Poems written in 2013

Contents page16.1 January . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 1.1.1 page17The mind of winter (2013-01-05 04:10) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 1.1.2 page18Everything and no one (2013-01-05 04:15) . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 1.1.3 page19Flowers for worship (2013-01-05 04:21) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 1.1.4 page20Lonely (2013-01-05 04:24) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 1.1.5 page21Riffling (2013-01-07 01:03) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 1.1.6 page22Love (2013-01-07 23:28) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 1.1.7 page23Birthday (2013-01-10 01:27) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 1.1.8 page24Radio (2013-01-10 01:29) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 1.1.9 page25The color of ruins (2013-01-11 00:09) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 1.1.1

0 page26Idle (2013-01-11 23:43) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

1.1.1

1

page27The van (2013-01-12 23:12) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

1.1.12

page28Concentration (2013-01-15 15:43) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

1.1.13

page29Anger in a car (2013-01-15 23:50) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

1.1.1 page30Gods in mountains (2013-01-17 01:17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

4 1.1.1

5 page31Oblivion (2013-01-17 23:39) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

1.1.16

page32Giggles (2013-01-18 23:07) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

1.1.17

page33Visions (2013-01-19 23:26) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

1.1.18

page34Curvature (2013-01-20 22:11) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

1.1.19

page35Chimes (2013-01-22 00:43) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

1.1.20

page36The banyan (2013-01-23 02:20) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

1.1.21

page37Beethoven is a dog (2013-01-24 00:16) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

1.1.22

page38Choice (2013-01-25 00:16) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

1.1.23

page39Sand (2013-01-26 00:28) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

1.1.24

page40Cashew fruit (2013-01-27 08:24) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

1.1.25

page41Smoke (2013-01-28 00:33) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

1.1.26

page42Stopping thoughts (2013-01-29 00:07) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

.1.27 page43Panic (2013-01-30 03:21) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 1.1.2

8 page44The deaf crow (2013-01-31 01:32) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

1.2 page45February . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 1.2.1 page46Lemons (2013-02-01 02:49) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 1.2.2 page47Grandmother’s grandmother (2013-02-02 00:21) . . . . . . . . 47

1.2.3 page48Humble bees (2013-02-03 01:31) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 1.2.4 page49Map (2013-02-04 00:57) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 1.2.5 page50Contrails (2013-02-05 02:52) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 1.2.6 page51Thumbnail (2013-02-06 01:12) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 1.2.7 page52Story telling (2013-02-07 00:06) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 1.2.8 page53For ever (2013-02-08 01:13) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 1.2.9 page54Plates (2013-02-08 23:20) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 1.2.1

0 page55Borra caves (2013-02-12 23:48) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

1.2.11

page56Sea rocks (2013-02-13 01:13) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

1.2.12

page57The tortoise and the sun (2013-02-13 23:22) . . . . . . . . . . 57

1.2.13

page58Waiting (2013-02-19 06:44) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

1.2.14

page59The sea rose like a wall (2013-02-19 06:48) . . . . . . . . . . . 59

1.2.15

page60Fiction (2013-02-20 01:59) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

1.2.16

page61Temporary (2013-02-21 00:05) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

1.2.17

page62Brittle (2013-02-22 02:34) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

1.2.18

page63Mystery (2013-02-24 05:20) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

1.2.19

page64Life of a Pi (2013-02-24 05:32) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

1.2.20

page65Distance (2013-02-25 01:13) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

1.2.21

page66Weather (2013-02-25 22:56) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

1.2.22

page67Poetry of memory (2013-02-27 01:14) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

1.2.23

page68Tears (2013-02-28 01:02) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

1.3 March . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 1.3.1 page70Compose (2013-03-01 02:05) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

1.3.2 page71Flecks (2013-03-01 23:03) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 1.3.3 page72Abstract (2013-03-03 01:12) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 1.3.4 page73Contorted (2013-03-03 23:59) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 1.3.5 page74March (2013-03-04 23:50) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 1.3.6 page75Dropping a song (2013-03-06 00:48) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 1.3.7 page76Genius (2013-03-06 23:08) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 1.3.8 page77Ruminations (2013-03-08 00:03) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 1.3.9 page78Spring (2013-03-09 02:09) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

CONTENTS BlogBook

1.3.10 page79Decay (2013-03-10 00:39) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 1.3.11 page80Bodkin (2013-03-11 00:52) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 1.3.12 page81The living room (2013-03-11 23:55) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 1.3.13 page82Placebo (2013-03-12 23:23) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 1.3.14 page83I saw (2013-03-14 03:02) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 1.3.15 page84Unrolling the car window (2013-03-14 23:09) . . . . . . . . . . 84 1.3.16 page85Vertical (2013-03-15 21:31) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

1.3.17 page86Variations (2013-03-16 22:35) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 1.3.18 page87The illusion (2013-03-17 22:30) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 1.3.19 page88Headstone (2013-03-18 21:38) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 1.3.20 page89Amulet (2013-03-19 22:48) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 1.3.21 page90Renunciation (2013-03-20 23:55) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 1.3.22 page91Plaster of Paris (2013-03-21 22:59) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 1.3.23 page92Denial (2013-03-23 02:23) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 1.3.24 page93Nail (2013-03-24 00:25) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 1.3.25 page94Danger (2013-03-25 00:56) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

1.3.26 page95Mortal (2013-03-26 01:00) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 1.3.27 page96Word and melody (2013-03-27 00:15) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 1.3.28 page97Marriage (2013-03-27 23:47) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 1.3.29 page98Connecting dots (2013-03-28 22:58) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 1.3.30 page99Beauty (2013-03-30 03:02) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 1.3.31 page100Slate (2013-03-30 23:15) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 1.3.32 page101Cliche (2013-03-31 22:50) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

page1021.4 April . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 1.4.1 page103Home (2013-04-02 00:17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 1.4.2 page104Weather (2013-04-03 02:24) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 1.4.3 page105Memes (2013-04-03 23:41) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 1.4.4 page106Monologues (2013-04-04 23:54) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 1.4.5 page107Disbelief (2013-04-06 00:15) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 1.4.6 page108Metaphors (2013-04-06 21:51) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 1.4.7 page109Free will, my foot (2013-04-07 22:32) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 1.4.8 page110Slide-show (2013-04-09 00:18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 1.4.9 page111Images (2013-04-09 22:34) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 1.4.10 page112Symmetry (2013-04-11 01:55) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 1.4.11 page113Residue (2013-04-11 22:44) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 1.4.12 page114Zebras (2013-04-13 00:02) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

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BlogBook CONTENTS

1.4.13 page115Apprehensions (2013-04-13 21:53) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 1.4.14 page116Notions (2013-04-14 23:03) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 1.4.15 page117Attention (2013-04-16 00:45) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 1.4.16 page118Revenge (2013-04-17 00:30) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

1.4.17 page119Random (2013-04-18 00:16) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 1.4.18 page120Joint and several worlds (2013-04-19 02:47) . . . . . . . . . . 120 1.4.19 page121Not knowing (2013-04-21 00:04) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 1.4.20 page122Uproar (2013-04-21 00:20) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 1.4.21 page123Spring rain (2013-04-21 22:06) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 1.4.22 page124The messenger (2013-04-22 23:28) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 1.4.23 page125The ritual (2013-04-24 00:01) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 1.4.24 page126The sentence (2013-04-25 00:13) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 1.4.25 page127Almost said (2013-04-25 23:53) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 1.4.26 page128Going loose (2013-04-26 21:32) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 1.4.27 page129Returning gifts (2013-04-27 22:34) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 1.4.28 page130Metaphors (2013-04-28 23:30) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 1.4.29 page131Unusual (2013-04-29 23:59) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 1.4.30 page132The Gir lion (2013-04-30 23:47) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

page1331.5 May .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

1.5.1 page134The page (2013-05-01 22:51) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 1.5.2 page135The grandchild’s marriage (2013-05-02 22:34) . . . . . . . . . 135 1.5.3 page136Mere (2013-05-03 23:29) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 1.5.4 page137The pigeons (2013-05-05 00:18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 1.5.5 page138Space (2013-05-05 23:23) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 1.5.6 page139The daily routine (2013-05-07 02:35) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 1.5.7 page140Ekphrasis- a quarry in ruins (2013-05-08 00:20) . . . . . . . . 140 1.5.8 page141Paper flower (2013-05-08 23:48) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 1.5.9 page142The music of flowers (2013-05-09 23:04) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 1.5.10 page143Pure View (2013-05-10 22:17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 1.5.11 page144Mother’s day (2013-05-11 22:28) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 1.5.12 page145Culture in dust (2013-05-12 23:18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 1.5.13 page146Balance (2013-05-13 22:51) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 1.5.14 page147And you (2013-05-14 23:20) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 1.5.15 page148Frame (2013-05-15 22:40) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 1.5.16 page149Water (2013-05-16 23:01) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 1.5.17 page150Faith (2013-05-17 23:45) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

CONTENTS BlogBook

1.5.18 page151Interior (2013-05-18 22:31) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 1.5.19 page152Fairy tales (2013-05-19 22:22) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 1.5.20 page153Breeze (2013-05-20 21:22) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 1.5.21 page154The broken world (2013-05-21 22:25) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 1.5.22 page155Sleep in a train (2013-05-22 22:26) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 1.5.23 page156Absurd (2013-05-24 00:09) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 1.5.24 page157Bones (2013-05-24 23:05) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 1.5.25 page158The library (2013-05-25 23:13) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 1.5.26 page159Bokeh (2013-05-26 23:52) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 1.5.27 page160Chain (2013-05-28 00:32) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 1.5.28 page161Tea (2013-05-28 22:33) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 1.5.29 page162Full (2013-05-29 21:25) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 1.5.30 page163Waterfall (2013-05-30 22:52) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 1.5.31 page164Grass lily (2013-05-31 20:54) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

1.6 June . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 1.6.1 page166Derelict (2013-06-02 00:02) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 1.6.2 page167The driver’s mustache (2013-06-03 00:32) . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 1.6.3 page168The reluctant old man (2013-06-04 00:57) . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 1.6.4 page169Phone gossip (2013-06-04 22:47) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 1.6.5 page170Enema (2013-06-05 23:16) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 1.6.6 page171Unread (2013-06-06 22:21) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

1.6.7 page172Conversation (2013-06-07 22:31) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 1.6.8 page173Voice (2013-06-09 01:17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 1.6.9 page174The silver mountain (2013-06-09 23:56) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 1.6.10 page175Password (2013-06-10 23:40) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 1.6.11 page176The hibiscus (2013-06-11 22:58) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 1.6.12 page177Closure (2013-06-12 22:35) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 1.6.13 page178Cats in the clouds (2013-06-13 22:56) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 1.6.14 page179The wild elephant (2013-06-15 01:11) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 1.6.15 page180Inchoate (2013-06-15 22:08) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 1.6.16 page181Smile (2013-06-17 00:04) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 1.6.17 page182Lines (2013-06-18 00:34) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 1.6.18 page183Own (2013-06-19 00:06) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 1.6.19 page184Agape (2013-06-20 01:01) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 1.6.20 page185Sleep (2013-06-20 21:52) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 1.6.21 page186Well being (2013-06-21 21:29) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186

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BlogBook CONTENTS

1.6.22 page187The jungle flower (2013-06-22 23:02) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 1.6.23 page188The super-moon (2013-06-23 23:48) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 1.6.24 page189Stages (2013-06-24 23:38) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 1.6.25 page190The god of the hills (2013-06-25 22:34) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 1.6.26 page191White clouds (2013-06-26 22:57) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 1.6.27 page192Money (2013-06-27 22:29) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 1.6.28 page193Scraping the night (2013-06-28 23:39) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 1.6.29 page194Who is this hooded man? (2013-06-30 01:07) . . . . . . . . . . 194

page1951.7 July .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

1.7.1 page196Walking down the Himalayas (2013-07-01 00:12) . . . . . . . . 196 1.7.2 page197Dance (2013-07-02 02:00) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 1.7.3 page198Hard rain (2013-07-02 22:36) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 1.7.4 page199Rooms (2013-07-03 21:15) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 1.7.5 page200Phone booth (2013-07-05 02:51) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200 1.7.6 page201Cigarettes and poems (2013-07-06 13:20) . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 1.7.7 page202Emptied (2013-07-07 02:59) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 1.7.8 page203Old inkstain (2013-07-08 00:33) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 1.7.9 page204Marriages (2013-07-09 02:21) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 1.7.10 page205Shelter (2013-07-10 01:30) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 1.7.11 page206Torque (2013-07-10 23:08) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 1.7.12 page207Petal (2013-07-11 23:37) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 1.7.13 page208Wild tune (2013-07-13 00:06) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208 1.7.14 page209Gold (2013-07-14 00:13) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 1.7.15 page210Pebbles (2013-07-15 00:02) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 1.7.16 page211Wrinkles (2013-07-15 23:09) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 1.7.17 page212Asymptote (2013-07-17 00:43) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 1.7.18 page213Grain (2013-07-18 00:47) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 1.7.19 page214Nap (2013-07-19 00:11) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214 1.7.20 page215Ironing (2013-07-20 03:09) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

1.7.21 page216Stench (2013-07-21 00:00) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 1.7.22 page217Worms (2013-07-21 23:32) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 1.7.23 page218Shy (2013-07-23 02:09) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 1.7.24 page219Hole (2013-07-23 23:53) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 1.7.25 page220Murmur (2013-07-26 00:22) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 1.7.26 page221The butterfly moment (2013-07-27 02:36) . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 1.7.27 page222Some times (2013-07-27 23:27) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222

CONTENTS BlogBook

1.7.28 page223Sun’s own day (2013-07-29 03:12) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 1.7.29 page224The duet (2013-07-29 22:25) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224 1.7.30 page225Attic (2013-07-31 00:23) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

1.7.31 page226Sleeping birds (2013-07-31 22:53) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 page2271.8 August . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

1.8.1 page228Upstairs (2013-08-01 23:54) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 1.8.2 page229Wait (2013-08-03 00:07) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 1.8.3 page230Voices (2013-08-04 00:33) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 1.8.4 page231Grains (2013-08-04 23:18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 1.8.5 page232Vanitas Vanitatum (2013-08-06 01:10) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 1.8.6 page233Nausea (2013-08-07 00:41) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 1.8.7 page234Kept (2013-08-08 02:26) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 1.8.8 page235Speech balloons (2013-08-09 01:01) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 1.8.9 page236Rock (2013-08-09 22:51) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 1.8.10 page237Distraction (2013-08-10 23:29) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 1.8.11 page238The village doctor (2013-08-11 23:18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 1.8.12 page239Finding out (2013-08-12 23:54) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 1.8.13 page240Baggage (2013-08-13 23:28) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240

1.8.14 page241Anti-poem (2013-08-14 21:20) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 1.8.15 page242Poem think (2013-08-15 23:25) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 1.8.16 page243Echoes (2013-08-16 23:04) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 1.8.17 page244Spectacle (2013-08-18 02:22) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 1.8.18 page245Song (2013-08-19 00:23) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 1.8.19 page246Building spaces (2013-08-19 23:10) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246 1.8.20 page247Contradict (2013-08-20 22:17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 1.8.21 page248Crabs (2013-08-22 00:34) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248 1.8.22 page249Frame of reference (2013-08-22 22:40) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 1.8.23 page250Lineaments (2013-08-23 23:07) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250 1.8.24 page251Vulgar (2013-08-24 23:11) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 1.8.25 page252Ruins (2013-08-26 00:17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 1.8.26 page253Conversation (2013-08-27 00:39) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 1.8.27 page254Synonyms (2013-08-28 00:30) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 1.8.28 page255Solitude (2013-08-29 00:01) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 1.8.29 page256Conjunctions (2013-08-29 23:26) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 1.8.30 page257Walking on air (2013-08-31 00:17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 1.8.31 page258Plank (2013-08-31 23:07) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258

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page259.9 September . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

1.9.1 page260Noise (2013-09-02 00:44) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260 1.9.2 page261The shaman (2013-09-02 23:23) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 1.9.3 page262Waking in sleep (2013-09-03 22:35) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262 1.9.4 page263Wet place (2013-09-05 00:56) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 1.9.5 page264Berry picking (2013-09-05 22:21) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 1.9.6 page265Looking out the window (2013-09-07 00:10) . . . . . . . . . . . 265 1.9.7 page266Ladder (2013-09-07 23:19) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 1.9.8 page267Storm (2013-09-09 00:04) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 1.9.9 page268Word spaces (2013-09-10 01:02) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268 1.9.10 page269Fail (2013-09-11 00:39) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 1.9.11 page270Raw material (2013-09-12 00:33) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 1.9.12 page271Specious (2013-09-12 23:24) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 1.9.13 page272Bus jack (2013-09-14 01:54) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272 1.9.14 page273Jacket (2013-09-14 23:56) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 1.9.15 page274Circling (2013-09-16 01:11) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274 1.9.16 page275Savor (2013-09-17 00:36) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 1.9.17 page276Onion (2013-09-18 00:25) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276 1.9.18 page277Shades of gray (2013-09-18 23:51) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 1.9.19 page278Regret (2013-09-19 23:33) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278 1.9.20 page279Pain (2013-09-20 23:09) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 1.9.21 page280Rain in September (2013-09-22 01:18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280 1.9.22 page281Smorgasbord (2013-09-22 23:51) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 1.9.23 page282Island (2013-09-24 00:47) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282 1.9.24 page283Non Sequitur (2013-09-24 23:43) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283 1.9.25 page284Decay (2013-09-26 00:39) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284 1.9.26 page285Hollow (2013-09-27 00:02) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 1.9.27 page286Missing the bus (2013-09-28 00:29) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286 1.9.28 page287Referent (2013-09-29 00:16) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 1.9.29 page288Publishing poetry (2013-09-30 03:03) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 1.9.30 page289Tart (2013-09-30 23:17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289

page2901.10October . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290 1.10.1 page291Framed (2013-10-01 23:20) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 1.10.2 page292Black (2013-10-03 02:22) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292 1.10.3 page293Entropy (2013-10-03 22:28) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

1.10.4 page294Discovering (2013-10-04 23:59) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294

CONTENTS BlogBook

1.10.5 page295Decision (2013-10-06 02:23) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 1.10.6 page296Palimpsest (2013-10-06 23:14) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 1.10.7 page297Unleaving (2013-10-07 23:26) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 1.10.8 page298Curtains (2013-10-08 22:44) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298 1.10.9 page299Quiet (2013-10-09 21:36) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 1.10.10 page300Letter of intent (2013-10-10 23:40) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300 1.10.11 page301The blue pencil (2013-10-11 22:00) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 1.10.12 page302Running (2013-10-12 23:58) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302 1.10.13 page303Point the pointless (2013-10-13 23:58) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 1.10.14 page304Vague (2013-10-14 23:20) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 1.10.15 page305Say it from happening (2013-10-16 00:44) . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 1.10.16 page306Fear of death (2013-10-17 00:45) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 1.10.17 page307Regret (2013-10-17 22:32) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 1.10.18 page308Eclipse (2013-10-18 22:58) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 1.10.19 page309Dirge (2013-10-19 23:15) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 1.10.20 page310In media res (2013-10-20 22:35) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310 1.10.21 page311Wing (2013-10-21 23:23) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311 1.10.22 page312Meaning (2013-10-22 22:30) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312 1.10.23 page313Thingness (2013-10-24 05:56) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 1.10.24 page314Silk of fish (2013-10-24 21:36) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314 1.10.25 page315Insect (2013-10-26 00:15) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315 1.10.26 page316Thread (2013-10-26 23:45) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316 1.10.27 page317The beat poet (2013-10-27 23:18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 1.10.28 page318Fail (2013-10-28 23:27) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318

1.10.29 page319Rear view (2013-10-29 22:46) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 page3201.10.30 Semicolon; (2013-10-30 21:59) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320 page3211.11November . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

1.11.1 page322Calling back (2013-11-01 00:07) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322 1.11.2 page323No images were found (2013-11-01 21:49) . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 1.11.3 page324Detour (2013-11-03 00:11) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324 1.11.4 page325City (2013-11-04 01:35) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 1.11.5 page326At the top (2013-11-05 02:01) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326 1.11.6 page327Passport (2013-11-06 03:30) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 1.11.7 page328Desert (2013-11-07 03:38) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328 1.11.8 page329Fiction (2013-11-08 02:28) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329 1.11.9 page330The (2013-11-09 02:36) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330

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1.11.10 page331Love in grave (2013-11-10 01:23) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 1.11.11 page332Before I die (2013-11-10 23:01) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332 1.11.12 page333Boat (2013-11-11 22:16) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333 1.11.13 page334City in art (2013-11-12 23:43) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334 1.11.14 page335Armful (2013-11-13 22:15) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 1.11.15 page336Fake (2013-11-14 22:53) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336 1.11.16 page337Rubbish (2013-11-15 22:27) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337 1.11.17 page338Matchbox (2013-11-17 00:02) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338 1.11.18 page339Wink (2013-11-17 23:41) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 1.11.19 page340Words not written down (2013-11-18 22:41) . . . . . . . . . . . 340 1.11.20 page341Cloud (2013-11-19 23:36) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 1.11.21 page342Selfie (2013-11-20 23:18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342

1.11.22 page343Hear (2013-11-21 23:53) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 1.11.23 page344Melancholy (2013-11-22 23:09) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344 1.11.24 page345Percentage (2013-11-23 22:25) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345 1.11.25 page346Bird by bird (2013-11-24 23:24) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346 1.11.26 page347Full and final (2013-11-25 23:07) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 1.11.27 page348Poem Hope (2013-11-27 00:57) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348 1.11.28 page349Blue (2013-11-27 23:14) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349 1.11.29 page350wood pecker (2013-11-28 23:52) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350

page3511.11.30 Weather (2013-11-29 23:54) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 page3521.12December . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352

1.12.1 page353Whirl (2013-12-01 00:17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353 1.12.2 page354Self love (2013-12-02 01:19) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354 1.12.3 page355Things (2013-12-03 00:15) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355 1.12.4 page356Ladder (2013-12-04 03:03) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356 1.12.5 page357Moment (2013-12-04 22:25) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 1.12.6 page358Tyranny (2013-12-05 23:56) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358 1.12.7 page359Ceremony (2013-12-07 00:19) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359 1.12.8 page360Sound and fury (2013-12-07 23:50) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360 1.12.9 page361Broom (2013-12-09 01:24) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 1.12.10 page362Barber (2013-12-09 23:49) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362 1.12.11 page363Walking the mind (2013-12-10 23:12) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363 1.12.12 page364Poemspace (2013-12-12 00:14) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364 1.12.13 page365Landscape (2013-12-13 01:12) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365 1.12.14 page366Branches (2013-12-14 00:32) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366

CONTENTS

page3671.12.15 Traffic (2013-12-15 01:08) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367 page3681.12.16 Machine (2013-12-15 23:22) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368

page3691.12.17 Clouds (2013-12-16 23:59) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369 page3701.12.18 Bricks (2013-12-18 00:47) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 370 page3711.12.19 Less sugar (2013-12-19 01:39) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371 page3721.12.20 Trapped (2013-12-20 01:21) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 372 page3731.12.21 World (2013-12-21 01:07) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373 page3741.12.22 Mirrors (2013-12-22 01:49) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374 page3751.12.23 grammar (2013-12-23 00:00) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375 page3761.12.24 Meaning (2013-12-24 01:52) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376 page3771.12.25 Gloom (2013-12-25 00:17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377 page3781.12.26 Forgottenness (2013-12-26 00:41) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378 The mind of winter Sure one has to acquire the mind of winter

Before one is born and raised ,in the snow

Among gnarled trees encrusted with snow.

