This poem collection spans poetry written between January and March 2001. It contains over 50 poems on various topics ranging from nature, relationships, philosophy and daily life. The poems are concise, often only a few lines, and explore ideas and images through metaphor and symbolism.

1. A.J.Rao's Poetry
Volume 4

2. A.J.Rao's Poetry Volume 4
Poetry written between 1st January and 31st March2001

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4. Contents
The argument 1
Edit 2
Dissolving 4
Fear of flying 5
The fly 7
Synopsis 8
Push 9
Sunset 10
Women in the morning 11
The edge 13
Spontaneous 15
The super-moon 17
Note-taking 18
Lizards in dreams 19
Smells 20
Familiar 21

5. Black leaves 22
Light 23
Shoe- laces 24
Relative 25
The heat 26
Iconoclasts 27
Soft 28
Movement 30
Snow 31
In situ 32
Prayer 33
Heaps 34
Waiting 35
Moon beings 36
Shadows in the evening 37
Key 38
Wildcat 39

6. Sweat 40
Mourning 41
Water 42
Patterns 43
Looking for the word 44
The rail -bridge 45
The table 46
Pictures 47
Remembered silence 48
Meaning 49
Nights 51
The past 52
Black comedy 53
The helicopter 54
Diminish 55
Discover 56
Disappear 57

7. Memories of memories 59
Her story 60
Ramble 61
Jokes 63
Father 64
Silence 65
Cadences 66
Visit to the Jagannath* temple 67
Shuffle 69
Voice 70
Crazy 71
Place 72
The owl 73
The intersection 74
Fait accompli 75
Mother 76
Now 78

8. Night thoughts 79
Hearing 81
Flashes 82
Light 83
We long for the night 85
Belly-fear 86
Milk 87
Turning point 88
Trust 89
Guilty 90
Matter 91
White flowers, dark creepers 92
Remembering 94
The mosquito 95
Radiance 97
The fall 98
The crowd 100

9. Joking about sadness 102
The chain of being 104
Epiphanies 105
The little dark one 107
Bored poet 108
Poems of the night 109
Pilgrimage 110
Cold 111
Trembling 112
Pain 113
Houses 114
Height 115
Old age 116
Celebrating the New Year (2011) 117

10. The argument
March 31, 2011
The argument here seemed interminable.
The blue hills were a mere haze in the trees,
I mean each of them, the hills, and the trees
Crow-caws at dawn, train-sounds from afar
The wakeup song of God in early morning.
A mere kitsch of a song will not release us
From the tyranny of this gridlocked mind,
The sport in the gallery, the dark glasses
On pretty noses, bare shoulders against red
A gaggle of crazy market men wild with joy
At the pantomimes of other people’s play
Giant projectors with phantoms of players
Coming from the world’s end with red balls
As if they run you run, and when they squirm
In their pants, in your living room’s corner
You squirm in your hot pants, red and dead.
It is this thought, under our felt caps, fresh
From the warm sunshine of other people’s time.
The argument goes on endlessly in filled halls
In play-grounds like a salivary thread flowing
From the silky spider-work in our home corners.
In our argument we conquer the world in cup.
1

11. Edit
March 30, 2011
This here picture I have produced
In a visual of an early morning light
When pain needed balm in the back
Of nerve-ends tautness of the night
And editing blues of much saturation.
You and I were trying to edit detail
Emotion that cut thinking at its back.
The morning needlessly brought poetry.
Poetry once produced cannot be edited
Because it is there in your front lobe.
But I cannot seem to edit all that detail
From this night of life when it occurred.
I cannot edit the colour of my dreams
Nor change the depth of field in them.
My picture seems shorn of all depth
As I am caught fishing in the fish-eye.
I want to know who is editing all this
Before morning hand of night vision
It is the time of happen, the horoscope
The blazing Saturn planet that ruled life
And many unexpected things happened
2

12. In the belly at most hours in the day.
It is in the belly again that it happened
Of tiny cells that grew without permission
In a splurge of the body, behind the back
And an inside has to go of a bag of beings.
Twenty five times blue rays have to touch
As if it is the morning sun on the patio.
I cannot seem to edit the noise in the belly
The fears rising in the depths of its blues
The little blue powder, its magnificent rays.
3

13. Dissolving
March 29, 2011
I look at the possibility seminally present
In the current decay and body to dissolve
Like an electric light-bulb that disappears
In the bright sunlight as the day breaks.
My body’s light shall dissolve in moments
Into the general daylight of a sunny day
And as the day burns I shall slowly dissolve
With the pain of light’s merger into light.
You know the merger of light in the dark
Is easy on our body and feels like a breeze
But the merger of light in light feels like
Getting back into the claustrophobic space
From where we had all emerged years ago.
We had come there from nothing and will
Dissolve in the space of nothing from there.
4

14. Fear of flying
March 28, 2011
My flights must go on uninterrupted
Past the white clouds and air pockets
When the pilot announces turbulence.
I make my worship of planet Saturn
With a ring of blazing fire in the sky.
Back home, I worship the Saturn god
In oil and flowers, turmeric and milk.
On the land my flights crash on houses
But there is a near-chance they crash
On slithering snakes of the deep forest.
They can crash on real flying sky-birds
Though it is too much of a coincidence.
I make that happen when I choose to.
It is my dream; I can make it realistic.
My dreams are stories made in the pillow.
They are made of bile, acid and belly-fear
I have got them from her belly and his skull.
5

15. 6

16. The fly
March 27, 2011
We do not know it when we lie dead in the grass
As the spring breeze would gently play with our hair.
Others do not know that they are dead from us
Though they are alive, up and about on their feet.
The fly on our flowers is perhaps alive on us too
When it would buzz about us as if we are alive
When our ears are now bright yellow marigolds.
The fly is blissfully unaware that it is dead from us.
7

17. Synopsis
March 26, 2011
A running commentary examines my life
In thread and bare, while it is going on live
Within me, in this business of life, with none
From outside peering in my curious window,
So I have the satisfaction of an examined life.
I am living my life entirely real-time, you see.
I do not like visitors to look in the peep-hole
When I am knitting eye-brows humorously
Examining my life by extended commentary.
Right now I fear others not worrying about me
While I am grey in chair and crumpled sheets.
I worry about paucity of metaphors for the day,
As I think of others not peering in my window.
I worry about the synopsis, my examined life.
8

