

Allow us to trace an exit pathway, neither life nor death.

For  I, baptised by the fire of senility,

tremble to clasp the microcosm of the folding world as you

left it in the palms of my hand.  

Once upon a time.

::::

We taught our boys and girls to sing,

a lullaby, a war song and an epithalamion offering .

And the women went to the hearth-             

To light up the fire, and stir the earth.

Our men sat by the fire, smoking the meats

Sucked the end of the fruit, the succulent tips

And like that-while we lay abiding

the parasite came, and swept us clean.

It crept inward and shortened our hymns

with renewed hoarseness, our houses began to screech.

Our cattle bellowed, our children cried and

Along the river, our brave men looked

And found a breath of new airs-amen- quickly

Into the village, they brought it like an old flame

Our young men were the first to pronounce  amen

And slowly it became a country only for old men

Man against man, woman against woman, child

Every man to his woman said, something’s amiss.

We did not know we took the parasite with our meals,

& Long before our duels ended, our children became unclean.

We called ourselves in different names, in prolonged

Tones our speech impregnated with a million tongues

Our piglets died, our duels grew old-

Our men and women, sickened, less bold.

Our village is an exile, but godknows

We stirred the earth once upon a time.

(Picture Courtesy: Elika Sumi)

Fiddling around

::
I didn't know we would laugh like that,
dropping our heads in automatic togetherness,
and buckle our hands one on each, like interlopers
of one and another's gazes.

I also didn't know your eyes learnt to
betray the participatory flutter of your hands,
and take with you- the page well-writ with the
misgivings of you and me.

From letters...

Lets make fittings into this skeleton

And churn out of our ramble

A chorus of poetic vendors shouting

Something due for relief, something due for long.

I’ve struggled you know, to grasp and look

At the pools that contained the falling water, pick

Up and leave.

But tonight, I am seized by a lust more

Stronger than a poet’s ambition.

For no poet is lavished more than his manuscript allows

No metaphor placed further away from his

Acknowledgment than this.

Is there any place in the configuration of poetry

to raise the question of why and how a sentence deigns to be?

Because I am devoid of a shape,

In possession of a subject that spasms out of control.

Who can tell- how many borders I’ve crossed?

Radar under the weather.

The man with the megaphone

inside my throat had

never dislodged.
He must

be buried somewhere.

Today he speaks

between my words, and strikes me

asunder with bullets of linguistic

infidelity. 

Water, water everywhere.

There’s water flowing, but it ain’t for drinking...

You can hold me or

Toss me o’er

Yonder 

And tell me 

Tall-tales of conquests, if

You’d like.

I suggest you turn

On the nozzle,

And draw me 

A bath, but only

If you’d like.

I’d lay there, engulfed

By an oath between

Ebbing and flowing

And having you over,

Punctured by a salient delight. 

Sun Kissed

Let us bathe
In the oil
From our garden,
Pluck those words for food,
And make half-drunk
Conversations on metaphor taxi.

I’ve been kissed,
Sorely and through
So out of your tirades
I will pick,
Unsheathed from the Sun,
Hyperboles for poems.

The clashing of cymbals

or the rupture of a tenthousand.

From this jungle of concrete,
I behold a firmament of torpor.
Thick with cinders, among binders
A soldier gentle fall and
A communal roar ascend
Towards heaven

Angry little children yell
Coo-coo-coo, blast it! his pronounce
(If I could make tea, and
Reside by the pin code from yesterdays
Package). Like Defrocked Prufrock, he's
Hung out to dry.

The night sky is crowded with fire, dear
Can heaven be far behind,
with consent, descend through these porous veins?
Where these children enumerate,
Is where my feet will adjourn, and
None sing the ballad for the soldier’s return.

Bitten with a guava.

my love,

you are the stealer of my thoughts,
the pandemonium in the morning,
the ruler of my gaze,
the nothingness in the morning,
my surrounding, my beginning.

my hunger at noon time,
my rage at dawn
my poem by midnight
my faraway friend at dusk...
the constitution of feeling, the rigmarole I bequeath.

Upon a Hiatus...

:::::

I flail among words, 

Look for means to go---

Washed ashore in civil disobedience, 

I find myself among

Convolutions of a  private kind…  

Hanging on a verb or two,

Surreptitiously supplying caresses

to some belligerent sentences said.

Do my words some morals betray?

Do these some cogency deride?

I have to know, is there an open-

Secret that rides upon this threshold,

That my grammar can no longer hold?

Where is this page that my weary feet

Has cast yoke?

I'm not quite ashamed,

I pluck out of your words,

Something that twirls inside.