Raised is a continuous snow falling process

Where whiteness falls deader and deader,

When we are born in the snow of old Santa

A wispy beard caught in wisecrack flakes .

We are now sufficiently winter in beards.

We are awaiting the gray gnarl of its trees. In the

meantime we listen for the sound

Of the land which is the same wind as ever.

We have been cold all these days ,you see.

(taking off on The snowman by Wallace Stevens) Everything and no one I dream of a blind poet ’s everything and no one The tiger that burnt vividly new year after new Everything , no one in particular, not just blind To the unreal library of other men’s unreal lives Asking God if transience is real or hallucination. You have got to be slightly daft to be the poet, It is others who are daft without being poets. Yet you are not you , in needless stratagems, Afraid to turn a pair of stiff feet jutting out Of thin white sheets, under yellow marigolds. The transience is unreal in library, floor to roof. (taking off on J.L.Borges Dreamtigers)

Flowers for worship Flowers are not art but science of beauty Where they sit softly on walled pictures. Here they are not taken apart but add up To the canvas of beauty in soft fragrance With a camphor flame raising its dancing Hands on the glass covering gods frames. In a taken apart they are flung at pictures, Their beauty adds up to the walled pictures Of gods standing shirtless, bow and arrow Their necks stiff with old painted flowers That will not wilt nor smell less in beauty. Flung flowers will make up our mountains Rising in a glass casket as in the snow hills Where a three-eyed God gently meditates.

Lonely Others not being grows on us like Dust forming in time lapse of a fan Stirring through months of hot air And whirring to gather noise in dust. The fan collects most of a monsoon In loneliness of whirring for nobody. Loneliness grows on park benches That are as lonely as fans whirring For nobody, with the bums away in Hotel rooms clutching their heads . Bums gather moss of lonely rooms As they do not roll in dusty streets And other bums have other rooms.

Riffling

Riffling through pictures ,as of yesterday We have made our overdue poem of today The pictures are long and signing in dust From an old attic, with some lively ghosts As the wind chimes keep singing somberly On a morning silence minus a train blare. The pictures are sometimes unreal images Of men ,children wading in dream waters Their trousers rolled up to their wet knees Men are children confused between states Sleeps alternating between night and flood.

And pictures are real of women climbing The attic for long overdue green pickles And the dream stops in confused states Of men and children, in mixed up states. The women are yet to pick up their wet White widowed cloths from the wall peg. The pictures are real in children and men In confused states ,in snakes and planes When the latter fall on the falling former In Freudian sleep mixed with nose cold.

Love

Love never took the wind out of your sails

On the seascape but in the fight with waves.

It seemed like the phone wires up and down

Through a milk bird in running train’s eyes.

Your eyes are full of teary love, wet of regrets

But with a click in throat enjoying every bit

And the salt of it is fine on a lolling tongue.

Love dangerously leans on the sleeping bed

And would peep behind your wooden pillar ,

A presence registered for your own peeping

Behind the wooden pillar rounded by dance.

Love is the phone wires going up and down

A bit of peeping behind well rounded pillars. Birthday

We are primarily tuned to the new birthday Of a child of long years,seeking its growth To a world of awareness, strings not pulled Horizons not yet explored, walls not climbed He that is inured to the loneliness of night.

The child’s own melancholy had returned Sweaty in fear and flight ,a panic in attack Years ago,when a grand ma of stories went Away casually to the outer darkness of fears And the mind went in search of a body lost. We now have our newer stories to recount. Our stories shall be without old melancholy With newer grand moms still in the making Their stories of new hopes yet formulating.

Radio Radio is a gift from our dead, no more playing But visually in the room of a memory’s corners Of a man who has since gone out of the system Like a radio made obsolete by retrievable music, He whose ancestors had belonged to snow hills But could not step in the hills of hatred and fight. O’Hara had his De Kooning with an orange bed And a radio to perform Prokiefieff of week ago. Bukowsky’s radio got flung on the roof playing In a woman’s back against a highly orange sun. Our radio plays from light to a tiny arrowhead. Radio is dead but it is still orange in our sunset.

The color of ruins

We fear that the color of ruins has changed

From green to yellow, in the eyes of woman

And later to pearl-white in a plastic opacity.

Our memory recall keeps changing the color.

We love our ruins in tact from the same time

In the same place , our own, woman our own

The woman we owned in man egos, money

And servants overhang, with a wash of linen

Now to be done by whir of a white machine.

Our servants are ruins, woman’s eyes ruins.

Woman is ruins of kids away in far islands,

Their shadows float in drawing room tubes.

Grand kids are shadows of a changing color,

From green of eyes to white of far off lands.

Colors change according to time of viewing. Idle

Some times idle, just a stone in the lake

You look to a humming bird and a moth

And the least letter of the word for work.

Words are humming birds of green pocket

With a heart beating just behind warmth.

Others’phrases are tiny palpitating moths

That die by the firelight of your old winter

Leaving heaps of fluorescent wings in gaps

Of doorways, in balconies that precipitate

To abrupt darkness of wordless mid nights.

We scoop up their fluorescence to pockets

But our work lies elsewhere, in other words

Beating warmly in our chest of furious work.

Our idleness is words working to warm light. The van Look the van is on the fringe of the river

Where water and bridge and sand meet

Taking ceremonial annual bath probably

Its driver sleeping on the steering wheel

Wonder what the van is thinking in bath

As we trudged up to it in sandy footsteps.

A man is passing by, our man, to touch

The waters in reverence, for purification.

He comes from hills holding a stomach

In good care under city doctor’s scalpel .

The van is not actually thinking in bath

But only synchronizing sleep with driver.

This man is walking up with a glass eye

Blinking to catch beauty in sleeping van

Against a sleeping river under its bridge.

The river is moody for this rainy season

But sleeps in restraint when ego swells

Less with no rain in the far mountains. Concentration The temple is beauty cast in flowers of dust A concentrated thought by chisel and spike And still beauty being explored by creatures Living for their death’s immortality benefits Where they lie in niches they project horror, A darkness of soul in bodies thought and lost. A man- lion -God lies concentrated in the stone A horror of a stomach pierced by a denied God In a stone pillar of a child’s love remonstrating A father’s egotistical demon ripe for his death A picture of God ’s anger, child’s beauty grasp A stony concentration, an exquisite stone child. A music of times lies concentrated in temple air An ether of gray skies lost to myth and history, The wind continues to blow music of transience. Death is neither here nor outside but in doorway.

(On a visit to the Ahobilam temple of Lord Narasimha, the man-lion God who slew

Hiranyakasipu the demon who refused to accept Vishnu as God)

Anger in a car He sneezes in anger as in common cold of nose

Sitting in a seat in the front of the car watching

Shadows on windshield moving like life events.

Anger gets better of him like cold of a red nose.

His rage is a sneeze, a seizure , innocent donkey

A last laughter being of others in the back of car.

Anger makes donkeys of us in the back of minds.

Gods in mountains The mountain’s tail had stirred a dark movement ,

Further down, where we went to see a phallus god .

Their torso lay here with a man-lion-God in a hole,

Who from anger fell in love with a mountain belle.

Their head slept in the dizzy heights where beauty

Had rested in fragrant camphor, red in sandalwood

Trees and heaven’s silky yellow flowers that waved

In our winter mornings of pilgrimage, with tea cries

Piercing a morning calm like early morning birds.

There we felt warm with tea in stomach, but cold

Under the skin with bones shivering in anticipation.

God would grant a moment’s sight of flowery smile

Among hairless men and women waving as flowers

In a warm sun flower bed, against a blue winter sky.

The mountains lay in torpor in the translucent sky

Their red tongues licked the warm cloudless sky.

We come to these mountains to meet our old Gods. Oblivion Heading towards oblivion the poet is a river

Flowing to the bay with not a stone to swirl

Around on the way, just a word in the night.

Pity he is not a mathematician with alphabet

Dividing finiteness by zero infinitely to horizon

And/or a hairy yogic torso stretched to roof

So he could view his birth event topsy-turvy

Beginning with a sky and ending with dust.

His words are going to end in a sky of birth.

Of course his words belong to others’oblivion

And his own non-existence point from where

He can view his sky clearly from holes of eyes.

Giggles As we gleaned the night, the words came out

As giggles from an isola , in just parenthesis,

Sometimes mistaken for the goggles of girls

With bare shoulders, watching from pavilion

Over popcorn popping , pomegranate seeds

Of scattered giggles, an act of ball’s running

Of eleven men with it on sweaty afternoons.

It may not be giggles for a man in two- light

And may have been just googled as giggles

In a supercilious maturity over giggling girls

With a long future history of devil-may-care

But with a tinge of pathos for eye-wetness,

In old eyes with light that may soon go out.

But words are no girlish giggles with goggles

Nor pony-tailed girls playing in the moon-light

But are serious business for poets in two-light

Caught in midnight wanderings of sickle cells

In a paper that may certify the end of all irony.

Visions Your postprandial visions come a little early

For poems to appear on the green landscape

In the leafy edges of summer’s bird-less sky.

You hallucinate a pail of water from a nearby

Sink-well with silver streams falling to crop

Like snakes of water flowing to earth’s music

And lie in stupor on a string cot under a tree.

That is when visions undulate in camel humps

Flowing in miasma in desert sands of wind

As if wind is water reverse-flowing to the sky.

The words then transform your wind to water.

In the midnight’s music the words transpose

The night with a desert of sands in miasma.

The visions turn thin poems as breaking light

Streams from tube, words reverse flowing

To the darkness , below your room’s balcony.

Curvature Curvature decides the degree of the soft fall

Of a chiffon saree on a night’s lower midriff

And its husky voice flowing from lower lips

Seemingly moving in sync with intimations

Of mortality, like the rustle of autumn leaves.

A poet sculptor disassembles the female lip

And makes it a lamp for sleeping bed room

With lights off for curvature to work smoothly.

She puts it on a light pedestal for public view.

But curvature disappears from the public view

As quickly as it has come ,like a lightning bolt.

Bodies undone seems to work better at night.

Their curvatures turn luminous on dark nights

As reduced to their essential component parts . Chimes

Four or more parallel bars strung by a thread In the balcony’s outer space ring in the wind Telling of its direction like the weather cock For sea ships, but mostly in a diluting night. The tinklers make night a thinner proposition. A flower creeper is the end-user of its directions Its own direction having literally gone haywire Over a steel wire , off the tangent, to the roof.

The creeper’s hands claw sky space in dance Touching the summer’s cement roof in its heat And burn its green in the greed of its ascent . It has not followed wind chimes for directions.

The chimes better be there when a brown bird Descends for future chick plans on the a.c. unit The bird must mind not to sit on it too heavily. But there is time for sky to turn wet for chicks.

The banyan

The banyan spreads dark hair on the muddy river And its red fruits are dropping on it like rain drops. Come to its folds to experience our sleep and death In an extorting sleep, interest for our light’s capital. The fruits mark time for periodic interest payments And interest shall cease only on the final redemption. In the meantime we sleep off our interest payments And each time ,hope that interest is not redemption.

(Schopenhaur’s famous financial metaphor in which he calls sleep little interest payments for the capital of

life we had borrowed at birth that will cease only on death,the final redemption) Beethoven is a dog Not in the movie, but in a poem and music He was the quintessential neighbor’s dog Whose barking barking barking in the oboe Played to a baton in Beethoven’s symphony. The poet is not luckily murderous with a gun He never keeps with him and is not missing . Point the gun not baton ,the dog will still bark Life’s symphony as if to Beethoven himself.

The dog might be Beethoven himself or poet Who hated dogs doing oboes for Beethoven But the orchestra went respectfully after him As closed windows brought music in poetry As a whisper in the poet’s murderous ears. The dog’s barking mixed life and art in poetry As a conspiratorial whisper in a closed room Its window holes letting in life to mix with art.

(Billy Collins’poem Another Reason Why I Do Not Keep A Gun .Also, Beethoven is a comedy film by that

name) Choice This here thing restricts choice by keeping Me committed to fulfilling of a white face In a space frame , as a spring pad for action All through the windy chimes of a dark night. I have no choice to come out of the frame. The sounds frame thoughts, the falling leaves. Much like a dog’s solo performance outside Beethoven’s music being performed in room But latter has no choice but take it as oboe. I am committed to this choice of white space For my morning filling , in the sound frames.

Luckily my freedom is curtailed and I can hear The sirens singing without running into rocks.

(Odysseus ties himself to the ship’s mast in order to hear the sirens’song without the temptation to steer

the ship to the rocks) Sand A day-hot sand had this cashew fruit dropped In it, half-eaten in the night by busy squirrels Who would make a ruckus climbing to get it. Beyond the river was this triangular mountain With a circular hole that had hid old time kings And monks who chanted ocher Buddha-peace. We now live cozily in the thatch remembering The cashew-fruits that lay in temptation’s way. Their taste is shriveled up on our sand bodies . Our knowledge is but a sensation , a sand fruit That cosied up to the beat of a summer sun.

We are waiting to bury our fruit in the sands. Cashew fruit This young woman could be part of my fiction, A daughter in law of my making , just a thought Arising from history of her mom’s wedded union Not approved by a family of society and uncles. Her dad is no turbaned folk hero of sand dunes Appearing through cashew trees laden with fruit. His temptation’s fruit has long since shriveled up Dried and lies fully buried under the river sand. She remains the union’s fruit , sweet and fragrant And her eyes shine in wet love and golden youth, A darling with a tiny finger to hold to world’s end. The daughter-in-law thing seems a piece of fiction.

Smoke The earth was then shaped like an oven That would let out smoke from her eyes The blue-gray smoke of love for her kids And for all of us in holiday knicker-pants Clustered around her for stories and nuts As the earth turned oven, the sun its fire.

In her kitchen she had the earth-stove With a fire licking the dark sky of iron pan. She roasted nuts on it for kid stomachs. The smoke from her logs climbed the wall And the thatch of the roof blackening it To the color of the pan that had the nuts Dancing in pain on it like black deeds.

Stopping thoughts The car seemed to drive as in a reality model By a dreaming creature ,turning on his pillow. The dreaming foot pressed a dysfunctional brake But the foot did not exist ,only the story teller A god story-teller , with a grand logic of design, Who thought no end of himself up to the sky. The dream earth had no sky of billions of stars But rules followed are exactly of the earth air. But why these partial rules of the reality model When it can dream a better model than reality Like cars with no brakes but stopping thoughts.

Panic As we had approached it we fell headlong Into its oncoming, fitful sweaty barrenness A blankness staring from our eyes, crazily

Tongue-tied like the evil man in a dark cloak With hell- hair on the ears, covering a sound. There was no option about music that came.

These were words in Charukesi of our God Who stretched end to end in the deepest sky. We stood breathless as his feet measured sky.

All the three worlds , under a palm umbrella One foot on our head and his wooden slippers Made no clicking difference to sweaty silence. Our panic held a bunch of iron keys in fists. Our breath went out of our body as the keys Opened inward sadness, a body held captive As he measured infinity starting from head.

The deaf crow We were raising kid eyes to the leaf spaces To glimpse its brownness in a sky of trees Tracing its presence to staccato mating calls. Its brown body seemed moving like leaves In the morning wind, touched by sun glints. All was soft brown music that froze tree time

Setting our boy time free, from home clocks. A morning eight of clock, stood obliterated By the deaf bird , with a song that stretched Luxuriously on our bodies, no schools barred. Its reddish little discs of eyes glowered at us Down to the earth where we stood on knees Calling down in fingers that pretended to fly. Actually we were trying to test how deaf it was. (The crow pheasant is a fascinating brown beauty of the crow species, called jemudu kaki the Deaf Crow

in Telugu) Lemons The girls walked past us with lemons In their spoons ,embedded in mouths With their eyeballs screwed on them Below pretty noses of glistening rings. As their skirts undulate over the knees The Lolitas with their lemons proving Infallible, in the little bowls of spoons Would march ahead , defeating despair By lemons that seemed good ,tasted sour But they could always make lemonade.

The moon is a big lemon for the poet Above the firs in the snow mountains. Well he has his own lemonade to make In the smaller hours of his wakefulness When they are no firs to host his moon. The lemons of girls are good enough For the poet’s lemonade, so infallible From bowls of spoons as they walked. At times the moon lemon would slip off Behind the waving firs in the snow hills.

Grandmother’s grandmother We remember her in a white cloth Over the head, covering a stubble Fifteen day old, from twenty year old Widowhood, a semi-wet cloth resting On the wall peg, honoring a husband Dead in opium, who had made kids On the night ,on this side of her bed. We have to remember grandmother’s Grandmother now over rice offerings On fires lit, to sacred chants calling The spirits of the dead hungry in the air. We remember her name in the smoke. We do not know her grandma’s name.

She must have had her own egg-head And a widow cloth over it to a husband Dead with opium, doing nothing except Make her many kids , on fecund nights. He might have had a good time beating Wife in the day , make her big by night And when he is weeping dead on the cot She too must have submitted her head To barber’s knives in his honor and hung A new cloth of widowhood on a wall peg.

Humble bees Missing humble bees mean cats on the prowl In bearded Darwin’s stretched out explanation It is that cats are fond not of bees but of mice. A woman there with bees in left leg poly-cast Has less to do of phone -selling and more with Less poems in ante-room of ageing darkness. We are humbled by bees ,in leg or elsewhere. At times we have them tingling in our sitting. They crawl our undersides, making us humble Because clovers live and die with humble bees With no implied moral of biblical humbleness.

On the dark nights we look up the sky to find Missing ancestors, so many of them crawling. We lose count and we are soon blood letting From our left foot of too many bees crawling As if they are the stars we have lost count of.

Map A fine warm line goes forward, in single track And then loops and turns us toward the sky As if the earth were sky with our footprints Missing and or erased willfully by the winds. We map country homes with electric poles And abandoned substations with bat-homes. We enter casuarina trees in their tall homes. Beyond them is a rise of the sea with no map, Only a dull ocean sound for our cartography. Canada is immigrant’s map of a maple leaf. In a coming back to our culture, a pipal leaf Has the leaf-end that kids rub in wet hands To make a surr sound in a squeal of delight. We map our empty space with the old pipal As reference ,the wind’s whoosh in its leaves A midnight refreshing of memory, when weak. We map our places with their unique sounds.

All places have to stay close to a railway track In their own interest, not to lose their identity. The train sounds are reference points in map. That way we run no risk of losing our address, As we are following our life’s line that goes on Endlessly on the mud track, when bush crickets Map our nights, by creaks addressed to stars.