18. Push
March 25, 2011
A little push is all we can think about.
A little shove, friend, is all that is needed
To push the leaky boat into blue waters.
So a decrepit eighty year old poet says,
In the margins, nicely to the night sky
His pale moon remembering all night.
The boat is on anchor in house balcony
Having come adrift in the last season’s sea.
The tree’s shadows love it in the balcony.
The timbers are still there in sea-cracks
With the wood scent of the forest intact.
Their chambers have nice wooden planks
That will make warm embers this winter.
(Taking off on At Eighty by Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) , the
Scottish poet whose boat got the push in the last season)
9

19. Sunset
March 24, 2011
Sunset comes hastily before volumes of traffic
In the road of you-and-me fist- fights of chaos
Where we fight pitched night battles in a war
Such as in the confused Peloppenesian war .
In the car the chilly fellow is hot on film heroes
In scraps of badly accented radio gags like ones
The driver man will enjoy and you sure say no.
Our drivers have eclectic tastes in film music
Where everyone seems to flow as if yesterday.
This sun comes in their eyes like a dust particle.
The driver makes noises from his nose to the road.
His mobile phone rings to come home before sun.
My monument must already be in its russet hues.
But many cars and traffic policemen are in between.
My sun has already sunk to the depths of belly.
10

20. Women in the morning
March 23, 2011
On the road before their houses are women
In turquoise and blue, their heads and back
Bent with earth- sweeping and water sprinkling
The way elephants do in the morning forest.
Their mothers-in-law had done it in their time.
Like them the earth smelled of their bodies.
And the children wait for school in uniforms
For yellow buses to stop before wet patches
Careful not to tread on rice powder designs
Their mothers had made on their wet patches.
Their designs are pretty but highly transient
Only to be eaten by sparrows of the morning.
The sparrows have become heavy in stomachs
Of rice powder eating from beauty designs.
But the sparrows are now not there in mirrors.
In the afternoons they were pecking in mirrors
At their sworn enemies in the mirrors of women
When they combed oiled plaits for the evening.
The birds have perhaps gone of morning sickness
Or of far too many cell phone calls in their air.
The women love their afternoon gossip ,you see.
Luckily mothers-in-law are now gone for good,
11

21. Like sparrows that have gone from the mirrors.
12

22. The edge
March 21, 2011
Contemplating quietly on the edge
We may not now tip over nor do anything.
Actually the breeze we are waiting for
Will come only by the fall of our night
When noisy crickets will wake up to make
Their weird noises under the inky sky.
We are now not on the edge of thought.
The precise word we are looking for
Does not come easily nor bring peace
In a stomach upset with understanding.
Our body is too full of understanding
In the snake-folds of a sleeping hose
Nestled safely in an almond-like case.
The crank case breaks with winter frost
But only when understanding vanishes
Through the chinks in its woven plates.
When our understanding vanishes we stare,
In eyes of nothing, at the nothing of wall.
We will then teeter on the edge of thought.
Your words will then sound as soft poetry
Like a breeze in our understanding tree
Meaningless but high art in its bleakness.
Their syllables will drop softly in our minds
Like the midnight breeze in the pipal tree.
13

23. We shall then hear you entirely by your lips
And make poetry words directly from them.
14

24. Spontaneous
March 20, 2011
We are now merely being spontaneous.
We chance upon phosphorous volcanoes;
Wear sunglasses at the burning on the fringe.
These volcanoes combust spontaneously.
Their lines form smooth monument steps
Flowing from noon prayers in white shirts
Descending in a series of steps to poverty
And plastic bags flying about in the breeze.
It is the dust in the air, the smooth powder
Of the earth that flies in our face like leaves.
We wear duly our sun-clothes on our faces
As if we are girls riding to school on mopeds
Spontaneously looking good for the marriage.
We wear our nondescript masks that make us
Look like others who wear nondescript masks
Which hardly hide nondescript souls under.
We are spontaneous in our poetry of the night.
Our words burst like birds studded in night trees
That suddenly erupt from them at distant gunshots
Or mountain-breaking sounds of the nearby sky.
15

25. Words are things we keep hidden for nights.
16

26. The super-moon
March 20, 2011
In the evening the moon quietly climbed our roof
To peer in our skylight from his perch on the tiles.
We almost thought he would jump into our kitchen
And flood our mosaic floor with his dapper light.
When we slurped our porridge with hungry tongues
It sounded so different, this deep slurp from throat.
The porridge tasted funny, a tad sweet on the side
But somewhat like the broth we daily give our cows
In their sheds with the moonlight sweetening its taste.
Luckily we keep our bedroom windows shut upstairs
One can imagine what he could do with our minds.
(On 19th March, 2011(today) ,we witnessed the super-moon,
closest to the earth in 18 years)
17

27. Note-taking
March 19, 2011
When you take notes you are not you
But a would-be gray non-conformist guy
Wearing pantaloons into early seventies,
The ones you reach way before the leg.
You collect all your notes in the shirt pocket
To discard them when you reach home.
Or wear them like polka dots on your shirt
To hide the existence of small holes under.
When you take notes be adequately surreal
You cannot make sense of life otherwise.
18

28. Lizards in dreams
March 18, 2011
Lizards often come in dreams at dawn
As some snakes do in midnight dreams.
Here I stand on the top of a black rock
And drop a tiny pebble on the lizard
That sways his head up and down at me
From his perch in a recess of the rock.
He seems calling me down from his sky.
I am calling him down to my own earth.
My pebble hits him but he flies toward me
As lizards often do in our atavistic past,
On the brown plains, dotted with shrubs
In steppes that stretch to the green hills.
That was my dream at dawn but I wonder
What I was doing in the lizard’s dream.
19

29. Smells
March 17, 2011
We were trying to re-create experiences in words
Of our walks, balancing on narrow embankments,
Through the standing paddy rice, in morning light.
Our words are stated experiences created first time
Semantically but later by invoking smells of things.
We remember sitting on a cloth chair in the shadow
Of a vegetable creeper that had flung green snakes
In our faces striking our noses with their green smell.
We had grandmother’s wet cloth drying in the sun
That had smelt of grandmother and afternoon sun.
When it was later hung on the wall peg in a bundle
It had smelt of grandmother and the iron of the peg.
In the sanctum’s anteroom, God’s clothes smelled
Of camphor and wilted jasmines and burnt oil lamps.
The priest’s smile smelled of holy water and camphor.
His words spoken in high baritone smelled of God.
20

30. Familiar
March 17, 2011
All that seems familiar on the golden beach
Where the wind blows in the sand like mad
And a wind child moves in waves, like water
With fun people riding them up and down.
There are shacks on the hot sands for people
Anxious for experience, for history’s sake,
When history is the only future of a couple.
Their gold coins glisten at the bottom of the sea.
They bravely hang there in a glider in the sun.
Other people go about in beery stomachs
We are on the lookout for some sun and food
A little honey on the side and some moon.
21

31. Black leaves
March 16, 2011
Look out the window to see black leaves
Of cold argument, in the middle of a road.
Usually green they turn black at night
In the blood coursing in your black veins,
Wearing the silk-soft colour of a black night
The inky back of a night, out of the moon
Only this fortnight ago, held by the stars.
Woman wears a black flowing argument
Of a black night, this night and this day.
Her golden pendant flickers like the stars
In the black night of argument, in white neck.
In the train we ate ourselves a black forest
Of night, that turned green leaves black
As the train cut through the black night
With a white surgeon’s light on its forehead.
Tea leaves stayed black at the night’s bottom.
22

32. Light
March 15, 2011
What came up was light, a mere tonal word
We were searching for the real thing, you see,
In the blind alley, making slow way for our eyes
In the living bats that fluttered against light.
We had to make do with a mini-mobile light.
A foul gutter loomed here in the corner of smell.
Some grey rats could crop up there, their tails
Tracing lines of black gutter water on the road
And of the dead ones that smelled bad in the holes.
These creatures smell bad when recently dead.
History’s dead smell nice in their alleyways.
Daylight fills their spaces in the foundations
Of houses that once had people strutting about
Among copper-red brick walls, with cold niches
That had oil lamps burning late into the night.
Their clothes smelt nicely of naphthalene balls
When they had differently dressed men in them.
Their walls are not here, nor the flickering lamps
It is our space that has swallowed all their light.
A pity it is only the smells that have remained.
23

33. Shoe- laces
March 14, 2011
Each time he bends down to tie his shoe-laces
He sees an inverted world, of a clumsy blue sky
Supervalently fallen on a sprawling globe-earth
So he does not know the blue sky from the earth.
When he looks up he finds breasts looming
Like a Pacific isle tsunami on the plains of cars
Brown-mud and paper houses, people and flotsam.
His world-view gets distorted of caring mothers
And nubile daughters with overflowing breasts.
The lace tying may have triggered such a view.
But it is the girls’ eyes that stare at him of passing
His fantasies played out daily in their noon shadows.
His clumsiness does not lie in their overflowingness
But in the topsy-turvy of a dizzy earth-sky scene
Largely drawn from the tube of the small screen.
24

34. Relative
March 14, 2011
She is not blood-relative but of flesh
In the dark night she is my dark flesh
And my bones and marrow of hunger.
An ontology of her bones clearly places
My own on top of her incumbent bones.
Beyond the rail track her bones live.
Her blood traces a train’s light beam
In the pitch dark of my own midnight.
There I wait her outside for the creak
Of a broken string cot that has sagged
Of many heavy bodies and light pockets.
Sorry I forget the name of the bones.
25

35. The heat
March 13, 2011
This heat may be unwelcome on young skin
But not on old eyes where it becomes pure silver,
A home to dense shadows that emerge slowly
From vaporous layers hovering on a hill stream.
Here in the trees it is green and joy and twigs
Quiet birds in the noon and their day-dreaming.
In the temple, afternoons are heavy with sleep.
Bare feet hop-skip from one hot tile to another
As if they are doing a brisk trot of a fire dance.
The neem tree sheds flowers of powdered heat
Offering a bitter foretaste of its summer fruit.
26

36. Iconoclasts
March 13, 2011
The crowds fascinate us in their latent wisdom.
Lately they have turned rebels for a cause.
They are now our iconoclasts on the lake side.
Our lake is now blooming heads like lotuses.
The torsos they left behind recite rebel poetry.
(Crowds have recently vandalised statues of history’s great men of
culture installed on the lakefront in our city)
27

37. Soft
March 12, 2011
Soon we went about our poet’s business
In the wooded paths of human history
Trying to tread softly on delicate hearts
In some ancient history of poetry kind.
We saw some turquoise tourist bracelets
Glass bangles that clinked in a poet’s story
And the shadows they cast on brown faces.
It was golden evening always and sun set.
The mountains sat there immobile and blue
Their egos went home in the white clouds.
Even as we wrote poetry we had to laugh
While not unduly muttering under breath.
Our silken pajamas were yet to come back
From the roof up where they were drying.
In the meantime we had to whisper softly
Our cumulative secrets into the winter air.
Beyond the parapet the sparrows hopped
And chirped incessantly in the morning sun
As if they were ripe golden brown wheat
That waved heads softly in the grass breeze.
The sparrows here under the window heaved
Their brown bodies as if they were playing
28

38. Music, in our computer, from the snow hills
And yellow pipal leaves fell softly on the wind.
Our temples were soft in the outlines of pagodas
Where they scraped the sky ignoring the wind.
As we looked up at the top of God’s golden pillar
We looked softly at the contours of our own life.
Everything came home as if it was in our mother
Where it had happened, in our beginnings in her.
29

39. Movement
March 10, 2011
We have come to movement at last.
Actually our inertia was inherent in us
In our present incarnations of tyres
That have lost stomach for the road.
Hung by a fiber rope on the highway
Our path remained where we were,
As indicators to passing motorists
Of tyre service available at the spot.
A passing wind enables us to pretend
Our continued lateral movements.
30

40. Snow
March 09, 2011
At sixty, it matters little if you have not slowly climbed
The snow hills to look a frozen phallus god in the eye.
You have now all the time for your thawed hypotheses
Like had I or not become or done this and this, then.
The snowy beard on your face flows in white clouds.
But of little use is looking precipitously into the abyss
Only to incur a plaster cast on legs like snow in flakes.
Had not my granddad happened then in hoar and frost
Would be less flawed in the vast frozen wastes of time.
31

41. In situ
March 08, 2011
We reveal ourselves well, in the night.
Our cell growth had taken place, in situ
And mostly localized behind our tummy.
We sure love words, Latin and medical.
Our surgeons came in white and green
Discussing the in situ growth in us as if
It was a pretty Ming vase found in situ
Where they dug up for ancient cultures.
The surgeons use mostly medical epithets
But their scalpels seem like sharp flints
Discovered in their ancient excavations.
We reveal ourselves mostly, in the night
Our fears come from dug up ground levels
Where they lie buried and in situ for years
And threaten to turn invasive at night.
32

42. Prayer
March 07, 2011
We stood in a whiff of fragrance
Of him that stood behind the curtains.
His water tasted sweet and fragrant
When taken to the lips in a slurp.
We thought of him in her destiny
As it unfolded for her in white walls
In a wilted flower within her flesh
Which once housed tiny beings.
It was a mere thought, this fear for life
An existential question, a silent prayer.
33