Contrails We went outside ,so we kids could flap Our fingers at the contrails after jets That came smoothly flowing like water Under feet, surprising us behind trees. The birds took no notice nor their trees. They were not a pilot’s smoking trails And the sound seemed audibly missing Like the lagged sounds of the thunder And we would wait for it not to come Because there was no fun in the sound When there would be no light streaks. They were the trails of silent sky-jets That stretched like monkey god’s tails. They laid luminous paths and our eyes Shone with excitement in our finger nails Ready for a little white fluff to sky-drop To lodge behind them , like tiny pearls That would enter our fingers fluttering At flamingos flying here on yearly holiday From their frozen Siberian back homes.

Thumbnail We talk this and that of deaths Our common topic, over nights Prolonged from light and sound Of history’s ghosts, in fort ruins And deep hurts from crackpots And their furniture and lady talk. Old talk is our unbroken poems Not to be published to be read But left by themselves to brew And froth ,like wine in the cellar In a brown tingling from fingers. Labels speak as of stuffed birds. Some one you know is long gone Some one you don’t know will be Long gone, while talking to wife Passing his hand on bald head. He stares there in a face book Who went last year’s this time . His ghost is efficiently manned By sons behind his thumbnail. He now plays farm ville by sons And you may poke him gently So as not to hurt him too much In a rib cage with the bird gone.

Story telling We are concerned with your story telling About events, other goings on in place. They do not exist in a plane of their own. The figures are two-dimensional in mind, Hung by a thread ,triangularly to the wall.

Their eyes protrude from sockets and lips, The eyes , one to the north and the other Screwed to the western pillar, in a squint As if dislodging a sun ray from the skylight. In short they lack flesh and some bones. And they loom large like noon shadows, Dark and menacing, in the high afternoon.

They can scare the shit out of your eyeballs When you are not careful of their coming. They zoom past, on their soundless bikes And rip your alabaster necks from behind. Your gold will stop glittering for their highs And you will remember your grandmother. The insurance folks are not of much help.

For ever A sales girl giggles,as she hands in A wedding anniversary’s gilded card. You have a lot to giggle about, lady, Says the undersigned with a card to buy For uncle, who lives at the beginning Of eastern hills, with their cavernous Wombs of silences in lime and stone, And awaits daily sun sets to the last. Giggles stay behind wish cards folded In two, their floral sounds entering souls In a calligraphy’s long flowing strokes. No,these are not for sun-setting uncles But for golden springs of puppy love. Girl’s laugh shines wet on mouse lips. Wishing them a happy anniversary,sir As in all these years ,together for ever. Sunsets in the eastern hills are for ever.

Plates The world is in flux and earth’s plates are shifting Without the Gonds who still dance their dimsa Undisturbed by the rushing waters of earth dams. We could not have dammed the earth’s rock flow Only the Gonds in their early twenties headgear.

Laurasia has since moved away from our plate. Our plate is now filled with new found minds. The mind is at the universe of motion ,a handful Of god dust freely flying about in morning sun Diagonally touching shadows on faces of sorrow. Our skylight is not a sky but a chink in rooftiles With dripping rain waters of poverty in minds. The blue monkey is indeed part of the universe . If the mind is a shifting plate away from Gonds Gonds can be dammed , their new year dances. They do not know the earth is changing plates And consequently when their time had begun And so their new year dances are all year round. They dance the shifting plates away from mind. The choreography is about mind’s blue monkey.

Borra caves A cow’s udders give off stone in milk Flowing down through a grazing story By a King, discoverer of lime flowers On the floor, through a luminous hole Where ancestors had lived their tales. The flowers hung as bats upside down But their shapes shifted through time Like ghosts of the ancients losing their Story tails, in their upside down stature. Up there they are Krishnas blue flutes Their music flowing like cow’s udders. On the floor they are ghosts dancing Their shapes to empty space of music. (Borra caves are a million year old naturally formed stalactite caves situated in Araku Valley of Andhra

Pradesh discovered by a British geologist William King George)

Sea rocks In the beginning the rock was spiked flowers Then it worked out to hung marble arches Catching the sea in its frame like a picture. One sat down and bent to target the rock That would carry the entire sea in its bosom With the sea hitting it in mother’s playfulness. The rock was green and mossy in the overall Turquoise of sea with diamonds of molluscs Stuck in body like polka dots on sunny holidays. A fish jumping man would point a rock corner For squatting to catch the essence of the sea. The sea continues its tirade against the rocks.

The tortoise and the sun As the sun climbed the temple banyan The tortoise carried the world on back As in apocalypse times, a flood coming And a kind earth quaking with disaster. We offer our eyes closed and in prayer Our palms joined in a tortoise gesture. We then go forward to the sun in silver, The sun god on chariot of seven horses Behind temple tank of immersed bodies Torsos in prayerful baths, eyes closed. We offer prayers to the sun in whiskers Lighting our eyes with camphor flames. Our silver eyes are for his safe keeping.

( Visit to the temples of the tortoise God (Kurmavatara) in Srikurmam and the sun god at Arasavilli)

Waiting The train quickly demolished our waiting The waiting in our things and other things. The mountains were waiting to be dug in So as to make way through their wombs As the train cut though a butter of silence, The wombs of darkness as in green aqua. The women were waiting to turn red waves Of dancing with hands locked in each others’, Their songs reaching the blue end of the sky. Their dancing hands waited to inter-weave In fragmentary beauty under trees with boys Waiting on tree top ladder nets like monkeys. Waiting stood petrified in the stalactite caves Of a million years with history dripping as lime. Waiting turned to a dance in fluttering sarees By petals of interwoven hands, to woman cries That waited in caves to turn stalactite tears.

(on a visit to the Araku Valley in the Eastern Ghats near Vizag)

The sea rose like a wall The ruins resounded with their mantras As our footsteps felt the monks’ghosts Striding in and out of the empty rooms Whose burnt bricks went into a huddle In sun-burnt bushes and pieces of rocks. The sea lapped up against the bare hills Like it did when it had first brought them From distant shores, for buddha peace. We climbed down the hill to the calm sea That would rise like a wall up to the point Where the sea ended and the sky began.

(on a visit to the recently excavated ruins of Thotlakonda Buddhist monastery in Vizag)

Fiction Thinking largely, the world is fiction A shout from a night dog’s throat A poem from a boxcar of somebody Memory from an atavistic cave past. Poems soon disappear from throat And a world crumbles and is re-built From ashes , as kids play i-pad games Rules changing,themselves of fiction.

I-pad is fiction, pure pulp of no paper, Eco-friendly but not friendly to echoes . Kids’games are fiction like dog’s barks Eco-friendly but not very echo-friendly.

All things have to echo in some where Like in the boxcar or in caves of men Full of echoes of naked men scurrying Like rats from holes, leaving tail-prints In the dust of millions of funerals held Elaborately to the echoes of drumbeats.

Temporary It was a time lapse of a memory of small things The reddish tiny worms that swim up and down In the blood-tide, their spasmodic movements Fishes of the day, ready to savor and/or discard.

Our permanence is temporary thing of the day The day being temporary in the east of window Its slow curtains effectively blocking permanence. Light spots are spot on after a violet light is cast As if they were temporary once but now and here Semi-permanent in an overall temporary scheme.

What if they swim now ,as they had swum once In a purely temporary sea-scheme of years ago And the temporary sea turns a permanent sky.

Brittle Brittle is peace of being , of staying intact All of a piece, not a charred body on road. Bodies are brittle and games bodies play .

The minds are brittle in their eye sockets Their seeing is brittle like a vitreous sky, A glass sky cracking in rain-less lightning. Eyes are cracked being brittle, out of sockets. Eyes crinkle out of their shape, from sockets Empty with air, like mouths, like sooty hands. Hands god loves are separated from bodies And later from all gestures of finger- pointings. Gods the broken hands worshiped are brittle.

(In an apparent terrorist attack, fourteen people were killed and nearly 80 injured on Thursday evening in

twin blasts in Dilsukhnagar, a busy suburb of Hyderabad)

Mystery Whether it is pecking at the bathroom glass All the time or when I go there is my mystery. What is the mystery in the sparrow’s mind About the bathroom visitors , their bodies Wet in the knowledge of a pecking sparrow? A sparrow tirelessly pecking at own reflection Is a mystery , set against futility of effort. How the bird can be stupid enough to peck At its own reflection, ignoring past failures Is mystery that overwhelms the bathing bodies.

I cannot look it in eyes ,set high and tiny, Save sense a squirm in its body as I enter . Overwhelmed by no mystery it squirms lightly Which is the same each time I enter its space. The quest for mystery is mine, not sparrow’s.

Life of a Pi The pacific storm is a story of animals and man Their together on the sea, with a gust of wind In the aft, a fierce tiger prowling from Bengal A sailor dead, a zebra, a hyena for not laughing A boy on flotation to all three gods for praying. The pi has to live off sea air, a drinking water. The pi has no life, a variable radius with centre Drifting away in storm to carnivorous islands Where algae may snuff lives of God-seeker boys Who live in concentric circles, widening circles, The last one of which they may not complete.*

The pi has to circle around his God like a falcon

Or like the storm around a boat or its flotation

It is a story’s version that makes the difference . (After viewing the film Life of Pi. -* Reference is to Rilke’s poem Widening Circles )

Distance With a distance of time ,what had looked white Would turn vague and gray by growing years Our wading in knee-deep muddy rain waters In the streets by white walls missing in places, The men who tucked white lungis in the waists, The coins that felt round to fingers in pockets, The rivers dancing round heads of mountains.

The walls stretched interminably to a white sky Hiding bush and snakes in them gently rising, Feet shuffling to rustling sounds of dry leaves. The squirrels had built bridges for man-gods And earned three dark stripes on their backs. Strange birds sang in the sky deaths of lives. With more distance of time our eyes slowly fell And the body hurried past closing our spaces. The distances are now small, the skyline close.

Weather Our weather is purely for our reference, A tether for the newly unattached mind, A kite on a float for cutting off by others, A well for picking a pail of thirsty waters. The sky-strata grow wider for the asking. You ask if you want to be the shepherd In mountains to negotiate endless spaces. Your flock has endless feet for counting. You know you want to stop conversation. The weather is sun hid in a backyard tree. Its rain is deep in hiding in the beach sea. Its clouds are a nightly television thunder. Moon has temporary circles like tired eyes. They tell you that rain is coming anytime.

Poetry of memory The tree arises in the white sky of a memory, Shorn of its leaves,through a kitchen’s vantage Going back to several autumns of old memories, A point of view that looked the oncoming street.

The leaves lie in state in a mishmash of rain On the roof with many days of rain accumulated For the crows to explore and the sun to render A golden painting of vanishing glory of rising.

We have to take the aid of poetry for memory With the leaves lost to sky’s white wilderness. The trees make bland statements as in a dance. Meanings are merely extracted from memory. Memories arise from words falling from trees. They quickly fill our kitchens with nice flavors Like rising suns sending down shafts of memory Through the half-closed kitchen exhaust hole.

Tears Birthdays are for celebration in our minds From the annals of the history of the eyes That flows within cool ducts of river streams. The ducts overflow with salt choking whites But fill them with beauty flowers in outlines Of limpid pools on lazy summer afternoons.

You celebrate birthdays of your baby’s eyes That stream with primordial salt of blue aqua, Tears that laugh at the grief of the mother A rising nipple in the darkness of mountains.

Tears rise in the mountains , flow to the plains And vanish in the valleys at the sunset corner, Their history flows in the sun’s own timeline. Birthdays are not for greeting after sunsets. Their tears have already dried up at sunset. ( I have been greeting a face book friend on his birthday without knowing he has been dead for two years)

Compose You compose ,from old bodies creeping up, What an early night cumulates in the belly A light of memory that exists without body. Old you and you cannot but decompose In hair and teeth, neurons whirring about Like electric fans dusting body machines. Let words be the star dust of soothing light A light dust from milk overflowing the sky.

In your deep nights, words fly off bodies. Their composition shall renew your bodies. You compose mostly against decomposition.

Flecks The roof seemed to sit lightly on its light With the sun above and a looming rain. The roof thatch took light in soft mouth Spitting a few flecks of light to the floor. The creeper spread itself on the scaffold In backyard, turning a green gentle sky As moon flowers waited to turn pumpkins. Flecks of moon danced to a light breeze.

The wedding tent fought against the hot sun As a clarinet blew out its puffs of mouth. Flecks of a hot sun tickled the groom’s back Causing bridal flurry ,while her own dress Sported flecks stitched on a silken texture.

Abstract Abstract is a sleeping mass of the individual Pitted against an amorphous darkness hiding Things trees, houses ,people,birds with throats Stuck in a night’s silence, sounds disappearing Into the ether in between the spaces of things. It is a language of words wrested from things.

Abstract is things not making thunk sounds, In the wing span of a fly buzzing in ear’s cave Or an ancient bat flapping its upside down wings In inverted world holes , an empty hollow thunk Against the silent walls of an ancient mountain.

Abstract is fear in belly of things being there, When things are not really there, here or now, A sweaty chemical churning in thinking bodies When bodies have to perform things of words As if words are things that make thunk sounds.

Contorted In a blinding sun, leaves are a blur And men contorted in their mouths Like mountains waiting to turn clouds. Their cigarettes smoked like factories Making sugar and molasses in smells.

The jute smelled rut and men’s feet. Their brown smells stayed contorted With spring flowers on the new trees. Room curtains were twisted in shape Admitting a sun contorted by sleep. Noses were contorted like gremlins.

The sights were contorted in smells Of rotting arms, sweating shirt backs. A whole world sprang under elbows. The crooks of arms went contorted With framed faces going up and down. Some went contorted with laughter.

Words were contorted in the meaning. Their beauty flickered as a nose ring In the dark night on a contorted nose. Nose smells ran contorted with eyes.

March Summer is in light and winter in a shade What the dickens is this madness of march Says our Charles of real great expectations. We were sputtering on our way to our god. Four in an afternoon is brilliant lake in teals From an alien land come flying a long way, To coexist in crowded bazaar of local cranes. Together we shop, say teals among cranes. The sun is hot says car glass with gone tint . Open the window to let in a shameless sun On feminine skins, training to remain soft In a marriage market, under strange hoods Looking like desert bedouins on camels.

Lake is everyone’s shopping for stomach fish. Some fish dance in the empty air of baskets By the lake ,for women to decide their prices. Soon they are on way to hungry stomachs.

Dropping a song

We have dropped the song of a humble bee And a butterfly that would hit our car’s pane In the higher echelons of God’s balmy hills. We have dropped a bumblebee from our fly.

Women’s faces were flushed in our shame. Their songs went bone-dry in private blush, As our tigers growled in our private pants. See the buses bloated with men and parts. (concerning the recent gang rape of a woman in a Delhi bus)

Genius Sleeping is genius waiting to be discovered

In the obscurity of a skull from electric pages Opening endlessly by the flick of old fingers. It is night that promises to be its depository As a skull hangs in the wind by a dog’s bark. The bark oscillates like a tree branch in wind, On a tympanum in your inner ear of sound.

Twenty lines a day, genius or not, is nowhere. Pages do not grow endlessly as dog goes back To sleep on your tympanum, leaving its bark To echo in the outer ear of deathly silence. The empty flick of pages continues its screech On the cold marble of all this sleeping genius.

Ruminations

In the walk is a dead-end wall , a four-letter car, And such other denominations along with a wife And a husband carrying separate dogs by leash. The wall overlooks nature ,always coming back To a bigger wall, a synthetic possibility in sleep. The dogs hang by the end of the metal leashes.

The four-letter car has a driver stuck to phone That would make a four- deal journey on road, An intimation of mortality, while dropping words In electric-magnetic space for other organisms To pick up at random for liberal interpretation, Four-letter words crisp in organismic meaning.

The car comes at my back, whisper and silent. This is their four-letter car, with extra a inside, Outdoorsy thing ,where everything yours is ours, Sufficiently long for large families out on picnics.

Spring

We have passed through melancholy But cannot balk at the despair of words In the nether belly, big busy black ants Crawling the inside of bark, all the way. Please play your music down you-tube. Ours grows black humor by the hour. Spring is here , seemingly inexorable. So we exchange words for soft metal. If music be the food of love , we play on. For God’s sake let us change the song. Spring should drive away the black ants.

Decay

A hundred decaying faces from plastic chairs Outside the restaurant hall slowly look at you As saviors for the bored bums and big mouths Their numbered slip is now a few places ahead.

Look and see, we are now sufficiently decayed, And we are waiting for our grand decomposition. These people are now ahead by a few numbers And are waiting in their bored eyes for their own.

Inside we have seen our food disintegrating, Home to a colony of organisms busy decaying Our faces ,our stomachs, our women, our kids. The lentils soup is friendly to our slurping faces. The hotel’s yesterdays have decayed it enough.

Bodkin The car sashays over the bump and down Like camel ’s hump, on the crowded roads. Fellow-travelers are bodies hanging in air In three-wheeled splutterers run with a rod In hands like a bodkin for making quietus. You can a quietus make with bare bodkin A noisy quietus ,by a prince of patience, Whose native resolution is sicklied over With pale cast of thought, a sitting bodkin With two other bodies, in their last prayers. After-life does not sound that fearsome. But how does one pull the waisted bodkin To make a quietus, while sitting a-bodkin?

(Bodkin is a knife or some other sharp instrument referred to in Shakespeare’s Ham-let. It also refers to a

sitting position in a running gig , wedged between two persons,on a vehicle with space for only two) The living room

The day went on with a few cross-voices In spaces between sitting and thinking With hands on laps and eyes upwards. Five different voices boomed in empty air, Their sounds raised from hands on laps To others’shoulders, brushing off dust Aided and abetted by a skylight of sun. Some times eyes would bore on backs Re-bounding on whites strangely lighting Their opaqueness to a translucent white. More re-bounding made dark silhouettes Of men in the opening sunlight of the day. In closing sunlight the figures would turn Softly sentimental, bruised by shadows.

Placebo There is dancing froth in the liquid With sounds like the top of a sizzle. The acid in there has to turn to salt Wherever wedding is getting ready

And a music will soon follow torsos. The torsos are waiting in shadows. They will dance until the wee hours Their stomachs preceding in space. They look to feel funny celebrating.

Better feel good with disease clutching,

With froth in the glass slowly shaking Through the inner snake, to the point Where pain flows like a rocket cracker. Poems are the effervescence of words, A froth sizzling on the top of the night.

I saw The seer spoke words that enacted death, Words wrapped in a worry over extinction. The blind king saw his words turning to ash

As the sun fell behind vast blind mountains Giving a few temporary lies to certain death. The seer says I saw mighty warriors falling And a golden chariot rushing without its sun A hundred sons falling to a cobweb of deceit.

A blind poet saw the endless rushing of life By a winged chariot without its effulgent sun. A library of books rose to sky from his earth A knowledge that dated back to a sunny sky.

(In the Hindu epic of Mahabharata , the battle of Kurukshetra unfolded for the blind king through the

words "I saw" by an eyewitness seer who described the events of the war in a streaming narrative. In The

Alef : Infinite wonder/Infinite pity by J.L.Borges the narrator describes the vast whirring world he has

seen with the words I Saw..)

Unrolling the car window The mosquito swatter bat is from the woman Of different pastiche colors ,overly anxious

To eliminate the buzz altogether in your life, Her sales pitch abuzz as you unroll window.

The China bats she sells make mere sputters As they go about electrifying flying creatures Burning them to zero entities, in tiny air fires.

Dress colors are captivating with small mirrors On the woman’s dress, signifying life’s snippets In a moment of your life at the traffic junction. They are the mosquitoes that will burn to cipher When the bat plays with life in a fireworks show.

Vertical The picture tube plays its shadows

At the back, like the winter night’s Picture in picture, thin at the edges As if it is the sea at night touching A sky briefly at the horizon of rising. It is at right angles to the horizon. A conscious mind ’s spanning night As its chimes go on in empty night. All things are at right angles to it. Even the night watchman’s whistle.

The watchman’s stick taps the earth Vertically, exploring essential hollow. Watchman is vertical to the horizon, Homo erectus previously on all fours. But moon is not vertical to watchmen. Being sprawled horizontally in trees. At night it hangs vertically in the sea.

Variations

The eye witnesses result waters flowing, A few eye-drops of pity in a death scene A Buddha pity of nothingness for people But mere variations on themes of death. People die and live, in crawling numbers As senses look downwards from a bridge To capture a death, an enterprise closed A life that was made from people’s lives. The variations seem muted and exquisite, Subtle textures as softly lighted textiles In check patterns of death woven with life , Patterns not repeated in the grand design.

The illusion Our everyday illusion begins to grow As the sun ripens to a fruit in the tree Hanging in glory for its falling moment. Our shirt sticks to the body of illusion,

Our self growing out of a banana fiber Made of words of purported meaning.

Fiber grows transparent as the sun grows Making the body a silhouette by dusk. Silhouettes disappear as sketch outlines Bodies experience before the sun sets. Bodies are mind’s constructs in yesterday. Yesterdays are body’s constructs in mind, Re-assembled , as we grow out of words And get up and grow, away from the sun, Like naked sadhus who came to the river From the snow hills, hanging their selves.