43. Heaps
March 07, 2011
From our ground levels we went on to heaps
Of vehicular chaos, of racing men and cars
Among heaps of crawling people on the road.
Their eyes shone unduly wet with money.
Some were anxious to reach dizzy money heaps
In cars wedged between trucks of bearded drivers
That spewed black smoke from their behinds.
Government bosses looked tall on their paper heaps.
Citizens walked like writhing bundles of caterpillars
That were waiting for decisions to transform them
Into full-fledged butterflies of the finest of colors.
34

44. Waiting
March 06, 2011
I stand in the computer luminously waiting.
I am looking for the flash, the glistening word
Lying in wait in the dark folds of the night.
On the other side of the world is a woman
Her womanhood starkly waiting in a white room
To be dispossessed by the cruelty of a body.
A mature night is waiting for beauty-dawn
From its orange memories of yesterday’s dusk
When over tea we were sitting on a string cot
On the highway and waited for the sun to sink.
35

45. Moon beings
March 05, 2011
We live, a little on the other side of the moon,
In a pallid half-disc of the moon in the day sky.
We say a little consequently, but withdraw more.
Our poems tantalise beings ,from outer ridge
Their words tease from its marble concavity.
36

46. Shadows in the evening
March 05, 2011
The old woman’s skin squeals fitfully.
She oozes water and fear now and then
And gets agoraphobic nightly in skin.
The thoughts in mind are submissions
To shadows present in layers of water.
There are layers of water in her old skin,
In subcutaneous streams, one on the other.
The vapors they emit are sulfur fumes.
Her feet follow each other in a pageant.
The professor said the mind made them
Walk like an ancient petite Chinese girl
With delicate feet not made for distances.
She struts and frets in the hour and is more.
These are high performances on life’s stage.
We need appreciative audience for claps.
37

47. Key
March 04, 2011
Her clean bill of health defies explanation.
The skin holds the key to it, not the heart
Which is a pump much like the water motor
Recently started to air-cool her sleeping.
Her nightmares generally describe states.
Behind the dusty stairs, the water-cooler
Lays her mingled past, in dark shadows.
Her skin emits vapors, like a sun-drenched bog.
As if it was moisture of the monsoon clouds
Or the expectant sultriness of the east coast.
She drinks ten litres of pure aqua by night.
Was it okay to drink straight from the bottle?
But doctor, in sleep it pours from her being!
38

48. Wildcat
March 03, 2011
A wildcat purrs softly in the back of the car
A random thing, a new geo-physical mapping.
When material things like our flesh are made
Security checks will work on fur at the airport.
Flesh and bones are white powder, brown ashes.
When not thinking, thinking flesh is mere bones
Thinking about the fleshy continuums of bones.
A little flesh, some powdered bones, colored fluid
Are all it takes to make us in plasma and chemistry.
Our bones are adequate noises of disintegrating.
We look for our nature cures in the black alley.
Our bone powder is mere sound in the ankles.
It is words that ooze in the flesh of our throats
Just like salt water that wells up in seeing holes.
39

49. Sweat
March 02, 2011
Our sweaty anxiety is in fact a pre-historic thing,
A primordial phenomenon of our ancestors
Like single-horned or several-armed creatures
Bestowing powers on dancers in the woods.
Our bodies are now airy souls that feel free to fly
From svelte conference rooms, plush hotel lounges
Into shredded clouds floating in the rarefied air.
We promptly put on our shields, on horsebacks
And set out to conquer worlds that will conquer us
Unless conquered, those lie beyond the mountains
Those that will descend with armies of elephants
Those that will bring about our decline and fall.
We are anxious our thermostats will not function
And we may yet sweat under our anxious armpits.
40

50. Mourning
March 02, 2011
Morning seems a good time for mourning
In the breezy season of spring and March.
That is when you have to mourn the dead
In flowing white garments, in vacant eyes.
You wake up droopy-eyed, dream-fresh
But your time is still ticking to the noon.
When noon comes the day feels heavy
In the warm weariness of a siesta time.
Your eyes half-close with sleep in them.
Your garments become sleep-crumbled
And their creases won’t hide black grief.
In the evening loss becomes a far ghost
Behind the coconut as the sun slowly sinks.
As the night creeps in, sleep comes to eyes
And absence feels like the only viable fact.
41

51. Water
March 01, 2011
There are blue striped pipes bringing water
To empty into intense human-made bogs
Sitting on the roadside between future houses.
There are here no crocodiles, only builders.
There are no prole-born brothers in duress
Only workers in torn tents under a blue sky
Wedged between tall skeletons of houses.
Houses are made replacing rocks in bushes
Murdering rocks slowly by sharp knives
And rhythmic pickaxes that fall heavily
On their summer bodies petrified in time.
Often water softens rocks, makes them amenable
To slow murder by persuasion and perseverance.
42

52. Patterns
March 01, 2011
On the beach sand were webbed feet patterns
And unshod feet, one after the other, of walkers
On a rising sea of memories on a moonlit night.
A hum went on like the breath of a sleeping child.
Its sound patterns were like those of shore palms,
Largely specters of lonely trees with wind in hair.
Behind them were abandoned customs warehouses
Of old brick patterns visible through flakes of time.
A liquid moon stood at the centre of white clouds
Their serrated patterns ruled out possibility of rain.
Green fish nets formed a sea-like wave pattern
With dark fishermen who sat on their haunches
Mending broken nets with honeycomb patterns.
43

53. Looking for the word
February 28, 2011
The word eludes in the night;
Pushes you into its blackness.
Change the colour, putter about
In the wild wastes of the night
As though in a wandering garden
Not to pluck flowers and leaves
But to think about far people
In white hospitals, blue overalls.
It is the white which outshines
The black night in fluorescence.
And the blue falls in the night.
44

54. The rail -bridge
February 28, 2011
The train crossed the span against great ruckus.
Miles before, we had thought of the coming bridge
When the train would stop greeting dancing poles
To enter sound, in a cacophony of steel and sound.
The bridge would then disappear in forgot sound
And the train would soon catch up with the world,
In a victory of silence over sound, of sun over shadow.
We knew soon there will be another clackety- clackety
Crossing of water and wind, more sound and fury.
45

55. The table
February 27, 2011
The old table sat there gloomily
With a checked cloth on its face.
Poetry was far from its thoughts,
Only a carpenter of wood to fix
The creakiness in one of its legs.
The carpenter teases it from afar.
He comes now and now, does not.
He is not involved with our poetry.
In the balcony our wet clothes hang
Revealing tiny bits of the blue sky
Their tantalizing shadows will enter,
When the table will embrace them.
But that is a story of the afternoon.
The table cloth has a dusty history.
Under it lie its innermost secrets.
But poetry was not in its thoughts.
All it wants is a carpenter of wood,
Who will fix the creak in its knee.
46

56. Pictures
February 26, 2011
In the night the pictures become clear
Out of a shrill whistle piercing the dark.
Words become thoughts, vivid pictures
In the whir of an electric fan in the room.
It is a sound that comes through a child
A child of the earth and of a climbed wall,
A tree with leaves plucked into pockets
For worship of a stone god in vermilion
And the yellow softness of a beginning god.
It is my god nestled in a heap of yellow rice.
It is my women of rustling silks of the air,
A fragrance of worship flowers and flame.
It is the flame that dies in floral fragrance
But re-lives to verify my continued living.
47

57. Remembered silence
February 25, 2011
I do not remember silence always
In the midst of noises in my inside
Except in the very brief interludes
When a noise holds over to another.
It is the silence at the edge of sound
The brief highway of green paddy fields
That occurs between town and town
In a populous countryside where
Noisy chickens often cross the road
And men are found lying on the road
In helpless pools of drunken silence.
I remember more the awkward silence
That rules when dialogue breaks down
And the answers in her eyes do not
Address the questions in your throat.
I remember those awkward silences
When words occur in sonorous sounds
And meaning ceases to flow between men
When expression loses its life function.
48

58. Meaning
February 25, 2011
In the bus a tiny girl suggested many levels,
Layers of meaning filtering into a cosy bus
From the information spread about in the bus
Around the driver seeing in the rear view mirror
And the passers-by who vaguely whizzed past him.
It was for me to make my own meaning for me
Synchronising my plane of existence with hers.
At another level a fuzzy sun set on the still lake
As if the collected lake had to speak for the day
Without the orange sun blazing in its other side.
We had to make meaning from the tree by the lake.
49

59. On the sidewalk men sipped tea from a red kiosk.
They made their personal meaning out of the time
And the information in the trod dust of the road,
In the bricks that piled to be built in a house wall
In the stray dogs that sat listlessly on the road
And in the dry leaves that fell on the parked car.
50

60. Nights
February 24, 2011
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.
51

61. The past
February 23, 2011
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.
52

62. Black comedy
February 22, 2011
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.
53

63. The helicopter
February 22, 2011
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 bodies here have to reach out to bodies up there.
54

64. Diminish
February 21, 2011
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.
55

65. Discover
February 21, 2011
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.
56

66. Disappear
February 20, 2011
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
57

67. That have my absence etched on them.
58

68. Memories of memories
February 20, 2011
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.
59

69. Her story
February 19, 2011
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.
60

70. Ramble
February 18, 2011
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
61

71. That way you are sticking to your point.
62

72. Jokes
February 17, 2011
We are on the lookout for jokes,
Not two-penny cell-phone jokes.
They must tickle ribs, just in case.
We mean if you feel itchy there.
The macabre ones go in the wild.
They do not strike you anywhere
On the ribs or in the belly-button.
They do not come on cell-phones
Or fill shirt -pockets with splutter.
They just happen in your stomach,
In blood-stream, in the upper cage.
As if they have dropped from above.
You don’t know it when they hit.
63

73. Father
February 17, 2011
Here strangers pass by, themselves alone.
You try to find a snake in the hole for effect
And actually find a snake but no effect.
This snake is a water snake of summer.
White clouds drift in the sky near the tree.
You are alone, all the time, in your mind.
You think of he who drifted away like a cloud,
When you were still in swaddling-clothes.
You had white clouds for swaddling-clothes.
64

74. Silence
February 16, 2011
There is hoar and frost in the leafless tree.
An old man has wisps of snow on his beard.
Church spires rise up to the white sky.
Their bells tinkle in frosty silence there,
In a silence of the art, of contemplation.
There is silence here, of paper crackle.
In the kitchen there is clatter of cups.
There is the blare of an oncoming train,
A distant dog’s barks in morning’s silence.
Silence is in the wall, hung on a sound.
65

75. Cadences
February 14, 2011
Here I write, dipping quietly
Into remote words, thoughts
Of other people and other me.
Words that spring from other
Nightly minds, nightly bodies.
Thoughts that form cadences
In the smooth flow of the night.
66

76. Visit to the Jagannath* temple
February 14, 2011
He ruled our puny minds and frail bodies.
He smiled from a painted black wooden face-
He that made body things and airy souls.
A mechanised drum beat its stick in rhythm
And a yellow camphor flame lit his face.
We duly took his sanctified water to lips
And dabbed his holy sweet to closed eyes.
We took a closer look at him while returning
He was like one of us, with a doting wife by him
And a loving brother standing in attention .
67

77. (*Jagannath literally means the Lord of the Universe)
68

78. Shuffle
February 13, 2011
Let me shuffle them and see beach people
In the rising waves of the sunset hour.
My light falls on them, on pliant faces,
On their hair in sea-filtered sunlight,
Of the soft December skies of deep hue.
On the beach they are just things, fine objects.
Flooded in strange light, they lose their faces.
69

79. Voice
February 13, 2011
Actually there is nothing with voice.
Here my mind was held up to scrutiny
For my voice that needed to be raised.
I can see the picture of mind’s knots
In folded vicissitudes of inner space
That resonated with shrill bird calls,
Flashes of memory, failure thoughts
That soon faded away in a foggy past,
A fall from a fecund sky, a brick wall
That returned all pharyngeal sound.
Actually there is nothing with my voice
It is just that I cannot scream loud enough
To be heard on the other side of the river.
70

80. Crazy
February 12, 2011
In the night’s glittering wedding hall
A crowd of sanity gave sidelong glances
To this odd-ball of clothed craziness
Who holed you up in her gray craziness.
You held her against her cousin’s bones.
There was no country laziness in them.
O you cousin, tell me where my meal,
Thanks you for the plate she wheedles
Out of you .Excuse me sir, is she from
Your wedding party? Yes of course.
Crazy people are in our wedding party;
Wouldn’t I like her in the bride’s seat?
(About a mentally challenged cousin of mine)
71

81. Place
February 10, 2011
In the rocking chair we are placed tightly
Behind the newspaper of all about places.
There on the park bench shadows fall on us
Of our several absences from thinking bodies.
Dry leaves crunch below of remembered places.
We then sleep on soft pillows in running trains
Of moving places and faster moving absences.
Our desire for place is moving away from it.
72