(This intuitive sense of self is an effortless and fundamental human experience. But it is nothing more

than an elaborate illusion. Under scrutiny, many common-sense beliefs about selfhood begin to unravel.

Some thinkers even go as far as claiming that there is no such thing as the self. Read more at

http://www.newscientist.com/special/self

Headstone A few sombre thoughts into it , this semantic Of a headstone would rise in tomorrow’s sleep Much against your wishes, towards the horizon

As you plod along , drag your feet in the thicket With shovel for deep digging scoopfuls of earth.

You cannot grow out of it now , this very night. A name is a name, whatever rose you may call it. But if tomorrow lives you may still get out of it Leaving it nameless among roses spread on it. The lady poet would think of an arm not moving Not gesturing, to write without a secretary by side. But she is entirely free with the other arm to move Watching the horizon, ascending and descending.

(Taking off on Louise Gluck’s poem Approach of the Horizon)

Amulet This time I thought of my personal amulet Something for the road as I wake up to go. Just in case, the clouds can gather any time.

The poem acts as one in the smallness of hour, In chimes against the wind through jasmines, When the tinkle sounds smell like fine powder An atomized spray of daylight and life essence.

This one is my protector poem round my neck Like the textured seeds of a certain hill tree We use mostly to count our god-mutterings, The very seeds found in delicate lip movements In the snow hills, on bodies smeared with ash.

Renunciation The man comes back from the holy river

Where he renounced a certain vegetable

The bitter one had always tasted terrible. (Please

leave behind here for your dead

All you consider dearest to your bosom,

Said the muttering priest of the ice river.)

We say return from a river purely bathed

After you have done your hanging thing.

The naked men would come from the hills

Their purity not yet tested in a natural sky.

(Here we write pure poetry in an azure sky About

waters that washed down corpses.)

The corpses had renounced all the worlds

But their sun went on to rise regardless.

The naked men have renounced clothes

And now what to do with hanging things.

We have no tears enough to wet our eyes. But we have genteel glycerine tears made To stream down eyes and keep them wet. But now what to do with the hanging things.

Plaster of Paris Our sacred Goddess is back again With grass flowers already showing up On the river across a dry sand bed. Her pristine body forms in white mud.

The dark maker has sullied his hands As they shine against her whiteness. Her many arms are stubs in reverse With weapons yet to be put in them. A fierce tiger is in making in a corner. But a demon is yet to be conceived.

In plaster of paris, good takes shape Earlier to mould and shape than evil With its several shades and tonalities So difficult to create in white purity.

Denial First ,denial came across a cool waving fan And then a brown teddy bear that stood up

In the corner .from its twelve years of sitting. It came in such and such lack of connection A wire lost to wilderness, a snake in its coil.

Self-denial is the appropriate loss of shape A posture upgraded from sitting to standing A solitude in the corner, a no-child situation To play around with, to snuggle with in bed.

Denial is refusal to accept the old as living. It is also a puke in the car, a temper tantrum, A pretending anger like a striking old snake A refusal to accept new living as only living.

Nail A rusted nail of ineptitude keeps coming off From the bathroom shelf made by a drunk

Carpenter of a philosophical-looking beard. He stands nailed to the bathroom memory.

We look at ourselves in bathroom mirror But cannot open its shelf with much force. The nail is there holding his flimsy memory A rusted memory , Jesus-like of Jerusalem.

One nail drives out another , one heat other As the bard in ever lasting memory nailed it. We are waiting for another hard as nail driver Of a philosophical beard to liberate this nail From the rusted memory of bathroom mirror.

Danger

In the evening you see danger in the air On the road and off ,in this very room And below the dusk of the apartment, As the air turns orange and suffused. That is when the world seems fraught, And metal meets twisted metal in flesh.

Other times it is an intermittent growl Of a striped fear in grown up minds About kids sleeping on mats in huts Likely to be picked up by phantoms, As they lay dreaming of morning broth.

At times it is just the flow of a paper Discovering the bloom of a tiny red flower In the synapse, in the alcoves of a mind.

Mortal The sleeping eyes turn softly to tears Being rubbed of their latent darkness. They then water our sentient feelings Their light in constant fear of going off.

A few electrical sounds of mosquitoes Meet their fiery deaths on dancing bats. A day fly crawls on the thinking being Mortal by a night’s smallness of hours. The insects do not feel death in bones.

We are inevitable of coming non-being, Our being projecting non-being in void, A future into the mountains of pyramids, A body staring at a stony ceiling of crypt, A mortality hardly felt in bones of being.

Word and melody In the inner most of your word and melody A reading goes, a word quietly tucked away A moon caught shining , a dead poet writes A letter to a young poet rustling a memory.

A yard is tall springs from a word, its melody A Rilke of god pontificates to a young poet A trial by fire, a catharsis, where a nose blows And its melody an arbitrary hum in the head. Write if you must, if your yard overgrows , A vegetable crawls in pumpkins on ground Its flowers turn yellow moons on the earth. They are word and melody of a poet’s letter. Their flowers are moons fallen to the earth .

Marriage All night ,the mind flows over everything Making it explicit , a foolish woman’s view An extrapolated existence of one on to two

Around eyes livid and staring at nothing. Eyes cannot be lying about in their anger. The body is bamboo, a dried and stick lady With leaves staple food for cuddly pandas. Their new existences bawl from tiny bodies Independently of bodies in throes of anger.

Marriage leaves bodies in a dense foliage Where they cannot prance in moonlight Nor climb down leaving bodies to their sky.

Connecting dots Strange and dreamlike is the language

Of thought, connecting things by dots As under a pall of gloom, a joint desert Under a breathless sky of waiting stars . A poet’s love lives far off and breathless In a station where the train is parked off, And falls asleep in dreams of its waiting. A day turns an hour in a second stanza And a second in the next one of waiting. Words are a wait , strange and dreamlike. As the stars are connected by a few dots, An hour turns a moment of endless wait.

Beauty When a balled up curtain hardly falls Beauty seems wrested from a silk shade. A magazine’s gloss is placed on a table Moving far and away from its outer space In disagreement, with its square shape.

Pain seems striking temples of beauty.

When paint colors splash to disagree With their individuality, their pastels And shades in violence with each other Beauty is sacked, nailed and bleeding . You have its red blood on your hands .

Beauty is also truth, if somebody else’s. Hunger in bones may make a cat walk. Truth is symmetry or blatant lack of it.

Slate Earth on earth, the black slate is a blank, A slate for throwing at a child for failure, Who learns his first letters against crows Citrus leaves mingled with Christchurch Sandalwood paste and waters in alcove. God’s child will supervise from a cross up If child is learning alphabet against crows On the lemon tree, thirsty in pot pebbles. Son of God , thirsty crows , citrus leaves

Are all the big child remembers at sunset The sun to go behind trees and dog barks. There are lotuses in a pond smelling hills. The water we drink mixed with indup seed, So as to clarify the muddy waters ,if any.

In the gold of a sunset the slate is filled, Rather too much with connections, wires Arrows straying beyond the woodframe. But we still see faint lines of an alphabet, Thirsty crows on trees, gowned teachers Amid smells of sandal paste , lotus ponds We drank waters from, mixed with seed, There at the top , below the wood frame.

Cliche Nothing frayed about a poet’s cliche Except it sticks to a body like rags The threads coming off, around holes Like blue sky through tree spaces

Of a child’s head looking up at God A god of blue body , peacock feather And a flute stirring the river breeze A tree and the woman of shut eyes. God is tired old cliche of blue poets.

The cliche moves to death smelling. When death happens that is cliche

As a clinched heart wrings and eyes Turn pink and wet with some cliches.

A soul strikes white like lightning, An art for art’s own sake, a beauty Glistening from the wet grass dew Putting bare feet up to it in cliche.

Home It is where you always got away from To the trees ,to a vast sheet of sea calm, Only to come back to its old bird chirps And bats black to tamarinds at dusk Divested of ghosts by autumn leaf-fall House corners purring like lolling cats, Deep wells in waters unreachable by eye.

Home is where you come back to die To lie on the earth, on hairy straw mat A cotton swab in the nose-holes of life Eyes closed in a final count of dreams, At the very space you had first come From the vast sea green of a stomach.

Weather At times the sun would beat us hard Behind clouds in their wet promises On the trees and in compound walls. The air-conditioner drones mournfully As sparks of violence fly relentlessly From a body going in vibrating mode In solo dance while audience sleeps.

Our words are infatuated with the sky. And our eyes turn upwards for water. Our words pour from eyes in streams Of water ,reminiscent of last year rain. The air-conditioner is birds’split home When it doe not turn hot for our insides. The birds will come when they are hot Enough for a fresh parenting zeitgeist.

Memes A spring in the step is another meme To hustlers of memes, internet freaks Described as peddlers of mellow words, Like a new spring in our street leaves. Words are newer algorithms vaguely Connecting spaces of big time chunks Hop- skip- jump over stones of words In puddles formed around vague huts Their walls touched in midriff by rising Waters kissing knees tucked to below. Frogs are memes of no kissing princes Heaving croaks in throats of memes. A spring in the step is one in the leaves, Not in the box of rising ,a nasty surprise. Frogs do not dance in true Gangnam Constrained by absence of forearms. A spring in their step can sure go viral.

Monologues In our betweens, we talk to us checking Nobody is around,in a high bass tone And metallic,fine drum beats following. We are nobody’s clowns , just desserts In motley, just joking for living, splitting For effect, duly obese and monologous. We wear words like tatters of our coats.

Hark ye ,this thing is coming on again. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are alive And licking and times are not that bad . Polonius is waiting behind the curtains Neither borrower nor lender be,says he. When we are keyed up in our behinds, We clap gleefully and beat our drums We are cold in our flesh and our fetish Our satire is not one of the airy things.

Our screams at the end of the bridge Are monologues full of wind and sail. We hear our black speeches in between As they disappear among other people With monologues,uttered mouthfully In the privacy of their own boudoirs.

Disbelief Inside a window is life and its poems Behind a grille ,plants in their breeze And words straight under the night. A canvas stretches through the wires Bringing the world inside of people Typing away furiously after the seas. Wonder what they are doing rubbing Their eyes of disbelief, sending down Stuff and thoughts to me, the obscure Recipient, typing away here in a hole.

The wires cut the trees in their smoke. A scrap of sky evaporates above them Till a sun will arrive to redden its face. The day noises wait till it fully reddens And disbelief ceases to be suspended.

Metaphors Everything was everything else The white swans in a lotus pond Were of learning’s lotus goddess A metaphor for a child of beauty, A recall of imagined sweetness.

The child made a speech on stage On a poet dead to a growing beard Amid claps for speaking his mind, A metaphor for a lauded virtuosity, All you remember now in bald age.

A screaming titya bird terror struck Then in a child is now a dead duck In the lonely deserts of old despair. Fear is now metaphor for bellyache A rumble in a nether world of belly. Metaphors rise from vague spaces.

Free will, my foot All things are happening to this me Through a night that encompasses Chimes in a ringing piece of the sky With white flowers embedded in it. The fan blows on like a sky rumble . Night is the very thing happening.

I have the free will to will it away, Not to drink water , write poems. Write about free will and deaths Embraced ,under a building’s fall A trade-off done out of free will By those who had courted death By debris of builder’s negligence.

Free will, my foot, I say in flowers At the elephant corner where I think And explain determinism of death. Flowers are ten rupees by elbow. My foot took me to flowers where I was determined to think of debris. At night I would pick on the word To write about, free will, my foot.

Slide-show A tiny red ant passed on the keyboard A figure on a slide show of a memory A shadow that would never come back However much you point- clicked for it . The ant will have to pass its funeral Slide-show once, a memory cluster In my mind , in its mind , all-ants mind, In separate slide-shows of species ants The atavistic ants of passed ant-lines.

A long ant-line is a funeral slide-show Of memory clusters of men about ants And of ants memories of passing men. The white stuff they carry at the head Is their memory clusters of our fingers On a keyboard, kicking in a slide-show.

Images Images do not mean much ,only idle fancy A passing show sliding away by a train With hanging people as big busy blurs. The tracks people mean only squatters Off houses of tarpaulin sitting with crows.

These dark birds squat on the tracks to hit A train’s bottom, wanting to get at truth, A morning’s getting at sky’s orange truth. Images do not get at truth ,only at blurs. They move slowly like squeaking train fans As if to get at truth, unhindered by crowd. But nobody ever got at truth in a local train.

Symmetry Our words have to fall in place, as stanzas Like mornings reddening in backyard trees Their dreams subatomically growing as god In particle collisions like snowflakes of petals Among nights flowing as infinity of stanzas. The stanzas have to grow from an asymmetry Of three-lines followed by four-lines and five The end-words singing music with no meaning But a symmetry of sound and the April foolish Smells flowing from googled words of search. The sights have to form symmetry with smells From eyes that smelled a fragrance of nature.

There are particles in collision in inner space An insect struggling on its back in washroom Its legs struggling up in asymmetry of space. An act of pure bliss is to turn it back on its legs By a flick of toe , god’s symmetry in my brain A god particle to set symmetry back on flight.

Residue Our ash and residue you may scoop up here To collect a bag of bones meant for your river In early mornings of sleep lost to a stomach.

Irony is what is felt in bone marrow in a bag, A supreme chill of Alaskan cold, as in a snow With crystal ice streams,where it is so clear And so transparent below fishes swimming And jumping over the waters of destruction. The stories are tied up with all the anecdotes The irony is too explicit for poems in words. Residue does not leave you longing for truth.

Zebras We are just thinking about real zebras In the dark continent , in a thick forest And in the light , speckled by the dark. A predator sees zebras in a slow fuck, Pistons of loosely motioned shadows Thickening in an afternoon of the forest Like zebra stripes after the smiling act.

The zebras tend to smile after the act And some times before , in anticipation. Their camouflage acts fine when smiles Are mistaken for tiny shadows moving On the floor of the forest in dry leaves. After the act no difference exists in smile Between the zebra’s and its predator’s.

Apprehensions At the day’s end there is slight twitch of body A contortion of the soul, a pre- occupied mind As a white wall rises with the sun on its top And the trees have dis-appeared to overlook. A job is upgraded to nay-say of recession plan Now a fear of not being there as the sun rises. Hold on ,we have multiple reasons vibrating As fears turn shaky like several thumbprints One on the other to reinforce a sleep- heavy Night’s ruin of dreaming sleep by mosquitoes. Use your hand to swat them flying on cheeks. Their blood is yours in the veins, full of flight.

Notions I have notions that all this will be gone Me gone , they gone and our words gone Only the chimes will remain, their echoes A dust, an amulet for keeping , a residue. Notions are gone like nations , oblations, A water for pouring in rivers of sunrise.

Laughing is gone of man beast and bird On a boat in the lone sea and a sky falls In the sea , a breath gone , a body gone. The sea turns dust of the remaining sky. I have notions that all this is not there With the sun and the clouds and the sky Falling in the sea, in their fit of laughing The wind sporadic from the mountains. Mountains are not there in the horizon The horizon is a notion from our dreams Embedded in old mountains not there. Notions are not there when bodies gone.

Attention There is a tiny flower curving at the wall corner A cutesy fan head moving in stillness of shadow An absence of drilling machine sound in window An absence of an insect struggling to come up On all sixes, an insect flying by the flick of a toe. I have to pay attention to syntax and grammar Verbalizing acts, grammar logic, thought breaks The dark of silence, try to make bridges of words And fail to live many presences and their absences. I have to connect insects with fans, sky and wind The presences of things, the sounds of my heart The absence of many things, the words in syntax Words that are flowers curving at the wall corner Insects that are sent flying symmetrically by toe, Windows that have garnered sounds of presences And absences showing up in a vast dark beyond. Yet I have to collect sounds by words in their logic, Sights by their absences, smells by their night sky Move my attention around in a maze of presences And their absences, and maintain my presence.

Revenge As they run a marathon they have grown old Their meat is faded and a revenge fed is dead They have run to a finish, their boy duly dead Revenge fed is dead to the lost and living beard. You have grown old, your meat is sooner dead The viand flits too soon, your angel light a panic Attack of terror’s grip, a shrapnel flying in trees, A dead sun’s orange , a smoke beyond the grave.

(Remembering Emily Dickinson’s poem Mine enemy is growing old- after the Boston bomb blasts)

Random I select the random word, a chaos word In a mass of confusion and poetry words The most beautiful world out of a rubble A heap of ideas hid in my random worlds. There is a random world somewhere there From sundry poets of ancient mysticism A geometrical measuring by elegant face A Greek face or a Roman or even a desert Sphinx deep encrusted with history sand . The random world is a real one out there, A heap of delightful chaos , a pile of earth A broken ancient stone, its letters missing. I was there somewhere in utter confusion A random man in the men of the bazaars, Their merchandise a white sugar figurine Sold randomly to a kid’s extended fingers, Only random, merchant , child or figurine A re-assembly, a possible re-combination Or a jumble pulled from ancient memory.

Joint and several worlds (Here we are all, by day; by night we’re hurl’d By dreams,

each one into a several world. Robert Herrick)

We shall now feel sleep in our tired bones And smell its neutral flowers and colors In several worlds beyond the sea breeze. A dwarf god stamps his humongous foot On our bent heads that makes us dizzy With the breathless air of several worlds. By day we are all but by night we are all Hurled headlong into our several worlds.

Not knowing Dawn is not knowing strident cuckoo And its rain clouds failing to deliver When a wind chimes in from the sky In a stillness that continues with a poet Gloating over not knowing, a seedbed From which new sprouts shall emerge. His darkness persists in not cascading Writing sheets of the night’s thoughts As bird sounds brim to form a dawn. Not knowing is the unmixed blessing Of oversleeping its embedded dreams. Not knowing is a straight face kept up By a fidgeting body ,in a postured chair From which the world unfolds by itself And dawn goes on in birds unmindful.

Uproar There is nothing stable in our old days With a television uproar, a sea that kills And rolls on as a child’s eyes turn pearls Suffering sea-change as they run deep. But the noise outside is just an uproar That will quieten like the sea out of moon. The child is violated in uproar of the veins. Her green bones ride tumult up and down And sea waves take them down in crowds. Eyes are unsaleable pearls after the uproar. (A 5-year-old was raped and beaten for days before being rescued, police said on Friday)

Spring rain Spring rain is just my suggestion As the midnight dog’s barks balk At an earthy smell of rain in turns And bells chime in windy response All our life is unending visual field And now hers as it closes, a spirit Going over shopping and a failure Of body to stretch eyes beyond it As the rain keeps falling and falling. Rain is a mere sound around ears Not a silver splatter on our cheeks. May be it is not rain but a smoky hill At the end of eyes as they close. Life goes on in flash and hers now As body thinks of rain in the spring Beating unawares around the ears.

The messenger The messenger carries hardly any messages, Wearing a red sash across waist and a brass , Only large-sheaved ledgers, with seams gone. The messenger is forbid to peer into a ledger Under instant amnesia but is duly authorized To imagine insects of figures across its pages. A red slash traverses end to end of his torso And a fine burnished plate softly glistens to it, A proud moment , albeit carrying no messages Only bulky ledgers with tiny figures crawling Across pages, with no meaning for the bearer. Messengers carry no meaning , only ledgers. Ledgers have no meaning for the messenger Except to earn a few annas for a daily bread That have far more meaning than big figures Crawling inside the red large-sheaved books. But the insects at times crawl into his pockets Tickling insides, a situation of some discomfort.

The ritual We love a gray time frame encircling Our activities from sunrise to sunset With a day in between, for dreaming Our eyes closed with cows and things. A certain poetess watches cows until They drop away from her line of vision, She and her lady accompanist in hills. An invisible frame encloses us always A shell that drags along round a snail The very shell that makes it feel warm Within ,with its tiny feet duly drawn up . Do we leave drag marks on the beach? Only for the seas to wipe them away.

The sentence Here the word is a sentence long enough To come to close with no end punctuation. The story will spring from a pad in words As they hop -skip in unconnected spaces. Gregor Samsa ’s fate is sealed by opening As he turns to wake up on his feet of a bug. His bugness is complete ere story is born. Words are stories of latent possibilities A random word screws up a perfect story With no room for the guy to use free will. Free will ,my bug foot, a determined mind Says ,turning its vermin body to the side Much before its story is born in the bed.

Almost said Transience of the word is almost said Flashing away in the skull of memory A skull transience, a word transience . A rain rumble is in sky with a mosque A transient loud speaker to west god . A bird transience is their intransigence. Their transience is dawn’s temporary air And likely death a transient fact of birds, A sun rising again with different birds, Different words from the dark of a sun.

Going loose Going loose was not just in your pants An old sartorial manner of speaking Where the visual field goes on and on And a foot is loose and a mind is free. The mountains yonder are your other The otherness of you and of the clouds Precipitating to rain not duly falling.

The seams in your plates seem showing Like your unzipped pants in the society A fly is open ,not the otherness of insect. In rabid humor fly’s fly is always open.

You wear your hell bottoms and hair loose, Singing loose songs to a sleeping society. Your foot is loose, your minds cut loose. You go loose from all and your freedom. The otherness of other is you of old space.

Returning gifts Gifts is what you have always thought of In cellophane and silk with a red cross-knot Of love in many a splendor or a see-through Corruption stench, abuse of company money. Not what your son had when first born then. A gift from mother nature turns dad proud A calculation backward or a rhythm of fingers Or a teenage guitar strumming excess notes. Gifts do not come free like company lunches. You give what you received the last season. His life was a gift from nature like her flowers In colors unsolicited, fragrances of memories. There are no free lunches in business or nature And now is the time to repay by return gifts.

Metaphors While trying to understand one thing As another, I call, at night time of day, A picture I get of self loose on things, A body’s nerves taut with expectation , An entire escape bid from plain truths.

Their wordy beauty haunts us ghosts And cultivates melancholy in our depths A despair wrought by their otherness Not words, thought whole and round . Words are metaphors for reaching out From a body’s prison, its thought limit. We propose land to buy and border And let imagination set a fancy price In a far future , for gold it will bring. The metaphor of a six by four land plot Comes to us so easily in our borders. Metaphors blur our borders so much.

Unusual Unusual and from a bed slept in, Rises a shadow stretching to roof In a light of memories flitting past Like the elephants in the west hills. There is some poetry in the offing . Rather unusual , a film of April heat Envelopes us all like a layer of dust A rubble from an upright building Or earth deep in pain in its nether Spewing rock dust as puff smoke From underground fires of passion, Not yet doused by springs of water. A smart phone aspires to be different To a dumb phone under warm touch. Game is how not to be dumb and old But how to be wise and old in fingers. All said , there is nothing unusual about Fingers stopping to point these things.

The Gir lion The lion turns head back for a moment As it walks into the shadows of a future. Kierkegard would look backwards to see The future endlessly tied up with the past. You cross a lion’s tracks towards future In dark shadows of the Sasangir forest That hold its vast tracts of past futures. The cowherds who live in the forest there Spot a calm understanding in the lion’s eyes As it looks back each time it walks past.

The page The page begins herein for me to take up Where I left off in the middle of yesterday

A big day to the day’s before, the then page. The day is a page blank and cruelly mindful Impelling a keyboard, the scroll of a night. The page causes a sputter ,a sound in fury Ending up in a spoof, crossing sound barrier, In a dust of sound , a light sawdust of stars. The finite sky is a page left off in the middle. The infinite sky is an endless scroll of pages. Mom is a page torn off from the book of sky, A page that sits on the wall of another page Staring infinitely from endless pages of a sky. The grandchild’s marriage The trees fall silent to the air-conditioner In a silence of aliveness that is a pause to live To shriek out your existence of omnipotence. You scream and you exist beyond the bridge, With lung power to shout out death’s silence.

This silence drowns the awkward sounds of life. A grandchild’s marriage is the very pause in life To re-validate your birth and fleshly continuation A shout from your lungs, a declaration of power.

Mere Past savannas, across the green horse-pastures With the snowed hills rising above them quietly And in several landscapes, one is moon-struck By a mere, just a mere semantic, the keyword.

The keyword is mere, from the poet’s struggle Like the artist who begins to paint with his words. Moon comes in just like that, like a pink Indiana Of cartographic need, the chosen color of map. Just and mere are freely interchangeable words.

A poem has to rise from somewhere in the word. Like words are , poems are mere chance events Abetted by mere absence of the definitive article. Poems are made from mere individuality of words Each of them carrying their unique life histories, Being rebels for cause, to beat the crap out of life.

The pigeons Their slow guter-gu dragged the day endlessly On mid-day’s napping children waiting vaguely To walk the hot sands of a dry river to the boat. They had made their family that season in twigs Brought from the guava tree of our neighbors. They marked time to this old time of the years Filled with gray smoked memories of a woman Who had fed children with love in cashew nuts. Her nuts would leave fragrances of roasted love Mixed with an endless guter- gu of the pigeons From their holed coop built on the barn’s wall As it overflowed with a neighbor’s annual rice.

They flew in our faces from pictures of a river-sea In the very space where they would live with cows And monks donning ocher robes to sea temples.

They flew in our faces from the tombs of sultans While they mapped their sleeping places in white.

Space The way a new space crowded in on us It was time that it had stifled our throats Leaving no chinks in our space for breath. Space will soon go out of breath in sky. The sky will go out of breath in a spoof. We zoom into frontiers of space in hills Where they sit unmoved and breathing. A touch will bring them forward to minds Overwhelming us to breath, like a woman That stifles breath in a preternatural hug. We now close space with the finger’s flick. Space will overfly us in Ganga over head. We hold our breath to experience its lack. Space flows over us in preternatural time.

The daily routine Your daily routine shall keep you alive And not unusually dead on some days When you are with cats play-acting sleep. All you do is stare and stare and stare From the whites of your opalescent eyes Their tears fed by ophthalmic drops. Just imagine what it is like to be dead To watch yourself alive as if a haystack Rising from a brown earth to a blue sky. Near a shaved tree ,the eyes look dead, Shriveled up like autumn on the earth. Morning of the poet awakens promptly To take his medicine and goes to sleep Without loss to complete a daily routine. The poems would rise to a glassy sky Broken like eyes crinkled in a wan smile.

(...on a typical day in the last year of William Burroughs’s life he would awaken in the early morning and

take his methadone (he became re-addicted to narcotics in New York in 1980, and was on a maintenance

program the rest of his life) and then return to bed...)

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/06/william-s-burrough s-daily-routine/

Ekphrasis- a quarry in ruins This time we did not go to the twin sister hills. We changed our track to a clearing in the rocks Towards the long arms of a dead stone quarry As gloomy machines poked an enormous sky. The quarry holes shimmered down somewhere Accumulating rain water that came and went Through monsoon and summer , rain and sun. The machines fell silent like holes they had dug Now accumulating dead time in their emptiness. Their twisted arms now gather the rusts of time. The holes they made to the silence of the hills Have vanished in the quarry’s bottomless history . A green mosque stood by a silver oak in prayer. Its walls whisper noon prayers , with lips gone.

(An ekphrasis is a verbal representation of a visual representation, a sort of art on art, an effort to fuse

together space and time. The poem is a verbal representation of an essentially spatial experience of

photography, a visual experience of a visit to a condemned stone quarry)

Paper flower A pink bougainvillea would spread out On a dumb computer that is far from Excited over its chromatic extravaganza. A crackling paper petal leaves you cold With no scent of the neighbor jasmine. The paper petal is surrogate for a poem, Especially after flower falls to the earth And is not a sticky mess in mud,valiantly Fighting your and its earthly ephemerality For days on end in the morning breeze.

The music of flowers The petals ranged against a centrality To a pitch of thought, flowing sideways. While a song was perfect for their bees Their fragrance was a rhythm of paper, A pink paper of written needles piercing An invisible space,an early morning fog. Pink -white petals fell one on the other To the earth of everyone’s muddy refuge. Their music was funeral in loud trumpet. Their color rustled against a broken sky. Their earthly sojourn will be a whimper A brief shout , to whoever it may concern.

Pure View The pure view envelops the light within Weaving darkness around core of being. Leaf around leaf promises a deep flower Nestled in contrast, a fierce independence Untrammeled by a reality check of color. The color is moss green away from pink. Pink is leaf around leaf, petal after petal. The pink reinforces a forced moss-green Of leaves mimicking tiny ground leaves Of slippery earth surfaces , rained walls. Men are daubed in pink, women in russet. Sun turns blushing red, a bleeding shame. The trees soar leaf after leaf, to a blue sky. The sky turns pure view, cloud after cloud. Pure view is nature brazenly imitating art. ( Taking pictures from Nokia Pure View 41 MP camera phone is pure joy , an act of willing suspension of

disbelief)

Mother’s day Some times it pays to think without bones The arm crook of sleeping mom with her kid My own head that is still bones nested in flesh. A pot that had held her silence is my memory, A river of purification in a boat, from behind As I would hurl her silence in revving waters , To return to the shore with no looking back. This night I look back to hear her lip silence, From up there in the wall looking down at me.

Culture in dust You bring up the great Gatsby in an old jacket In layers of dust on hard backs writ in fingers Surprise flowers in dust, not fully gathered yet But soon turning a sticky mess in earth’s crust. A silent man of movie turns away from sound He thinks is a mere fad that will go away to sky. You bring up the silent movie of people talking In slow eyes , exaggerated gestures and drawls. Culture is flowers in dust, a sticky mess indeed. Old man Borges imagined rows of books to roof, And their content spread in his blind mind’s eye . No longer is rows of dusty books left to imagine.

Books are electrical worms crawling in handsets. Culture is no more flowers in dust but plastic stuff That is immortal like a polythene bag that rustles In a morning breeze, for ever on a wayside bush.

Balance What have they done, these tiny ants, To her inner bone ear of many years Of waiting not to die and turn fossil? Ants too do not want to die but wait, As they crawl a mouse-pad and mind In the smallness of our larger years. Wonder how they keep their balance.

The ears are used to determine years Of fish, that have their otoliths intact. Can we know the ants’years by ears? Wonder if ants have ears as they walk. But one thing is clear in our own ear. They seem in collusion with maggots.

And you All night these very ants are working In the computer on their white stuff, Data packets ,bits and bytes on back Their back turns heavy , a leaden back Of sorrows in holes, a night left behind. The day will begin with your magical Line drawn round to keep them away You will take your little pesticide stick To draw a round charmed inner line As your lips will tremble with words.

Your words shall disappear with ants At dawn, as their holes are filled again With new white stuff , sorrows brought In endless new lines on internet wires Taking data parcels below their bodies. And you are left behind, your silly words.

Frame The yellow leaf is not an autumn leaf Before falling to the pure view frame. When inside the frame it will not fall Like the painted leaf of the story one. Only outside will it fall and loosely off.

The gold of it arises from a sunrise Of the balcony, in shadows to form, Birds forming to wake on the house. And when they do they are little v’s Painted in the gold of a dawn’s sky.

Just juxtapose yellow leaf with paper, The paper of a pink flower trembling As in deep cold before a soft breeze. You now have pink plus yellow frame In the slightly inebriated morning sky Without its native hues of resolution.

Water They say we are ninety percent of water. We are hydro-static about it naturally, In our grand ecstasy of a tongue touching The back of the throat shouting hoarsely. The throat goes kaput as our ten percent Turns a notch up, to form a series of holes In earth pot for throwing our ten percent In streams flowing , as water to the earth And a part of ten per cent to fire and sky.

Faith All that is wrong is righted in the body. Several things keep fighting in its liquid. A tiny new mess of creatures will trigger Fisticuffs and liquid risings in red blood. They are not welcome to add to its heat As the mercury is rising in a piece of glass And we are highly helpless in our blood.

A fierce lady comes over new neem leaves Her tongue sticking out, our own mother. She rules our tiny creatures who shall go At her leafy touch, her tongue sticking out. She will right all that is wrong in the body In smoke and incense, in a few body shakes. The creatures shall leave at her command. The mercury shall no more rise in our blood.

Interior The softness of its textures is my possibility A skilled assembly of corners in my space. Here I create space as time’s multiplication, In wind-blown doors and curtained windows Brushing palpable wind, the colors of prism.

The colors are my ghostly existence outside, A sun dwelling in my senses, ruffling my hair Creating dark patches of my exfoliated skin. The sun lives in my interior as room partner , An extension of space through several times.

Fairy tales It looks you are through with the stock Of fairy tales told in the evening hour As the night’s stars appear one by one To occupy their positions in the hall. A soft breeze will stir in jasmine bush From evening’s wetness of fresh leaves And come to far reaching conclusions As to the prince finally saving the dame So everyone is duly happy at hall’s end. The hall is empty with the stars coming One by one, as your breeze gently stirs In the flower bush and the garden lizard Looks at your waiting for the next move. The lizard is your own word in the offing. Your reasons are a grand abeyance show As the lizard is waiting for the next move And a prince moves ahead on horseback Toward everyone’s happiness of wedding.

Breeze The child wind is a spirit, like the fallen leaf That rolls along towards the earth’s infinity Riddled with false matter from its past sky. The mischief maker touches human cheeks Provoking them to endless fits of kiddy mirth With the hair falling loosely about like grass Unfurled in the hours before a wind gets it . Breeze is no laughing matter in a hand fan, Nor in trees shaking with excess sunshine On the days when mercury rises in the glass. Shake trees , will you? asks nostalgic mom, Her sultry despair climbing hard nut trees Looking for child of the wind in neem trees. Actually it is found shaking a polythene bag In a bedraggled bush, just outside of the city.

The broken world In the night we collect pieces of a broken world For the after-life of a body promised, an illusion Of seeing, a rainbow now shimmering, now gone . The world’s whole remains shattered to this day A sound broken in parts, a color diffused to sky. There is the body gone to the mountain breeze Broken from our world, away from our touching. Let us sing of this broken world, its shattered sky The silhouette of a body disappearing to sunset A song broken from breeze, a broken mountain .

Sleep in a train These are my real things born of a sleep The real objects existing out of my sleep On disembodied walk with a lonely train In its tracks continuing to its gray gravel Endlessly as my own objects , that have Borne the brunt of temporary existence. My existence is temporary to the train And the gravelly things hitting its bottom, Sparks that fly off its wheels as tangents, Temporary things but real sleep things , Light sculptures in the night of the train. Sleep is light sculpture in a night of sky. The train’s light beam is sleep flying off, A temporary thing waking from the night.

Absurd She asks death’s lord god to defer his visit Until grandchild’s wedding and her wardrobe. Her travel plumes wait in night’s black-yard. You see his smirk, her admission of defeat As uptight dress is getting ready for journey And a slip is in hand with unknown number.

Who is admitting defeat in this waiting game And who will blink first, as her eyes meet his , In this absurd script , written afresh each time With a smirk alternating between him and her?

Bones At times hard facts would touch our tiny feet As they flipped charred bone pieces in the sand From freshly smoked men , in spirals of smoke. The waters shimmered down skirting the hill Through the upright palms on the other side Nodding their vigorous heads to newer bones On their way to the river bed to turn smoke. They were fine clay , the shards of burnt earth Only yesterday’s hard facts with their own feet.

The library With not much of a sugar in the eye And nothing coated with sweetness It is a vestigial fear of rain and clouds As the books stack up to the infinity From a hyphenated to a seeing sky Whose stars turn sand grains of sea , Each a microcosm writ from a night. Books can contain anything of light They take away your breath smartly As eyes adjust to their intense light.

Bokeh At least the finite will keep the breath intact In the end , till the mountains in a blue haze The twin hills that seemed to climb the sky For a telltale eagle to beat about the bush.

The bush does nothing except to sit pretty The lizard is its home ,a destination comfort An earth not moving away to a far off near.

Bushes do not move but think as if to move But not to a shocking loss of their finiteness To indifferent infinity of hills not being there. In a bokeh of a pure view I shall fix the focus Round the lizard to rescue bush and myself From the infinity of a bare naked visual field.

Chain The words will go on as eternity chain Linking endless skies of watery nights, Words trickling down from dark nights . Words that have been stars shimmering In sleep’s crevices , in its secret places, Words not coming out wearing a meter But a plain rhythm like water falling off The leaking faucet at the midnight hour. I share their eternity in this being chain The awful sounds of an alphabet’s music Like graffiti on the city’s rocks in lakes As birds whiten them with fevered flights.

Tea In afternoons we drank tea that rose In mild hot vapors from our deep cup Sweet to a severe tongue of scalding, Woken up from a sour belly’s dreams Of a fearful afternoon of midsummer. Tea would go into hiding behind bushes Waking in afternoons of female hands Deft for plucking, tongues busy crying. Three leaves and bud go back, to baskets Like dreams plucked one by one in sleep For tea- taste by expert tongue and finger. Only the best would pass the test leaving The unselected crying in afternoon sleep.

Full Is there a thing that is full like a ripeness That is all, of seasons , through the year I ask in eyes full with factory made tears, As tears do not flow back in drain mesh. The eyes are full of an optimism of night. Night is full with absence of sleep and wind. Wind is full with a rainy optimism from hills. Life is full with language and no currency. Currency is half-full with its hope and faith. The night is full with a stick tapping sound. The earth makes sounds with a watchman. Night watchman’s mouth makes its sounds With a blow whistle at a night of fullness. Life is full with words and sounds and lines As fruit to be dropped any time in fulness In season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

Waterfall Nothing about it is permanent except Going over edge in the gondwana plain A ninety feet drop in an abyss of spray A fog of death ’s hell, a brimstone frame Serrated like winter sky , a green bush Hanging slowly, now here , now gone.

Go down to the hellish depths,in its fog. Look your eyesight up to a pure white Streak from an old sky, a permanent sky Holding no permanent water ,but a fall A fall dizzily impermanent, set in its blue.

Grass lily A bearded yankee sang of leaves of grass But where were its flowers bursting in color? A bulb of ego can sprout in verse and sky As water would hit India’s bottom of wind Its hills shedding the tears of a virgin’s loss.

The grass lily’s color hits you in the navel And leaves you dazed , prostate and flailing Just woke from a sleep of temporary fugue. When in camera view , it is unearthly color Far away from rainbow’s seven or combo A view where flowers are simply overstated.

Derelict On the upper story is telltale remainder Of a fine smile of yesteryears , a direct Message from Christ, a new shiny star In plastic paper in light, gently swaying To December wind’s Christmas carols

A fine celebration over christmas cupcake By rubber man now south with daughter Grown and graceful, a fine Maria of angel A lily fragrant from a monsoon breaking.

Our heads are derelict , carrying ruined Walls from yesteryears flaked off by rain Accumulated rain of bitter experiences But the remnants still sport a life-giving A green plant shooting from derelict space.

The driver’s mustache A wide and long handlebar mustache Trembled with life and a car smoothly Flowed as life, driving its bloody heart But one morning as the sun would rise Its blood trickled down to its last sand. Two plastic tubes could smooth its flow But tubes are the commerce of medicine That flows smoothly, on warm pockets. And the mustache had to stop quivering With all emotion as pockets went cold.

The reluctant old man In the beginning it would sound funny Like the short squat cries of brown birds That have come back to a roost season. Any old man has got to look ridiculous And feel it so in short squat bird cries. He did not feel that awkward before birth Why now before a locomotive of a disease That will carry him to the little black dots On starred skies’map, like dots of towns On a lazy map lying stretched to eternity. Disease takes him there chugging clackety But on foot the old man is rather reluctant. (For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it. But to look at the stars always makes me

dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask

myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we

take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in

this reasoning is this: that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we

can take the train.

So it doesn’t seem impossible to me that cholera, gravel, pleurisy & cancer are the means of celestial

locomotion, just as steam-boats, omnibuses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old

age would be to go there on foot.")

Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh c. 9th July,1888

Phone gossip

We call it the possibility of a happening A language of thought, of a meditation A way of happening, not just an event As the phone unfurls on a pair of ears. We construct life ,wall by wall ,corridors In empty spaces of language and speech. In the graybeards exist many possibilities To hymns, God-invocations and silences.

The phone vibrates a silence of thought By hand gestures, a pantomime on wall. The ears speak actions jumping on wall, As eyes remain screwed to their ghosts.

Enema All this sadness is hers and not mine It is her kneecap that is not working To climb the stairs powered by a lift Not working now , sadly, out of power.

This sadness is hers she refuses to own And passes it to me nursing my own, My own sadness congealed in blood As the general sadness of humankind. Sadness is not hers but enema maker’s Pain in the arse is mankind’s, not hers.

Unread

I would better smell the unread growing To a huge pile of golden straw at dusk In a read later’s vast continuum of sky. The gold shall disappear at early dawn When a whole new pile appears to smell Fresh dew-wet straw scraping the blue. We always remain unread straw people. We are for demolishing our straw piles To wear their hats in our literary leisures But always put it off to tomorrow’s dusk.

Conversation

We did little to further the conversation. Our gestures would vanish in the wet air, Our gait formal and awkward in the sand As cactii bloomed between legs of dogs. Stray dogs jumped and ran to other dogs Beyond the mound, to fishermen’s shacks The shacks that sported colorful garments Before the conversant sea of fishing nets. The nets broke off ongoing conversation Between moluscks and hole drilling-crabs Making drag-marks as if of formal nets, Nets broken like holes in mosquito nets Letting in mosquitoes to buzz near ears. The sky stretched like a drying garment Broke in holes to let in sea-conversation With a moon that would listen endlessly.

Voice

Thinking is a language’s voice stopped Wind in coconut leaves briefly stopped While cock crowed a train in woman’s Voice embalmed in sleep before coffee. Train will arrive soon on the sun’s back And find voice of woman on its clackety. The milk van is on its feet finding voice On the slurp on kids’lips as eyes blearied. Soon it will be the voice of school on back

Little girl giggles of memorizing formulae On pony-tails ding-dong on uniform backs As buses blow ready horns in road corners.

Coconuts find dancing voice before dawn In lost moons and wind gains,before eagles. Eagles will arrive to find voice before trains.