82. The owl
February 10, 2011
At midnight the conch blows in a new start,
The start of two new lives together of future.
The owl is eternally welcome at midnight.
Several owl-hoots echo in the wedding hall
Not to betoken evil on the withered stump
But to bring on back a seated wealth goddess.
We welcome our owls in our own hoots.
(At a marriage ceremony, women make owl-like sounds in order to
invite the Laxmi, the Goddess of Wealth who arrives on the back of
an owl)
73

83. The intersection
February 06, 2011
At the intersection of truth and poetry,
It does not at all matter if we prevaricate.
Words do interfere by beauty and noise.
We are not here speaking the real truth
But an almost truth, and if this is not it,
Let the bodies speak, in their receding
In their constant flux, movements away.
74

84. Fait accompli
February 06, 2011
A gray and sullen sky is up there
With no flying birds frozen in it.
I cannot paint all those birds back
Into a seeming blue sky, tiny dots
On the painted canvas of the world.
My freedom is indeed at stake
As I sure want my birds there.
But I have to maintain proximity
With truth, with the real world,
A kind of pretension of reality,
In a verisimilitude of no birds
When no sun, but white clouds.
I wonder why in the name of God
My facts always come accomplished.
75

85. Mother
February 05, 2011
I thought he wouldn’t come, surely
Not with the body his mother has.
Here, in her soul, there is quietness
Of resignation and in body, tautness.
Mother’s body is yours, a fragment
In the whole of your body, like mind,
As you were a fragment once of her.
If she dies, you die, in a piece of you.
The rest of you will live with a hole.
76

86. 77

87. Now
February 04, 2011
Now is a fragment of me in this space
A fragment that lives and changes its shape
Like the amoeba of light changing feet
A piece of the self growing by the hour.
Now are my sounds coming alive at dawn ,
The light that floats from the crack in my roof
And drops of rain that texture my window,
Dry leaves flying in the face of the wind.
Now is fragment of time set in this me.
78

88. Night thoughts
February 03, 2011
Night thoughts enter your body
Like so much free-flowing water
And its top portion teems with
Its many empty sounds, echoes.
The body is your mind at night.
The thoughts occur of living
Under white sheets, iron cots
A shut window for winter cold,
Of living, under eyes of sleep,
In pajamas of strings loosed
While dirty goods get splashed
On an old man’s quiet dignity
Under a pin-striped nightcap.
In a prison uniform of thoughts
The body is trapped in the mind.
The night watchman’s stick hits
The asphalt and your existence
Its tap accurately measures time
On the asphalt of your existence.
79

89. 80

90. Hearing
February 03, 2011
I still hear the world in my ears.
I hear the whoosh of the west wind,
The noise of the empty word
And clatter of senses rubbing
Against the body of the wind
As if they are my very bones
That move lazily in my knee.
As I walk in my defunct dreams
I do not need the hearing aid.
81

91. Flashes
February 03, 2011
The cold seeps in our head.
Our head echoes with a hum
Of the trees in the sea wind,
A mere silence of the mind.
That is when we look for
Flashes of light, in sound.
82

92. Light
February 01, 2011
We talk here of light of everything
Not merely of dispeller of darkness
In the bat smelling ancestor cave
But of lightness of being, bearable
Because it does recur but may not.
Our lightness becomes when the pill
Reaches deep recesses to dent pain
And lightness dawns in lower being.
Our lightness happens in the mood
Not in its several sing-song swings.
Our lightness happens in the sun,
When stone shines in its splendour.
Our lightness floats in white beauty
In the textures of weightless words.
Our words are lightness of the spirit
When they come out of being only
To drift away in the sea of the night.
83

93. (The faint allusion is to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a novel
by Milan Kundera)
84

94. We long for the night
February 01, 2011
We do not look all that pretty in this daylight.
Our beauty emerges slowly as night creeps up
On our houses and on our bodies, in starlight.
Bright arc lights show us up as divine figures
But without them, the stars do their job fine.
It is the burning sun above our coiffured heads
That makes us look pretty ordinary and human.
The way warm rays fall on us makes us squirm
In our clothed bodies, arms covered in gloves
And our heads in scarves shielding from heat.
We long for long silky nights that make us pretty.
85

95. Belly-fear
February 01, 2011
We now remember those smells of nightfall,
On the mud track lined with thorny bushes.
As night falls the bushes become ominous.
Several night ghosts reside in thorny bushes
Those make their ghostly food in the night.
As our bullock cart proceeds toward the night
The bells tinkle in rhythm in bullocks’ necks
Drowning the dreadful shrieks of the ghosts.
When the stream appears, the bullock’s bells
Stop clanging for a while when pale ghosts
Resume their shrieks from their bush homes.
We, the kids in the cart, hug mummy’s belly
Wondering how the bullock fights its belly-fear
When the bells stop clanging in the darkness.
86

96. Milk
January 31, 2011
There is wind in the dry leaves on the floor.
The busy red ants are crawling up to the bark.
The sky looks like rain will come and hail.
The water sound there seems as if falling
On the slanting tin roof but it is the squirrel
Or some love- pigeons shuffling feet on it.
Here I wait in the front porch of my house
Afraid, deep within that the milk has boiled
And is overflowing whitely in the kitchen stove.
Footsteps are easily drowned in dew- wet leaves
And I am unable to go in to check the milk.
87

97. Turning point
January 29, 2011
Somewhere on the journey, near the banyan tree
I meet this perfect stranger in a colored headgear
That sits heavily on his head, his legs swathed
In silken dress-cloth, his torso decked in camphor.
I see him come riding on a horse, sword in hand.
I decide to join him aloft, in the journey beyond
And now as I look back in the hoof-dust of his horse
My village becomes a mere blur in the blue hills.
88

98. Trust
January 28, 2011
You begin with a cloud of trust above you
Your rubber house will not close in on you
And when you come out to breathe fresh air
There is no poisoned air and the dirty aqua
Will not do you in or the long rubber hose
Will not throttle you in your crying throat.
Who is this one who had decided to give you
A chance to exist ,borne out of a mere chance
Collision of particles in a big bang of bodies
Like the astral bodies singing the sky song?
And now who is this another one ,years later,
Who decided to give some one a chance to exist
Out of a similar collision in her inner space
And you a chance to join this game of trust?
89

99. Guilty
January 28, 2011
When I went to sleep yesterday night
I had to reckon this in my own failures.
My sleepless thoughts were mainly of guilt.
My long scroll stretched to the starlit sky.
I tried to arch over the expanse of space
To see where the record of my guilt ends.
In the back of my mind I have a feeling-
Between us two I cannot be blamed for this .
I now lay the blame for this at your door.
90

100. Matter
January 26, 2011
In the morning walk we thought of ourselves
As mere matter, matter trying to coalesce
With other matter in a compulsive fashion,
Man matter merging with woman matter-
Destructible matter with destructible matter.
The monk saw some bones and some flesh
An unusual matter that saw other matter
In a decomposed fashion ahead of its time.
All the time we are making matter in this
Factory of the old matter merging to form
New matter which will do the same thing.
This matter wants to control other matter
And some times hastens the process of matter
Decomposing ahead of time like the monk,
In a compulsive urge to decompose matter.
The matter is the same, monk or murderer.
The urchin who broke the dog’s leg with a stone
Was just breaking down matter to its essentials.
91

101. White flowers, dark creepers
January 26, 2011
Muted conversations are heard in the street
In the gray shadows of the houses of dusk.
Women squat on the steps of their houses
To discuss their kids, husbands and neighbors.
Their memories go back to other evenings
Of kids, drunk husbands and bad neighbors,
Of the many pretty floral designs before houses
Other women made in rice powder and color.
The incense smoke from their four-armed gods
Enters the streets, reaches up to the tall trees
And electric wires, going up in silk-smooth swirls.
As darkness sets tiny white flowers break out
From loving mother creepers on the houses
Like stars we often see burst on our roof at night.
92

102. 93

103. Remembering
January 24, 2011
Remembering is a morning and some thoughts
That swarm like those buzzing locusts in the air
Those have descended from the far off alien skies,
Their wings light and flapping to keep them alive.
A child’s stick brings them down one at a time.
You had nothing against them who were our guests
Guests from the plains of Siberia into our bushes
That had brought their memories, their thoughts.
They had brought memories of many green leaves
At other places and other thoughts, other skies
But you can only bring them down one at a time.
94

104. The mosquito
January 23, 2011
The midnight mosquito is back in the ear
It comes as a mere thought in the earlobe
A buzz, that is, in an excruciating journey.
I speak above the general din in the hall
Do I hear less than I speak, in my tuning?
Sometimes it is this old of the thoughts,
A mere fear of the impossible in the dark
A frightful young volcano in the nether body
As sleep comes distorted in the resting mind
In a mash-up of the living and the dead.
When I lie in the plastic casket do I look,
At the roof slab through its transparency
Somehow contributing to the frigid room
There in fourth floor in its un-swept dust?
How can I add to anything up there with
My fixed stare where I cannot say all can
And I am just a thing of the plastic casket,
A thought buzzing like a mere mosquito
In the earlobe, in the depths of this night?
95

105. 96

106. Radiance
January 23, 2011
As radiance strikes his face
A pale silence spreads from his
Pantomimic lip movements
In continuation of the dream
Between his waking and sleep.
(On visiting a cancer patient under radiation therapy)
97

107. The fall
January 22, 2011
The fall comes to you again and again
From grace, certainty and equilibrium
Of forces of gravity under a gray sky.
These are our failed attempts to stay on feet.
We have to dig in deep before we extend foot
And not lose sight of white walls at midnight.
As we think we expand sideways and up;
The body falls as the mind floats in ether.
The tree there and we exist in the same plane
As its golden leaves fall we too fall in bits.
98

108. 99

109. The crowd
January 20, 2011
We dip into the mind of the crowd
(Not sourcing the crowd as the geeks
Would say under their light words)
As the layers peel off in the internet
Revealing the reader to the writer
And vice versa in discursive mode
In a continuous text engagement
And of images, virtual and sound.
The crowd dips into a single man
As it dips into his tiny piggy bank
Adding it all up to say it has wealth.
The crowd is not a humongous mass.
When it has things to say it says them.
Its spiritual guru would say it all,
What it likes to hear in heady incense.
But there is the sorrow of the masses
The collective wailing of the crowd
In a black parody of all that goes on
In the recesses of its aggregate mind,
A mash of bodies falling on the curb
A bloody mess of an unwanted sword
The stupidity of a pantomime in black
In a few burnished thrones and sashes.
A boring repetition is all that they do
100

110. A mere déjà vu and we have seen it all.
101

111. Joking about sadness
January 20, 2011
We have blasphemed singing about sadness.
Our jokes are mostly about being unhappy
And these days we sing of sadness in fables.
Kafka’s rat is running in circles with corners
Strange, says he, these walls are closing in
And he is at the center of concentric circles,
Strange shapes of circles with four corners.
The world had been big and afraid and running
And then quickly the walls started closing in
And he started dying little by little as a joke.
You have to change the direction, says the cat
One gets his point only after getting eaten up.
(Referring to A Little Fable by Frantz Kafka)
102

112. 103

113. The chain of being
January 18, 2011
At this time I wait for the big word,
Rather for the bird of the deep night.
It is this damn structure that prevents
It’s landing on the waste of the night.
But it is now already moving on and out
Of the limiting structure of beginning.
The grasses wait in their levels of being
As trees, animals and lesser creatures
I wait in my assigned place in the chain
Patiently to ascend to my higher plane.
A confusing woman is in the forum
Waiting for twenty years to ascend.
In her confusion are epiphanies hid-
Dark mystery insights of the midnight
When her birds land as mere words.
In my human anxiety I truly want to be
Deeply vegetarian with no sharp blades
Thrust against my sleeping conscience
Into the vitals of a fellow living being
Yet this is what I did, this night’s dream
That left me wondering about sinning
If I kill in dream, will I go to a lower hell,
Stopping my ascent up the being chain?
104

114. Epiphanies
January 17, 2011
There is utter helplessness about the world
The existing built world when I keep saying
Pch , pch, not much can be done ,you know,
My life is too short under the present sky;
There are other skies, other spaces of times.
My buildings shoot up steadily into a blue sky
But my clothes hang in the holes of balconies
Their wet drops fall into masses of passers-by.
Our epiphanies occur mostly in the fine gaps
Between the existing built world and this ‘me’
If only they would allow me to build it anew.
Thinking means wondering if can get the hell
105

115. Out of these various hell-holes I have built;
The holes can only be expanded, not blown away.
Ha, ha, I now chuckle at the warm thought
Of blowing away all my holes, one by one.
It is a nice thought to blow away all the holes.
But there is a bigger hole in this midnight logic
Because I cannot live under this open space.
I am deeply afraid in the hole of my inner space
And I need a five feet five canvas tent of a hole
Between my frame and the glimmering stars.
106