The silver mountain

The silver mountain disclosed answers To a meditating saint in its deep recess Now sky blue with priests interceding For us on behalf of a phallic stone god. Then were no blue - red painted pillars Enclosing people bathing phallus gods With smooth gluey banana milk paste, Just a saint and his god in banyan trees Sprouting from silver recesses for wind. The saint would look for beauty in jungle And in silver mountains, on his cross-legs Blinded by a gold of sun , a child’s doubts A flicker in the mind like a child’s smile. We search beauty in blue stone pillars Climbing kitschy colors engulfing men. Their beauty flows in white gluey paste Around phallus gods in silver mountain. The mountain is no more silver but blue With white clouds about it as gluey paste.

Password

You say it and shall pass like Change of guard in Elsinore fort. But the lock-bar does not slide Like half-open toothless mouth . You shall remember who mom Had been before her marriage. You remember mom all the way Before she was dead and gone Further back to silly giggling girl Before she had worn that finery To her new life, your new birth. Her own lock-bar opened to enter The half-open toothless mouth With a password open sesame. One always forgets it to return. The captcha is hard to decipher.

The hibiscus

We have never looked deep in its heart It carries at the top waving in the breeze Loving a bee and the colors of butterfly. Cognition names it hibiscus for poems But poems are no hibiscus, with anther, At summit sprinkling pollen on breeze. Airy creatures will land on the summit. They will make it a hibiscus pure view For a stamen to nod in excited whispers For the breeze to carry a floral message.

Closure

The dad’s absence hole is waiting closure Of a grief never felt, yet staying open in The space between us and a body’s sleep. We live alongside a grief’s body staring At the ceiling fan that has never buzzed. The fan was never really meant to buzz For the tiny blood flowing up and down, A bundle of baby flesh shrieking closure. The gaping mouth in its mother’s breast Stays open for closure of grief never felt.

Cats in the clouds Rainless and cotton-white it had turned A whiskered cat staring down from eye Over the spiked antenna of the neighbor A picture of a ghostly vision of a feline.

How can it disappear from my picture? It is as if cloud cats jump walls to disappear In the bushes to the other side of tree. The eye-hole stays but the rest of the cat Has gone , cat-silent and rubber-footed . A cloud-eye is what remains of its ghost. Cats disappear from the virtual picture The same way as they do in the real sky.

The wild elephant

The tribal guide would not not let us down Into the crunch of leaves and tiger paw-prints. From such height you can see the mountains. The secret is to hold on and not let it move To mountains over thorns , low-slung bushes With blue clouds at the top presaging storm. Without ankush it takes us to the inner animal With trees uprooted, mountains pulled nearer Without the dusk shining from the rear flanks. Muthu teaches us to wield ankush to it to go Where we want to go, to the blue mountains. (The mind is a rider on an elephant. My own mind used to wander wherever pleasure or desire or lust led

it, but now I have it tamed, I guide it, as the keeper guides the wild elephant-Buddha) Inchoate In the hours before a night crashes Our meanings are formed as wings.

Wings are a shambles of flimsy art Exquisite art of a silver filigree done In sleep and dreams between sleep, The moth-wings left on a rainy night. Marginal words are inchoate ideas A shambles of thought , a silver filigree Of wings that pile up like fallen leaves To be scooped up the next morning To throw away behind a white wall.

Smile

Just this happiness wish at the street corner With no birthday in cakes and songs on lips, As you coast along on a floating noise of feet. A smile curves at lips corner near silver hair. Today is not even your birthday but could be. Who knows somebody is smiling in your back. I for one smile behind my back at your corner.

Lines A few red spots turn lines as a sun dies. They are on a body flying southwards.

Birds are white spots under fingernails. Fingers flutter wings to call birds down. Tiny red spots disappear from a dusk sky And the body turns to sky at a soft dusk And azure, beyond a brown rock of lake. The lake swirls around the birdless rock And the rock swirls around a birdless sky As the birds turn fingers fluttering wings Calling other birds down from a dusk sky. Birds are now white spots, v’s on canvas May be lines from white spots in fingers. Sky is a line joining white spots of birds. The rock is a line living in the lake’s line . Sky is a fine line living above a lake’s line.

Own My own thing is this very empty space

Since nobody has claimed this as own Like the dog on a leash claiming his , Shouting at tree’s silences in corners. The cricket claims his own in the bush And around a forgot house on the lake, Now a grand view of buzz- mosquitoes. Poems are buzz- mosquitoes owning all This piece of unreal estate at midnight. Their shrill cries are documents of title.

Agape

While at the stand we keep wondering With mouths agape, forgetting to close. All the time we ask immortality forgetting To desire eternal youth to fading bodies.

The cicada keeps its mighty mouth open Its sounds a never ending stream of youth. We open our drawers only to keep them Wide and agape as our mouths wonder. Wonder never ceases while youth is gone.

Sleep Sleep is not doing nothing with body But a possibility of switching off Like for instance in sleeping with.

You have to sleep with a possibility, A metaphor for love that kills sleep.

Just when you turn a blind corner At the corner tree in a windy dance You sleep off your wind in the hair. The wind gone the hair still stands As piece of avant garde reporting. You only have to sleep once with And not do anything with the wind. What we mean sleep we mean with. Or if you please, we may agree to off, And not alone in a midnight pillow.

Well being Like the old poet we had a well to look in With a bucket lowered gently to touch its Perturbed waters in their broken moons. Midnight was fearsome with green snakes Lurking in ghostly hibiscus trees standing.

A boy in knickers could not bend too low For fear in belly, with no Narcissus -love. Fear perked up like a piece of balcony sky And crawled in half-pants to feet below.

The bucket fell to it with deep dull thud As its rope had slithered down a pulley Like a vague water snake searching frogs. The waters came up to sprinkle moons In tiny puddles on the stone saucer rim.

The jungle flower Near the lazy rock and its green sky A jungle flower would bloom whitely Like whirring wheel of a firecracker, A toothed wheel of tiny locomotion. The breeze stirred its shape into many,

With false feet of anthers , disheveled Hair of dancing to a morning breeze.

Near its heart is a dash of soft orange Set in a white crystal of perfect view, With contrapuntal note by brown bee Hovering to a hesitant landing away From prying camera for macro views. The rock rose grandly to a summer sky Looking down on a single jungle flower A white pride in its green rock bottom. The bee landed briefly on bee outlines, Many shapes vaguely embracing bee.

The super-moon My super-moon drifted away to its sleep Behind rain-clouds ,while a super-mom Danced away blues on the small screen. Big bright orb was ghost on another sky.

My purest view had to be near a guess

Behind rain - cloud, a dastardly destroyer Of men in folded prayers on the snow hills.

A moon ghost became far from my truth With men and trees across its luminosity, Ghosts of men and dark trees in a breeze Violently disagreeing with its astral views.

Stages

It turned out their world was not a stage

But many stages as players looked down Their eyes popping out in disbelief about The growing years of mustache and glory Turning to mud , in cloud dust and rumble. A handful was the rat-slime about a temple That turned eyes to pearls, passing stages. And nothing of them that doth change but Doth suffer a river change, a rat that came Crawling from the trapped valley of a glacier.

(Thousands of pilgrims to the Himalayan shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath have perished

,caught in a flash flood triggered by a cloud burst : Those are pearls that were his eyes Nothing of him that doth change But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange

The tempest : William shakespeare

The god of the hills All the machinery is there ,a siren’s blow A blade, a voice to the right, some words. The blade cuts through ice, mud and lies Saying it is words from the night, a sleep.

It is bodies in their own words from space A chopper on its way down , men stopping Short, other people living and some dead For a hill visibility that is missing from life.

Silence is all ,a stone phallus in the hills Snug in the cave ,a light from earth lamp A blue and dusted god with a river in hair And a moon no longer super, far from us. Words are his dreams, a god in snow hills, A god submerged in the stream of his wife.

White clouds In that sky, like preternatural birds , Lay soft white clouds, full of rain Drops for red roses by the lakeside

Lying in wait for somebody ’s car Boot to pick up so as to lie in wait With the wet clothes on balconies. The white clouds are wet clothes Hung by the sky gods for drying. As they drip-drop they will turn rain Drops on lake roses lying in wait For cars to pick up, to lie in wait On balconies with drying clothes. Meanwhile , soft white clouds will Turn temporary cat’s eyes peering Down in our camera’s pure view To lie in wait permanently in eyes.

Money Times we feel warm and upbeat in pants With money ,as with pebbles from beach Near a sand castle built on our child foot. We bring home pockets of cash to forget Hot flushes, our years hot with knowing.

We know oldies with their gleam in eyes About certain money schemes hatching Gold ducks , the gold from duck stomachs Dropping as Sunday’s eggs in bare fundas. And later, on four shoulders towards dust, The gleam would go home to their sunsets Beyond rocks, their children smiles gone.

Scraping the night I have to be a cat scraping the night Confusing between idea and thing. You may call me a soft landing cat On night’s tin roof with no hot feet. Its corrugations collect windy leaves

Having lost the previous day’s sun. The cat is missing and since gone . Rain snakes overflow corrugations With blowing yellow leaves to floor. But the cat is messing and not gone With a kitten held by a loose scruff. Mom cat is searching for other night On another hot roof, in scalded feet. Kitten turns small night’s scraping. The scraping of the night is a sound In the inner lobe of an ear’s poems. Cats are poems on your hot tin roof They sky-drop and flow as rain waters Snaking through night’s corrugations.

(A gentle recall of Raja Rao’s novel The Cat and Shakespeare) Who is this hooded man? The women are at their frivolous pursuits At lake, with a shameless crow on the tree. Soon the crow will be black in wistful air

With a princess’jewel, to women’s shouts, Their delicate fingers pointing to the sky. There is a Krishna- flippancy to the crow That flies away with a jewel hiding shame. The women walk on their hushed whispers. The hooded man seems a crow running away With the princess’beauty on rising bosom That went up and down on the golden jewel. He is in fact a self-redeeming black soul A bored painter of languid women of myth. These women are figures from his canvas Bored with pointing fingers at crows in sky. (Raja Ravi Verma’s painting:

Walking down the Himalayas As the sun set very high behind the tall pines His benediction rained down on sharp stones

Laid the way down to keep hoofs from slipping. One never knew when the sun had disappeared As the horse mounts were pricking our behinds. We then set our burdens down, our hurt bodies . Horses and men went their way , through turds. The smell of the turds stayed in the walking air And as we walked we sniffed it as if fresh lilies. The sun had vanished in crickets of darkness Leaving behind a fear of loneliness in bodies As if horse turds would never go away, petrified In our bodies ,like our body odor that never left. Without the horses our bums hurt less and less But fears grew ,as turds persisted in their smells Hardly distinguishable from the fears in bodies. We then thought of our phallus god whose leave We had taken at the top, our lips trembling with Silent prayers that resounded in the empty hills Coming back unanswered, not reaching the top. Hours later, in a lamp’s flicker, we saw this horse Standing in the corner, that would take us down. This time the ride down was no pain in the arse Nor did turd smells offend our upturned noses. (Journey down from the Kedarnath shrine to Gaurikund in the Himalayas) Dance As they danced, their limbs would contort, Their torsos to gradual motion like worms That have emerged to the rain on the road. They flutter their eyes set in bird-like faces Feathers here , there, like dropped bodies.

Their motions are of pure air, of the swans That have trooped out ,into a flooded street From wedding function , just out of the hall. Their energy levels are high, grace touching. You put them all together on a floor writhing. They look as if emerging from a primeval sin An apple here, a snake there, a devil’s gleam. Their helpless cries rend the air, their thrusts Extending their pelves to cottons of heavens. (The genre referred to here is the quiant Bollywood group dance performed by a hero-figure with several

anonymous pelves thrusting in sync. just behind him) Hard rain It is a hard rain that is going to fall On a night of dark trees and puppies Snug in the street , their flaxen skins Upright and bare ,white to the bone. The blue eyed son is asleep to night, The darling one, in deepest of dreams.

A corner dog whines in crying poems About a puppy afraid of a door open, A white skin of puppy open to wound. He is afraid of hard hard rain a-falling. The blue-eyed son is afraid of a pillion With trucks going past, their bumpers Scraping his knees,the bad-eyed ones Their faces painted black with evil eye.

(Taking off on Bob Dylan’s beautiful A hard rain’s A-gonna fall consisting of first lines of songs that he

thought he would never have time to complete) Rooms They lived in rooms with view holes And clouds hovered over their hairs. Her body lived past a blur of partition And his ,in this, hearing her knitting. Kitchen smells wafted to his papers. The flies went on to an electric flynet. They were her words drifting as smells.

They are, alike, alive in their rooms Like flies in the flynet, willingly stuck. The newspaper is alive on a spread lap. Its stories were to be caught in flynet, With the lap unable to close on center And the letters to editor complaining.

Phone booth We sit on the edge of a bench in the square. From here I can see his incantatory gestures Pointed nowhere, inquiring into life’s meaning. The fog will soon go in vanishing fingerprints On the phone booth’s frosted wall in a gold tint As the sun is slowly rising from its mountains.

His fingers are pointed to a mass of humanity, Trying to address their existential questions . But for now he hangs up the phone to come out Largely concerned about some cinema tickets.

Cigarettes and poems We were filling skylight with swirls of smoke From a burning mouth, ascending a dark sky. We have now burnt the white sticks to cinders And flipped the ash to the other side of poetry.

Emptied On the keyboard it is death that comes To the fingers, from the pages of an aeon. A philosopher’s dad dies, not sad in death Nor is his son who is keyboard-occupied All about the general death of mankind.

We are emptied of sadness in our eyes, Like star-gazing eyes of our dead fathers . We see a somber coffin in an Italian village In a procession filled with general sadness.

Henry Cartier-Bresson’s photograph Funeral in Italy

Old ink-stain Amoeba of an old ink-stain in drawer Moves, slowly squirming like a body Photo upon photo, body upon body Amoeba ever shifting, its false feet Grab space within and out,zooming in, Zooming out, little ants of flowers. Ink-stain cries itself to space within,

A desert of unoccupied space ,humps Moving up and down, in mock laughter Of camel mouth, about passing camels Through a needle eye,a waterless ship. For now eye is transposed,the letter And the needled one of addled brain. You cannot pass the camel in its eye. OMG ,this is no ink-stain,only inkistan.

Marriages A risk-return trade off is actually a return Of the typewriter to its saw of teeth ,letters Slightly risen, gone except on deed’s back.

On the footpath are machines clicking away Earning daughter’s marriages, their breaks, Some broken, some made broking them. The risk-return trade off is routinely made Depending on whose daughter and the typist Her future is after all a risk-return trade off, All risk and no return, except the typewriter’s.

Shelter Up here in the hills we need a shelter From sky ,recently angry with our father Stone god father lying collected in niche Waiting for trickles of bath and coconut. Her love is so mud unlike while pouring From our stone god father’s matted hair Before a recent spat concerning children. Mama is looking for us under a tarpaulin Continuing her thunder program and mud. She would hurl mud at our stone god dad

And at the middle man before him and us. The middleman would climb a top storey And wait for anger to turn nice and cool . He was looking for a shelter from love. She would take his son while lightning . Poor man had no shelter from her love. We all need a shelter from mom’s love. (Massive floods and mud slides caused by a cloud burst around the Kedarnath holy shrine in the

Himalayas has led to loss of several lives and untold destruction to the pilgrimage centre and the people of

the area)

Torque As we go along the wind and tree And men in rain hoods ,mini-palm Leaf worlds,we see a blink of eyes A sudden torsion, a wannabe flesh Of the sky, caught briefly on leaves Poetry words are buzzing like rain

Around the ears under earphones Duty-bound to muffle all sounds Except a Nokia’s pure view magic. The pure view is missing in views. There is space to be inhabited here Between paras, a dream of space As rain snakes pour from roof tiles. We are waiting for torque to happen That will twist fragments to circles. Each fragment will now leap-flame To rainy night,to new wind and tree.

Petal A petal kicks air asymmetrically large For the blossom to be, breaking light From earth of the pot, in a rain mist. The eye turns misty in beauty of light But has a symmetry issue with mind. The rose must break off a guilty petal For blossom to come out in its light . The full blossom grows in rain mist. Rain pearls sprout on petals in knots As in my mind in its folds of red meat. Mind is now a rose with rain pearls. The guilty petal has gone a long way

To the rain mist, the earth of the pot. The mind must shed its guilty petal Hanging in mists of yesterday’s eye.

Wild tune This is a wild tune ,folks, from snow hills Of woman grass heads,as flute sings ruin On precipices over watching endless tea. Wild tune is now a poem of personal ruin. If it is wild tune, it is a poem ,says Frost, Rather frostily of waves of snowed hills. Frosty breath goes of mountains falling. Tea breath that was cloud is here water.

Water is earth and mud about stone god. Stone god is helpless about violent wife. Violent wife is piece of mother deranged Because of progress dams in her bosom. Her tune goes wild and somewhat eerie In the nights about dead people waiting For their fires to be lit after copters come. Copters bring the wood for the wild tune. Stone god dad is waiting for his death ash.

(A busy pilgrimage until the flashfloods, Kedarnath today has turned into a virtual ghost town .....There’s

an eerie silence at Phata village, broken each time a chopper lands or takes off. Three pundits are

performing the last rites near the river Man-dakini : Times of India report) Gold Gold is heaving bosom, statuesque neck. Gold is not itself that glitters in early sun. We grab it for chance to make us undying Beyond our sunsets, tall coconut groves With flickers of smiles, in windy dances. So many grams are for so much glitter. A baby is not crying in ears hole-pierced That shall carry gold as girl body to man. But her missing teeth shall sing like wind Till innocence of song loses to man’s gold Or her missing teeth are a gold of sunset.

Pebbles Fine turned pebbles I drop in a right pocket With the hand in the other, to pick up more And when I go home I shall empty them all And drop them on the floor for rolling away. Smooth and round they are to a finger feel With the singing embarrassing to the pants. They clatter like shriveled up brains in skulls, The wind in the palms on the days of cyclone, With cicadas calling forth nights of darkness. They are smooth and rounded by sea song With the edges gone to the hem of the wave. They taste bland but quench your sea hunger.

A little pebble in your mouth, round and smooth, appeases, soothes, makes you forget your hunger, forget

your thirst. Samuel Beckett, out of Molloy (1951)

Wrinkles They would appear like the moon craters When arms were strong and up-swinging And they could bring down moon matter. The rain could fill them with a day’s water Enough for thirsty crows in nearby trees.

(Poet says they are guests who had called When

you were away, passions and vices That registered

arrivals in guest notebook But you noticed the

entries later in the day) At times they were plough- marks for rice,

As you tied a pair of bullocks to the yoke, Their eyes running blindfolded for clouds And rain that poured to bring life to earth In rice that would sprout to fill our bellies. They were the very furrows that would linger As we knitted brows, in passions and vices And insights that vanished leaving marks.

Asymptote A reluctant asymptote shall meet curve At the infinity through darkness of trees On the middle path of grassy wilderness Worn by many other walks, other curves. A bush tailed jackal stirs bush like wind. But not now , no noon barking jackals as Emerge from bushes , only street dogs. An asymptote will meet the jungle curve Some where up in sky where rain stops. Clouds meet mountains asymptotically. Death shall meet bodies asymptotically Somewhere in the infinity of closed eyes. Sleeping pillows float on tales in making Death stories of people, shoulder- heavy.

We shall meet death curve at the infinity.

Grain You are not sure about the sun in clouds With the grain in your eyes, petite pearls That do show up as thinking turns gray And impermeable, tears all but missing. World is a heap of grain to see rainbows Hid in glassy grease bubbles blowing up On a rainy evening, as cars make beeline To the gas station, blowing color on rain. In a hills square ,men in overcoats are grain And god- engineer, who drafted the world. Only camera makes pretty picture in grain, Of sun turned to grain by mists of a hill city.

Nap Younger brother of your night’s sleep A little less deep , flowing to day’s edge Touches the fringe and the jacket softly Walking you calmly to awareness ahead A white wall of the world doing things.

Sometimes is a nasty shock to see stuff Walk out of a noon’s clouds, rain in sun. Drool if you must, use a napkin to wipe And go back to your misty nap, napper. Dreams are about the same, their stories, The same logic that propels night plots.

Ironing All these things are yet to be ironed out The essential differences, rough edges. Go near and they are not that smooth And blue as seem in a morning vision. Our father has a large three eyed vision In ancient snows,where mother flows. Mother flows from dad’s matted locks And gets spanking angry,behind his hills As dad’s brow is furrowed for no reason. The scraggy sea needs to be ironed out When we go near we see a moon fixation. The moon is itself pock-marked on its face Like the sky of serrated clouds a while Before mountain wind whittles them down. When the sea is angry and clouds violent

They turn earth to smoothly ironed sheet With trees and houses leveled in one go.

Stench We were going through our progress When we came on a chemical stench On a terrible stench from air in trees As if we had been dead and smiling And the ants crawled all around us With earth lamp flickering about us We paused mapping progress sniffing. Our olfactory stopped in the lamplight The ammonium nitrate luckily passed On our palate in dark guttural depths. We smelt it in jasmines of moonlight And resumed mapping our progress.

Worms The thought of suicide ,in a poet’s mind Is a bit premature,kept for later in the day Especially when surrounded by prayer. Suicide is deeply afraid and glamorous From the examined life of a bearded man.