116. The little dark one
January 16, 2011
At two this midnight the little dark one
Became a poem, her all-knowing smile
The first stanza and her baby bird- glance
Became the next one as she pranced there
On the floor up and down like pendulum
Swinging in the free air, a full fall of force,
A pout of sarcasm from tiny baby lips.
I at midnight wanted to round it off
With a cool third stanza, of epigram
A last line well said, to the deep night.
But she wouldn’t let me, the little one
That squirmed in my hands like a worm
Full of bones that pushed against mine
In my withered palms and finger bones.
It is life which pushed against my death.
As the night creeps I once again go into
My epigrammatic mode of the old poet
With the bally irony thing barely broached.
The curl on my lips that briefly occurred
Vanished without trace in my confusion
As my eye followed her moving in circles.
I thought I had seen the curl on her lips.
107

117. Bored poet
January 16, 2011
The bored poet is not a sleep-deprived poet
But a wanting- to- create poet with the leaves
Yet to fall, and the golden autumn yet to arrive.
A yawn or two at midnight is not pillow-sleep
When warm musk thoughts steal from behind.
Actually they have been there under the ground
Waiting for the first rains to bring them to life
A summer breeze from the warm mountains
Will surely quicken them in those fluffy clouds
To bring to the dust to sprout light and green.
The poet loses his amber sleep in the afternoon
Figuring out when autumn ends, spring begins.
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118. Poems of the night
January 13, 2011
These poems appear at midnight with the shouts
Of fearsome Alsatians with their echoing barks,
That emerge daily ,from lonely houses on the hills
Living behind electrified fences of sleazy money.
The barks come from their dark cavernous mouths
Of soft sorrow, born inside, of gratitude and love.
The poems come from the sleeping mouths of fury
From where emerges the silence of a sleeping city
Whose tautness will break at the first crack of dawn.
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119. Pilgrimage
January 12, 2011
Mother, what is now cooking, in your home?
That once smelled of onion roast and fried potatoes?
Where is the food you promised us the last time?
You now talk of long distance yellow pilgrim buses
Those will take you to the pristine hills of snow
And the pearl-white temples nestling in them.
The holy beads become weighty on your frail chest;
Their mountain smells are truly overpowering.
Up there shimmers a silver lake of frozen ice
And pretty swans gracefully float as in a dream.
There under the looming shadow of a white rock
Sits your three-eyed god who will dance destruction,
When he will open his eyes from his deep thoughts.
Mother, will you then cook lentils and rice for him?
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120. Cold
January 10, 2011
Here, in the cold of the nose you are transmogrified:
To become a little tranquil, like the sea in the morning
With a hidden possibility of rise to the moon at mid- night.
The white surf is quiet, lacking evening ‘s orange passion.
The hum in the ears is but an imitation of the dark night.
But the sounds come to you like morning beach crows
Landing on their whooshing feet near the gentle waves
Looming largely as though they only exist in this world
And none other, on the sand-earth or in the sea-air.
For example we ignore the existence of jumping fish
Or crawling snails in the wet sand in and around holes.
Or plastic fishnets in knotted heaps of red and blue
Or strange old women selling sea-shells of rarest hue.
Here these pills enter the swelling sea of my blood
Trying to negative the existence of those tiny creatures
That feverishly ride their red waves in gusto, up and down.
The sea is everywhere around our dear earth and in us.
Its hum is persistent, breaking only when bigger sounds
Land on the shores of our tranquillity like beach crows.
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121. Trembling
January 09, 2011
First of all I don’t believe I tremble
At the thought of the dark night to come.
My feet do not quake but shuffle in walk.
There is sweat on brow and fear in my eyes.
I don’t believe my trembling unbelief.
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122. Pain
January 08, 2011
When we were being borne our idea began.
Our limbs slowly formed making us a tadpole,
Then a blind creature swimming in the aqua.
Our idea is just once, living in the present
Like the carriage wheel touching the earth
Only once in a brief vertiginous movement.
Those limbs we grew have to go in the end.
The gills shall disappear as vestiges of then.
Somewhere in the middle we grew some flesh
As succor for new life, new love and beauty.
But we remained just an idea, a brief moment
A fleeting moment when beauty shall pass.
All that will remain is mere flesh and its pain.
“Strictly speaking, the life of a being lasts as long as an idea.
Just as a rolling carriage wheel touches earth at only one point,
so life lasts as long as a single idea”
(Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy I, 373).
(re-blogged from The Floating Library)
(Hearing of the discovery of breast cancer of a friend’s wife)
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123. Houses
January 07, 2011
Houses we think of, in sun and rain-
Those houses which live, cheek by jowl,
With maternal mango trees of summer.
Their shadows paint their white canvas.
In monsoon the houses are painted green
In delicate taffeta of luminous moss.
The squirrels climb the tree looking
Curiously into your bedroom window.
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124. Height
January 05, 2011
When your face is situated quite high
You look naturally down on the world
Because that is where your eyes are and where
Dramas are staged before sequined curtains.
When you lie down on the ground with your eyes
On the infinity of the dark promontory
You see tiny fish-worms swimming behind them
As if they were swimming in your own blood.
It is these swimming creatures that will do you in.
You remember, you were once one of them.
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125. Old age
January 03, 2011
Funny how we all begin in our old age.
First we ignore it and then are afraid.
The pain down there reduces us merely.
Fairly farcical, our faces have lost all
Their humanity, angelic glow, at a time.
These our pills are tiny white universes.
They vanish darkly in that vast chaos.
We laugh deeply in hollow inwardness-
A toothless attempt at biting sarcasm
Whenever the phone does not truly ring
But becomes a mere ringing possibility
Uncomfortably vibrant for an old pocket.
There is now not even pain there below
But a dull ache in the lower mind and back.
All our hellos trail off in the blue winter sky.
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126. Celebrating the New Year (2011)
January 01, 2011
Poetize we said, whatever prose there is.
At twelve new night, little boy and girl jig
In bleary-eyed parental compulsion, proud.
They keep up with Joneses on cup and cake
As wine sparkles between uncles and aunts.
Our little cherub dances his steps so cutely,
We are proud of him in his English school.
But there is tension everywhere, tension
On the wall, elephants get up and charge
With their tails tucked in their taut behinds
And a poet appears from cloud and rain-
Wet behind the ears, the poet who forgets
To wear iambic pentameter in his under.
Poetize, we said this morning to the tree
In the hills where village women trudge
To work, with many-storied meal boxes.
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