You suffuse yourself with creepy thoughts But caution, suicide remains philosophy. The poet has no philosophical pretension. He is just exploring words,their other side. Turning over stones for the worms under .

Shy In the bus we were shy to make chorus Singing to a passing road dragging us To the nether end, our sleeve tugged By a passing breeze, shy of our trees. The trees were shy of soulful singing By a bus full of men who would tremble Like autumn leaves before a sky wind. Their singing would bring an eye mist From frosted trees, under film of dust. Shyness brought forth not much music With all the high notes hid in the throat. We were not shy enough not to bring forth The lower ones, sung softly to ourselves.

Hole To conveniently gloss over the hole One needs to forget the cool draught From a crevice in a running bus door. Sit still in bus to think general holes With legs drawn up in lotus position, The way you can be a hole in the bus. Holes are sunk within a winding logic . There are no independent real holes But with you not being there in time, You can be a hole imagined in space. But why gloss over independent holes. They let in cold air on bloodless skin. The wind hisses in your hole of being. Your whole being is a hole in your skin. Your skin is just a hole in general wind.

Murmur Why say it if it is under the breath And is a whimper, like the soft rain Of a midnight in a closed window. I ask in the breath’s under- sound Just a wheeze above the mustache A shuffle under door of rat’s ghosts Like the word whimper that fails to Fall , rise after fall, to fall before rise And failing is an act of not saying-it.

Take the trouble to say if you must Not a lip to rise, a whisker of quiver. You alone shall say it, not the other. Why not say , to fall on diaphragm Mildly quivering to passing breeze A hoarse whisper, a grain in throat As it moves up rising and a-falling

It is a girl thing in the throat of skirt A voice in the emptiness of a drum Music that fails to rise, a drumstick That is stuck in the air before strike.

The butterfly moment There is not much we can do about it A butterfly fluttering wings in China. My body goes into its midnight ache In the morning I watch a tube to hear A certain Frith of a marvelous moment A guitar that flutters on wind waves Set by China butterfly, wind crossing The Himalayas to get a garbage truck Moving on ringing bells, a bird cooing On a fat tree, a mosquito’s bite marks On a dark midnight’s wakeful bodies.

The butterfly was a crawling ugh thing On the road against my woodland shoes Of yesterday’s walking toward old man Who dragged a limp foot for exercise,

A transformed caterpillar certain baby Of today’s man would eat like a toffee A would- be butterfly of Monday blues In school going stomachs on fat books. The black itchy creature of ugly disgust Is his own fear of death, a decrepit body Trying to create its marvelous moments Marking beauty of tiny things, rainbows Held aloft on grease bubbles on wet days. There is not much we can do about it, Only project butterflies on ugh things.

Some times Some times it is just a pony-tailed girl On a counter squeaking from thin lips Like what is right with you and/or wrong About a body backward, a certain way Your blood flows back against its walls.

Some times it is rain on the tarpaulin An empty rustling of leaves ,a slippage From the corrugated roof of dried fruit A hissing song through a tooth missing A microscope viewing the purple liquid For squiggly little worms, in white shirt A white uniform with a hanging necktail.

Some times it is possibility of ceasing , Imaging a world without you, in internet Of things, its meme of continuing ashes A meme forgotten in the heap of ashes Scooped up , dissolved in a sea of stars.

Sun’s own day The finger is pointed to a new flower in balcony And thence to a rainless cloud ,a sprouting sun. A translucent blue defers to the low-rise gold In the blankest sky ever eaten by pearly clouds . The wind plays mischief with yesterday’s flower And flower promptly drops from a helpless mother. All this while our sun friend would rise slowly On the lazy Sunday from under his sleeping blanket Of thick and silky cotton rolls of rainless cloud. Sunday is his own day,not another son-of-a-gun’s.

The duet At the bus back we dream and aspire To our singing, with the wind in duet As they do in filmy parks round trees. Our heroines are our own thinking. Our duet is not a song on our wet lips But where we get our stomach warmer. We get much too warm in stomachs To sing any duets but our lips tremble In pure lip-sync,our hands and feet up In our classical style of breaking wind. Happens so in duets with wind in tow.

Decrepit man, you have a date in diary, As you flip pages, with floral messages, Your duet sung with a horned creature.

Attic The village house has an attic for pickles For a fussy grandmother to bring down For son-in-law arriving from far village. The pickles are brought down , sun-dried As son-in-law is bathed and fed in love. Has’t he come from far-off paddy fields In knee-deep slush, writhing with snakes With half -eaten frogs in closed mouths? There is paddy lady rolling tongue on song About rain to bring rice on the sun’s death. In slush the sun falls to temporary death. Just before dusk he will be whisked away To the posterior of an attic behind the hills. All grandma’s pickles are left to dry in sun. But the sun is dead in attic behind grandma. The son-in-law is caught in the slush of rice. He rolls up his lower garment as the snake

Loosens mouth around the half-eaten frog.

Sleeping birds At night I would open the door on the bird That flew back and forth from a vast void As if it had never flown or lived in tree-nest In the big hole outside that sucked all sleep. Sleep would suck both the bird and room That took no birds ,only holes that sucked. Sleep was the biggest hole inside my room.

Sleeping birds never lived outside my sleep. They would only fly back and forth like wind. They never existed outside balcony hibiscus Where they would tremble in vague outlines.

Upstairs Upstairs there is no room for you as yet A dark philosopher doctor would hector To grandma not quite up to die till wedding Of granddaughter wrapped in shopping. But look at the upstairs railing vanishing In the clouds, where they all go as crows That return every year to our wall for rice . Her sister’s crow too comes some times.

Wait We have waited already long enough Not to wait for ever and call it a day. Bus no 6 will not come at the corner Where moving thoughts are frozen And a driver seems still slurping tea.

We have made our little ceremonies In our watchman room of 10 by 10 Where guests lay sprawled all night Waiting to celebrate girl’s innocence Who will be woman, the night flower.

At the corner of road the dust flies And the bus no 5 comes to take us

But we wait for bus no 6 knowing There is no bus 6 this route or other And driver is all- time slurping tea. When this our little girl is all flowers And our guests will be fed to the gills She waits knowing only flowers bleed And nothing will ever come of waiting.

Voices The closed window is struck by voices That come flying from the basement, A choral celebration of womanhood. They will not break my glass panes like Street-side boys cricket but coagulate On them like rain moths hitting to gain An entry to light , only to die on wings.

The voices flow from a jointly vibrating Drum-skin like the strident tom tom Announcing a new girl-woman thing. They strike like midnight jackal wails With joint complaints against the moon. They sound you about a flower arrival In the grass waiting to be discovered.

Grains I believe I am done with in this place. My rice grains are getting over for now Like the scatter of stars after shining. Ants believe grains are for their holes. Grains are so much like them, shining In milky ways while darkness lasts. I believe ants are done with in holes If grains are not in them for the rains.. They believe our holes are done with. I believe ants are done with in holes. Their holes are done with in the rains. Here I am done with , with no grains. Both I and ants are done with in holes.

Vanitas Vanitatum The poet talks about their flowers Perfuming our burying ,our words In their words, earth’s Latin words That smell of a freshly dug earth. It has reverently rained in new sky And the shovel has clods of earth. The flowers bloom on our bodies As bodies look up to a vintage sky. We are vintage in our new flowers. Our name smells in English letters Engraved in stones under flowers. Our name is perfumed by the earth And the honorifics we earned here. (Reference is to John Webster’s poem vanitas vanitatum)

Nausea The start of the world is a belly’s edge A storm in a stomach, a dirtied flower Now a regurgitated memory of words Ill-digested, with endless associations. But you recall the primal belly-wound Your kicks at walls, the original nausea Behind your coming into the green fluid, The gutter fluid floating your darkness. The coming was a mass of tuberous stuff A nauseating flesh stuck on stick bones That will rot about yellow tubes of fluids. The going is as nauseating as the coming.

Kept On the kept pages , living stories are Brought out from semantic recesses As the train blows horn,superseding The calls of muezzin on the parapet. The milk clan clatter is sound narrative In the babble of morning, plastic bags And crates over incoming train shouts And an early food call of God’s devout. Time for morning verse on emptiness As words float away from the inkwell Their content validated as they come .

Speech balloons The speech balloons are notably missing In pre-dawn story for a wide-eyed child There is a lip moving, a hand gesturing Below there were no ambulatory organs Just a tapering tail off into the lower air.

Trees were in an upper air of circulation. And the snakes in rising hoods of hissing Skulls laughed eerily from the earth up. Ghosts have stories to tell on a shoulder As kings listen to stories to get to truth.

The moon waxed and waned fortnightly. The stories had no speech balloons, only Flying bottoms on their ghostly bodies. We cannot afford to have a ghost- speak In gas balloons, but as third party stories. We can always imagine speech as sound We can imagine the gaseous balloons too.

Rock It stayed put ,in rain and sun,its flanks Pouring out streams of summer vapors . The sun would burn it in its blacksmithy To a village level of red-hot perfection . Burnt ,it was a calm rounded down sea Of dawn, with night’s footprints of waves That had come and gone in its beach. Men made forts for and against men. Wild trees would come and go, waving Their tops to generations of dark skies, Rising from the ashes of their ancestors. Their barks peep from love-holes of rock Unaided by earth’s loving stranglehood, Helped by a passing gust of rainy night. The rock slept like a whale of a deep sea And the loving couple on its high flanks Made no goosebumps of love on its back. There were no camp fires lit on its back Sufficiently hot to make it stir in its sleep.

Distraction That buzz around me now hangs in the air But it is yet around the ears, in their space From a world , ears own, distraction-free. The way I go about in my life, free from fear. Annoyance is mosquito about me from fear. I keep my eyes to the ground-like situation So I do not raise them to oncoming death. I do not look up to the overcharging trees Cutting large slices off summer’s living sky. There is just one hell, born of a distraction The one caused by temporary annoyances, But better than the fear dancing in my veins.

The village doctor The man with a red dot looks down his eyes Marginally to below the epidermis of a skin The subterfuge where stomach humors show. The Hakim is monkey man of a myth’s fame Making men swallow brown pellets for quick Cures for stomach’s skin and mind maladies That make women shake like full-blown trees Caught in a windstorm, their hair disheveled.

A middleman helps us wade crowds of men. Men wait outside to enter unreal iron cages Anterooms for an entry to the medicine man. The man would then bend his ears sideways To muttered tales about stomachs and devils And scrawl prescriptions in quick round letters That wriggled like earthworms in a new furrow. The middleman now takes us to growing rice, Proud to show his rice dominions till sky-high. We see more men coming for women’s ghosts .

Finding out A white wall stood firm all the way up To a blue sky , to our shirtless beyond. The tree embraced it against the sun. A breeze blew against our body gently As our eyes would snake up the wall. The rain fell on its other side smelling Grass and horses grazing calmly in it In steady rain that brought turd smell, Turd smell of horses from rain drops. In between, horses snort for breathing Or for overwhelming flies around tails. Flies overwhelm brooms of horse tails. Tails swish flies as the feet stamp grass. It was clearest day this side of any wall If only we could go up to see how many.

Baggage With twenty kilos I will sail through easy. The belt would go fast forward smoothly Like a black gutter stream carrying plastic, Finally to end up in a subterranean vault Where masked men worked day and night Noses covered and mouths all time shut. My gutter’s swell is not mere twenty kilos. It is big time behind a shirt pocket’s cage. I do not pay baggage on it for a free river. The river flows smoothly to gutter men. I would save a lot more money this way .

The plastic thing is fast coming at me now In the gutter carousel’s parabola of love. In a split second I decide not to pick it up, Leave it to pro gutter men to deal with it .

Anti-poem Useless into the night ,when sleep refuses To come, an anti poem acts for it somewhat While a mouth opens slightly wide in yawn. The pro-poem soon turns anti- in dialectic A dream logic that argues about how joke Occurs between denizens of sleep worlds. There is no living poem except what is born In the middle of sleep and it is sooner dead. Poems vanishing in portals of word dreams Live on as remains of anti-poems in viscera.

Poem think We now need the soft rain outside Like the patter of a tiny child’s feet Slowly walking by the nearest wall. Rain will disappear squatting down. Now you need fingers to take you. The rain comes on without moths. Their light flickers on window glass Without death’s embrace of beauty. The rain falls on sodium vapor light Diffusing trees , dogs and bits of sky. Rain falls on poem words diffusing The boundaries they sit in, confusing Word for thought, think for beauty. Beauty goes up in smoke of the sun. The rain diffuses in the sun’s smoke. The sun burns to go down in smoke. The rain will go up in a sun’s smoke.

Echoes Our mountain echoes do not come by themselves. We stand on the edge and shout to the mountains. We wait for the return of our shouts for a moment. Now our mountains are far away in our childhood We cannot reach them across these vast chasms. The resounds seemed lost in the misty air of then. Now I will force them to come across this space. I close eyes and will them to come, in this room To sacred mantras muttered on thick- grown lips. It is easy to get back echoes in a deathly silence. But the echoes are a strange vocabulary of sounds. Their inflections are too complex, their grammar Has changed them to meanings difficult to follow. They are not even my own sounds, my own voice.

Spectacle They play their cricket in our dark hours For us to make living room conversation With munchies about cricket, somebody Slapping another and a few other tit-bits About a son-in-law ,a star and a pot fixer.

We die bit by bit when dying is routine. It is a repetitive dance done in clusters, Like circular dance to appease rain gods. We love to make spectacles of ourselves In balle of street dance, a cricket dance. We love villains making a fine spectacle. Their bashed up sounds are a tamasha.

We die in our drawing rooms every day. We renew our deaths in tea stalls, buses Class rooms, others’cremation grounds . Our dying is such a routine , an earth pot Where numbers swirl to make our luck Or take us to the flowing river of ashes. We make a fine spectacle of our deaths.

Song The little toothless girl says thank you In t.v. idolatry, in her pearly innocence. Her song would reach our grown hearts In its twists of sound, a fleshy encounter Of ideas with sound, a sky composition.

Was it effort to break our sound’s barrier When little sounds escape gaps in teeth To form a primal song of pain, of death? A beginning of rain in flashes of thunder A tentative nod of trees, a moth readying To die from its hole, on windows of light?

Building spaces We were in the new space of laughter Faces new with the proposed marriage That would build new spaces, way up. A smile or two could lit up a lunch plate. A pure way is new view, how you look At girls of absent pigtails, the jasmines In their hair, with spaces between talk, A style ,a shoulder,an accented tongue. Build spaces with them with no spaces In their time , their time to build space. Marriage is the musical way of building A note , a jazz on guitar, a mobile music In the car, building spaces with drivers. Balcony is our building space with plants In earthen pots aspiring to the bits of sky A bird aspiring to bits of hibiscus flower A delicate balancing in air in a trembling. A balcony is space with a moon promise, A space to abolish all spaces in our time.

Contradict All this while we contradict ourselves So there is nothing final about our life. It is such a loosely hanging thing in air Like the jangle of a badly made fuse box. We contradict night’s words by dawn. The night’s cleft foot would then vanish In a blinding flash of a divine sunlight Behind twin hills with green creepers . Their white flowers contradict their bees. The bees contradict hills claims of flowers. They contradict each other to a blue sky. We contradict hills temporariness claims. They contradict our permanence claims . We contradict own permanence claims So there is nothing final about our life.

Crabs Whenever the poet speaks he is making A sea sound like a word from midnight A troubled sleep over a moon’s hanging Over dark waters , its sand tinkered with By a thousand crabs , crawling the sands In little empty holes filled with its night. His night begins every day with the sea.

Now he has to die from the sea sound. Night was the sea from where he began But he has to die from it as the sea crabs Are still in their holes, but keep coming. They make weird sounds one mistakes For the general sea sound of midnight.

(Cancer is the genus of a sea crab. In humans it is a malignant growth , an un-controlled growth of cells )

Frame of reference It is interesting that your frame opens itself To the larger frame behind the custom house Where that lady was seen last walking away. Your frame went behind trees , then the wall As the wall went up where a creeper climbed And the garden lizard nodded its head to you In open acknowledgement of your presence. At times your frame crossed Charles Bukowski In acknowledgement of his presence out there. Sometimes an ancient sage expounded on truth And its therapeutic effects on our healing world. And another frame came laughing its head off. Their frames crossed paths with no lizard’s nod. The lizard’s frames largely ended at the boulder. You escaped infinity frame by the skin of teeth.

Lineaments We vaguely make up the lineaments Of our dead mother, over little balls Of finely rounded rice in sticky paste To be picked up and eaten by crows. We make them in smoky daydreams Conjured up by a Sanskrit incantation By middle man between us and death.

Crows do not come nowadays to walls. We make them up from flames of twigs. We exist as mother’s dream figments In her old sleep continuing as mother. Her rice is yearly consigned to flames. Flames eat rice balls as vanished crows. We make up mother’s face from words.

Vulgar We were really trying to be high at brow But we were plain-simple crass in actions The act of gods- seeking we did from fear. Poetry rescued us from our basal vulgarity But its words seemed from such a deja vu As if they had taken place in olden times When green leaves were spread on floor Of food soaked in exotic language words. We reached we wanted to get away from. We have pain raising brows high enough. Language fails to lift us from a vernacular. We belonged to the universal din of men Above indistinct stock exchange buildings Or fishermen hanging fish by beach suns. We belonged to a silent moan of women With bitter complaints about vulgar tribes.

Ruins We could imagine kings in mustaches Order soldiers to march against kings To occupy their space , ruins of space Now bloodless as vitreous winter sky. Their swords glinted with fresh blood Against same sky in this very breeze.

Kings turned pale in faces and wives. Wives turned ruins of faces and kings. Kings and wives turned ruins of men. The sun burnt himself to dusty ruins In stone walls made to enclose space By men and ancestors shrieking blood Beyond the walls, the bush and thorn.

Conversation We walk joining this running conversation High-pitched, in a low wind of a winter sky. Our bodies join shouts across the blue sky In white smoky trails jet planes leave behind . We are following birds from a different sky As fingers fly to the white guests from Siberia. They are coming here to nest to make chicks In our brooding banyan trees, shitting white Round spots on their ponderous shadows. As we walk on we have this queasy feeling That somewhere down we will get dropped.

Synonyms A big part of us subsists on synonyms Half way things barely touching truth But not quite but then we are not quite By ourselves, in meaning and sounds. We are two lives, one of a court jester Cracking jokes exploring relationships Between unrelated things, by an absurd Below-logic mocking at the big scheme . Words are not what they seem to say Making spatial linkages between things As they change from real to figments With a halo around them like Buddha. Our poetry words are fake but not quite. Other times we are the other mocking At the funny facial motions just behind Our greasepaint depicting green reality Not quite the same but approximation. Everything seems like everything else.

Solitude In these pages I have come across a solitude Practiced assiduously in their whites of space As eye prowls aimlessly, its whites popping up. White is colorless tears of softness in a black None for the open humanity, but for the self.

Internet is out there waiting in its mud tracks, Clumps of trees as beginnings of neutral skies. Night’s stars may have gone home for the day With men warming themselves by cave fires And women in the sickle of perked up bodies. Women are interim sounds on parched tongues. Faces are not books but the men in themselves As they practice their absurd facial movements In shadows of rising elbows, fingers touching The roof , bodies a wiggling mass of humanity.

Conjunctions In the deserts of the past there would appear Many conjunctions, men and things conjoined By words, the phonetics deciding their nature. Stars would run into conjunctions by accident Of the eye view , astral bodies seeming closer By parallax, like a balcony view of tree moon.

Tree moon is conjunction of night and despair Coming together in tree’s sky, in the loneliness Of a moon’s motions and a tree’s helplessness Caught in the drifting mind of a desperate poet. It is as if a subject would get up the high bank To capture a blazing moon in palms for camera. Camera view is fleeting view of the passing act A mere conjunction in the camera’s view finder. This moment is a view in somebody’s camera.

Walking on air The old poet would sometimes walk on air A space walk against his better judgement. A tom tom would go on till late in the night A drum beat urging tribals to rush to join A space walk in which there is no return. You are aloft on a wind at such dizzy heights. But space walks work out only if you suspend Judgement about the earth pulling belly down. (" I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. I credit it immediately because of a line I

wrote fairly recently instructing myself (and whoever else might be listening) to "walk on air

against your better judgement". - From the Nobel lecture of Seamus Heaney , the Irish poet who

passed yesterday)

Plank In thinking of the plank I now have a river, Men in straw hats crossing it, on ghost feet Brought together in their careful negotiation Of a river gushing under , their arms akimbo As the rain is pouring down faces like tears.

Walking the plank is touch poetry to mind. A mind needs a plank, away from nerdiness A mindfulness about intimate connections That have always existed below shaking feet. You need a plank for basic arguments for life.

Noise The digging noise may not bring water But brings a sleet of fine stone powder From earth’s deep intestines pouring Like sun melting glacier slowly moving Towards the roadside gutter carrying Fallen leaves with it like bodies in flood. The noise will float on night’s silence And will float up to the gutter and fall Into an abyss of the underground sleep. The machine’s shaft enters a stone layer Drilling holes into it but breaks in two Leaving permanent relics in its bowels As in surgeon’s forgetting joke of scalpel In open stomach ,due to years in phone And surgeon’s ears are too full of noise. But the drill at last shuts ears to all noise When its proboscis smells sweet waters Gushing ,from the tiny rivers down there Its gushing drowned in machine’s noise. The shaman The shaman would look in deeply Below your body for the genesis That brought its tiny red skinmaps, At the same time wave a neem sprig To calm another shaking woman .

When he is not dealing with ghosts He sniffs at the nature of the body And hurls pellets of dark medicine In a random throw that would kill Physical and airy creatures at once.

Woman is now shaken of her ghost. Our own ghosts are more physical. He would get rid of them by matter, Little globular earths of brown matter Hurled into the dark depths of belly.

Waking in sleep The eyes are God’s saucers ,lined in black And without tears, without fluttering lids Closing the oceans making lapping noises . From behind, stare pupils, at their sleep.

Their dramas enacted are for green room By green people in green faces twitching Their eyes meaningfully ,classically perfect. Their red lips quiver with vulgar platitudes. Words come soundless, from a twitching Of eyebrows, the pupils laughing to tears As if from open mouths echoing big bang. The earth is in a dying rumble from birth. In the muddy mouths lie the starry worlds With stars fast asleep from their flickering. A mother’s mouth is open and wide-eyed For mud , finds infinity stretching like pool.

Wet place At night a white wet place would come Out of nowhere, with high boots in mud An earth falling off to white snow in tea

A tepid tea to warm military stomachs. Further down would be a turquoise lake Lapping up against the enemy country On other side, with their military boots Stomping their ice, rising in icy silence Their men looking all of them the same.

The hills would rise in their brown mud Stripped of ice drained out last summer. Their water rivers are bloody capillaries That trailed off to lake’s turqoise history . But for now we are still in that wet place With military boots sinking in white ice. A temple is swathed in ice that must be Having an oil lamp to light dark innards . Everything has to be wet , even a flame. (Chang La is a high mountain pass (17000 ft) in the Himalayas on way to the beautiful Pangong lake)

Berry picking The poet in a double chin is no more. The berries he picked are succulent Shining like polished apples of a night, My own night of blackberry memories

In a wild mountain, with sister flowers That shone like white and pure stars.

We both poetize in our double chins Shaking like the berry bush in breeze. Doublechins would shake and shake Till the breeze would finally die down Under white stone, a blue summer sky.

We were children before double chins And had picked white flowers tasting As good, with no violet squirting juice. The thorns were a forbidding challenge But berries tasted fine to our pockets And their flowers to our acid tongues.

Looking out the window Looking out the window a poet’s eyes Crawl in the empty space like an eagle Flying in lonely heights, staying afloat For long periods on sky air, descending

Once in a while to sharp-eyed bushes Below for leisurely lizard meals at bush.

At times the poets see lonely grandmas Shout at scurrying children in corridors Fearing for safety of their grandchildren In their boisterous hide-and-seek behind Worn wooden pillars, where they swirl. In Venice a poet sees a man and a woman Framed together by compulsion , cold-eyed To each other against black lawyer gowns As the latter gowns point fingers in the air. Actually they were only in the poet’s frame. In Macedonia a poet looks for a daily stork To arrive on roof so he could look in its eye. The stork arrives but in poet’s daily frame . The poet is nowhere seen in stork’s frame.

Ladder In the dead grandma’s story, the ladder Took kids to the sky roof for their play. An old woman swept the earth of its dust

And found the low sky highly annoying. She would push the sky up with broom. The kids could not come down from play. Poor chaps had to turn sun and moon . The ladder , now in rain and rust, lands You in a water tank with crows on its top Trying an old story trick to throw pebbles To bring up the water for their black thirst. The ladder’s top vanishes in blues of sky. That is where grandma went and woman Who pushed annoying sky up with kids. We have never seen anyone climb down. But we see the sky’s kids day and night Playing in its orange edges near the hills.

Storm When it stormed in our childhood we used to

Call Arjuna several names on our tiny tongues Rapidly moving , in sounds hitting deep throat. Arjuna is thunder god’s son who could stop it. That was how trees could be spared of deaths. But next day we saw our palm tree decapitated . Our words might not have reached the clouds Ere a random thunder bolt struck its head off. The poet says we have not experienced thunder, Except as words rapidly hitting the mouth roof. But the palm experienced it in its severed head Experiencing a cessation of experience in death. The tree had no words except in severed head. Its charred stump stood tall with no death fear. It did not have a functional head to experience.

Word spaces Here in the muse our sleeping dreams Fill all our pending i-word spaces with The jelly of unfinished baby thoughts Around the first words that had come Gleaming from the highly understated Baby swaddle clothes, in a silky mother When our gutturals filled all her spaces

And our sleep dreamed of waking words. Punctuation filled no toothless chasms And endless commas stopped sounds Leaving meanings in baby deep throats. Old throats now gurgle their meanings.

Fail Fail better said Beckett cosmically In his absurd body proposal deep In earth between ,with newspaper Spread out, near a cup of tea dregs Unreachable by hands in pockets. Please do not remove hands to keep

Warm inside of your thighs too cold. Outside earth mound is quite breezy. Yellow leaves keep us flying in words. Well this is fail worse , trying to fare Better in a failing, rising after failing To fail better, from the earth mound. You keep leaves in check in breeze. Words are leaves from a poetry book. Shred them in yellow leaves for flying. But fail better to keep them in check So they do not fly away from bodies.

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." Samuel

Beckett

Raw material We looked in a night at its dark middle And for some, in the past’s throbbing Words that throbbed from old pockets Of shirts , now torn in beggarly tatters But still carry washed out paper pulp

From a washer man’s wash since dead. The washer man is dead in his earth pot. Its shards offer us a clinching evidence Of once living cultures, his once living That existed to beat papers in pockets That would be raw material for poems.

Specious We argued for a neat unified life Its spidery dreams just material For lyrical verse, its terms nature Like filigree works of spider circle

Hanging by roadside thorn tree Here and going but expectantly Postponed to returning camera. The argument of a life steeped In pearly lyrics was lost to spider Snug in a silky wayside hexagon Not usual concurrent lyric circles. But geometry is not our concern. We argued to retain it in return A beauty to capture in the mind Not on the dew of camera lyric. The camera turns out its beauty If put off , a fine lyric in making. We gestured acceptance in air. Our hands went up to a sunrise And we would turn a silhouette Standing by the spider getting Busy at its gathering dew pearls. Our arguments sound specious Always during our morning walks.

Bus jack I think on the night that hung By a bus jack,to fill a bus hole. I cannot get it off mind’s hole I had made with the bus jack.

Night is a lawyers black gown Made with body hanging ropes And jabbing fingers of moms Shrieking to fill my bus holes. Her innards are my outwards That can never be put back in Holes stay whole and gaping, As mouths die after first milk. (The four rapists who had brutally raped a young woman in a Delhi bus leading to her death have been

awarded death penalty by a Delhi court) Jacket Strange as it may look , the rain breeze Seems a mere jacket , with wind at core Somewhere in a deep ocean’s current Audible outside in yelps of a dog puppy Restless in wind and water, at its chain.

A dark man who would float back today Did so for his dog in its chain in cyclone. A puppy bite it gave me , to fear of death. He came back for nothing, not in recall.

He had gone long ago not to come back And his dog puppy went in its fluffy cries. Mom went much later not to come back . Everything goes, only the jacket remains.

Circling This circling thing has been going on For poet Rilke’s thousands of years, Mine a little less, by a hundred years He is a bit inner to me , outer to God. The eagle I met in Kolkata was circling Around a garbage rat, seeing with two Circular eyes, fixed at moving things, The rats circling around food crumbs.

Rats are outer to god , inner to eagle That is outer to God but inner to me .

Is God nothing- dot ,a quake’s epicenter A boil on skin with red circumference A storm center, a spider at net’s center Or a song with a never ending refrain A ripple in puddle or some such thing? Poet Rilke, eagle, rat and I are in ever Widening circles moving around God. God knows when the circling will stop. ( ...I’ve been circling thousands years; and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm or a great

song Rilke from the Book of Hours)

Savor We look up to the morning man carrying A pail of water, drops of water splashing Sideways on black shirt, as country’s maps In circumnavigation , in polar conquests.

Make the man woman in blouse, water Now ocean, as calm as one could savor

Cloud maps of nimbus, sky’s blue eyes. Parts are wholes,themselves parts of holes. Holes are lack of matter, lack of integrity. Savor them while you resist intelligence And willingly suspend as if it is disbelief.

(Taking off on Wallace Stevens poem Man Carrying Thing )

Onion At the core is the onion of argument Capitalism’s glitzy way to win elections Greased by the onion’s peeling tears In topied politics,shopping for votes.

We keep peeling it to ground of zero Or till a red smeared triumph settles On spoons dancing streets to power.

Our polemics goes on like onion peel To reach the tearful center of nothing. Let us cut them to thin rings of slices For a farmer’s hungry mid-day lunch So he makes stuff for other stomachs His own stomach lost to onion peels. Onion is bankroll to feed hunger games About men thirsty for a palm’s climb For gods’nectar where tree meets sky. Its peels go well with the gods nectar.

Shades of gray The hair turns gray and wise Not dyed-in- the- wool- wise But one of black and white in Between, like the sunless sky Falling on stone monuments Sandblasted to a perfection.

A sliding glass on the nose

Will surely make old poets,

A species slow and extinct,

Quest for a word perfection

As words enchain thought

In its several shades of gray.

Words have several colors If it is to gray evening hair A twilight in the mountains Sheep in browns and blacks Looking in our eyes curiously Across idyllic pastoral scenes Abutting rows of blue houses. Some deflowered butterflies Have rarest of shades of gray That flutter in China’s gravity They cause storms in blood In the western hemisphere. It is their weather that is gray In those parts , a missing sun, And elegies gray in churchyards.

Regret Here again we should have done Not this , in a pock-marked past But the other thing, the bus no.6 We had let go waiting for bus no 7. At the curve ,where building rises In dust hiding men and buildings There seems another possibility

Of not taking it, a night for regret.

We have this night and its smells Of a past heavy under single roof In canvas bags bursting at seams Like lizards sticking out tongues. The truth is we regret old man’s Stupidest actions on some nights When a fuse went briefly under And he went and took wrong bus To a garden abundant in snakes.

Pain Pain does not persist in limbs But disappears underground To the earth’s hole of gravity When feet are put up to light Hoisted up or are just hanging . It does not exist, mere illusion Within the larger leg illusion

Of a head throbbing in proxy.

Illusions subsist in leg of pain Like flat stones hurled in lake In quick series of frog-jumps. They are illusions to the lake But do not exist in its real time. They just bounce off its space .

Ants in feet are real illusions Like ants about a sugar grain In a hole in the head of queue A tiny white stuff on journey. Ants are illusions within feet They are pain’s tiny allusions To the larger body of illusion In a cosmic existence illusion.

Rain in September Rain was an unexpected bonus An extra refilling of sound world As far off mountains have washed Their clouds off in a lighter mood.

The night was a receptacle of joy Just above the tops of the peepal That moaned their soft pleasure Leaf to leaf, groping invisible sky. Unknown to its stomach the lake

Swelled unexpectedly missing its Hyacinths that one ruled its heart. A change of lover this time of life Took its teals entirely by surprise.

Smorgasbord Picture your day , a lifetime story When written up ,fully and finally . It is an old man’s story, not to be A mix of colors, weirdly textured A palette of words, a brushstroke Of uninitiated, an antic landlord.

Woman is doe-eyed, picture-like Looking for her man perfect type A perfect type story, as eating out

From your hand, a Saturday night Of long spun stories of grandma.

Grandmas are dead from paintings Of exhaustion of laughter in prime. Stories flow under naughty moons. Grandmas were laughing at moons Stuck in the night’s coconut palms. Days go on like lives likely to stop, Their eyes still retaining bits of sky. Dream planes crash on sex snakes Their lips drooling on soft pillows Fear ruling the juices under shirts While world spins out the window.

Island Driven by defeat , god-man landed In the island,where one would reach By a ferry, in the western seas calm Of waters, to worship to earn merit Up there in sky-loft where we all go. He had ruled this island and cows For thousands of years, his river flute And women in shut eyes, kept us all

In thrall , a god-man who had ruled Our atavism for thousands of years.

God-man had run away from enemies In the cow heartland, taking his flute And his women to this distant island Where he would be king and cowherd.

God-man’s butter thief baby mouth Opens galaxies from mere mud clods. We do not like his pretty feet shot, Mistaken by a hunter for a tree bird .

(The legend of Krishna who is god whom we worship and man whom we love-the island is Dwarka in

Gujarat to where Krishna is believed to have migrated from Mathura)

Non Sequitur I have tried out this thing in film A voice from space above, about A fan whirring , closely followed By the dying man, whose woman Yanks out a story from a curry As his eyes follow the fan’s whir.

What if the eyes stop and curry Stops frying in a pan with no gas. We stand dead for want of space Or lay dying while watching fans. A standing in train is gentle nudge A hello to kids with ball, a struggle To keep up the logic of what follows. Everything seems so non sequitur.

( Imagery from the exquisite Hindi film Lunch Box) Decay Before minor dissolution the sea rushes To the mound of sand making hieroglyphs Like raised monsters etched on its flanks. Decay is its automated nighttime process Under a moon falling foul of ringed clouds Bearing no rain,a belied promise, a tease. The bird fell to be decay’s show-piece

But is inside curiosity on a passing beach With the moon gone ,the clouds at ease. There have been so many of them here. The event does not enter history books.

Hollow Hollow is the shape of our air In our vessel of echoing ideas Bouncing on its inward walls, Making empty vessel sounds . Our hollow lies inert in straw Stacked in rain ,filled with air We use its air pockets in rain Against a noisy batter at night. We use it for cows’stomachs

To turn milk for cherub babies Of whom we are hollow men Duly burped of airy hollows. We stand in mountains bowl Crying our names to their walls. They return as hollow sounds To our empty pockets of rain.

Missing the bus We had earlier talked of our route no. 6 And how we missed a bus of route no .7 The other bus missed , dust and swirling In a regret that we would always nurse. In sleep I would miss bus as I went back To find my things forgotten in a bus seat. The dust is still swirling, a driver’s hands Seen in the horizon, outside bus window. In the nearness of dream is a bus in dust

A driver’s elbow outside the bus window. Dream is of an elbow , not a whole driver In dust in which all buses shall disappear. Today in the news was not a whole boy But a foot that had missed a running bus. The dust swirls, being a regret no longer About the route no 7 but a dust swirling Where we all disappear, elbows and feet.

Referent Bodies are things like the poster boys Bursting from a high wall, hero stuff Pretending cop to a mawkish mom. They deal in pop corns between and Near machines for dispensing movie. Body is a referent , thing referred to Or the one referring , ibid, page 451 A body seething with righteous anger In an archive of unread history pages

Nothing in it except peacock feather. Referent is cute god in peacock feather A blue god butter thief, a demon killer A woman favorite, a flute note on river A tree cool in shadows playing on river.

Referent is body about itself in minds And other bodies in history of space. Body is the thing referred to in space. It is but a thing referring or referred to.

Publishing poetry You may try to lead start to publish Splashing poems on several eyeballs Splitting their eyes to sinuous beauty Of lines flowing in exquisite music. But poetry is not a cash of pockets. It is not even about dreamlike men But dreamers strutting their stuff.

Pockets stay empty , just purple air. Tart We could start off with a tart

A way to talk, 3 A.M. this way- A.M. is magazine, not a night

A tartaric thing on acid tongue

But beauty talk, a bowl of fish-

Red in their fins, gold in names.

City is a beauty of falling rocks Rocks that are slow- murdered Like talks between two people Engaged in mutual keyboards- Some emojis amply state love.

Talk is mostly tart , on tongues About fast moving acid tongues The "t" repeats itself as tut tut People coming into close range- Phone walls have secret ears.

Framed I saw an opening in the fence wall With rocks and a quarry framed As if in the window near me here. The window frames nothing new Being shut up by flowing curtains Leaving the world to imagination. The curtains flow near my poems. Window flows in curtains of poems Like birds that came to be framed In the doorway above the quarry. Birds were transiently caught in it

Like v’s on a canvas of landscape Framed on basement gallery walls .

Window hardly sits with me here. It is I who sit with it that sits with A balcony sitting with sky’s moon. Balcony manages to frame moon In the middle of a night with tree As moon sits with the tree at its top.

Black Black is color of nothing in a white In a jungle of happiness at the fringe Where it careens to an abstract sky In swift brushstrokes of artist’s truth. Black is bush holding imaginary bears And mountains dancing with ghosts. Black is nothing in a nothing, a white Of nothing, white in colors of dupatta.

It is white’s cousin, the color of pupils. Black is sleep’s temporary obliteration Where a bosom heaves to color of eyes A space of stars flickering for nothing.

Entropy In the night , big peepal tree forms A bulwark for sleeping white birds Against a shapeless sea of darkness. Flying is possibility of not sleeping, Order in the entropy of white birds Against dark tree, in a sleeping sky.

The entropy of the sky is in shapes Of star flickers in its vast expanse Against sleeping bodies on the roof. Shapeless water in overhead tank Takes the shape of irregular laugh Against the corners of red girl lips.

Verse is entropy in stanzas of music A flowing water losing soft fluidity At edges of metaphors like laughs Losing shapes at the corners of lips.

Discovering Actually we have managed to uncover In a night, a wild and strange hookup As a dream of a silent animal at night A dog exploring its spaces in sound Between spaces in a tree at its wind A snout loud and clear at dark nights. We uncover stories as if discovered World stories flowing on possible life Their words cascading story’s course In a heuristic approach to chance on A story unfolding and happening as. We uncover words to discover stories

Like worms slow hiding under a bush Darkness yet to be discovered by sun.

Decision There is rain above the platform Empty in descent from the sky Like sounds sloshing in a hollow . Voices jostle with flies and bags On thick porters in red dresses And worn with holding suitcases Of stuff weighing down on men. Bags in revolt against head cloth Rest like coiled snakes on heads. The waters snake down from roof Falling to the gravel on the track.

Inside the station master’s room Night is broken by a single lamp. A voice announced an unknown life Deciding to call it quits too soon.

Palimpsest Yesterday, from a lake side rickshaw We tried to look away from its smells We saw rise from dead fish, in a visual Palimpsest of a gold dusk lake with its Former hyacinths ,bobbing up a-green From its live fish swimming under lake. Looking is tomorrow at the lake’s gold. We erase former smells on visual gold And stifling memory of hyacinth green And we have a lake canvas stretching To impressionist sky, by a brushstroke. We erase memories but they still stick.

Unleaving Old woman likes to unleave backyard And a spring just born of a little child Whose autumn is not now but flying in On a spring’s back, just behind the cab Parked on the kerb hiding young boys Who might be sons, from her stomach.

The golden grove will be scooped up For now ,while bare branches creak Minus the old birds now chirruping Beyond a white wall, under blue sky. Their cheerups are now yellow leaves

Scooped up by a woman in autumn.

She better make autumn poems before Too late , at least before it is her winter. After decline a fall follows as if spring. An autumn gold has to be leavened flat On the lake , dehyacinthed and birded.

Curtains They exclude you from a road And its tree and the hollow air Of a dogged street, its sleeping On road ,pups at their yelping. They fall for you in diagonal lines In balls of views , a pale soft light Filtering through a window glass A fly pottering about on sunlight.

Open them a bit, you befuddled, Tie them in a few knots of light, Lose their significant symmetry, Let the sun in on atoms of dust. They fall for you in oblong lines And sometimes in crooked lines Clashing with the diagonal stems Sporting flowers waving heads In their own autonomous breeze.

Quiet We wonder if the night watchman’s whistle Renders us tone-deaf to a midnight’s quiet. Night has a tone of its own for telling time. Look up at the sky-high darkness of sleep And tell your time ,this side of the equinox. Your ears ,like leaves, tell the time of waking. The depth of the night is in tone of silence. Your tympanum still vibrates , eyes crinkle But the world whirls, turning itself round In a blurred universe of tone-deaf silence Unable to separate high and lows of a pitch In music of the spheres, in creaking of stars.

Letter of intent You find thin crawly lines towards the edge Father-lean helpfully so you will not teeter, The letters appropriately spaced to crawl. They are poetry’s dumb notes to see print. The letters are of intent ready to be sealed Signed at the bottom ,in a flourish of beauty But they are of mere intent, not to be taken At the face value, of which there is not much. They consume less papyrus of the river kind More charges in electric spaces, keystrokes That sound like the night in its pretensions, A sleep’s inventory that does not cost much.

The night’s pretensions are a poetical prose Or blank verse, in its time worn pentameter, A soft tissue language rhythm from a dream. Every line is a letter of intent crawling away.

The blue pencil On your brow the stylus inscribes fate Like finger and having writ ,moves on. Your three-headed bearded God can Rarely come back with after thoughts. His educated wife keeps him occupied. He had his origins in the lotus navel. You had your own origin in his head Supposing she would prevail on him To change the writing on your plate Give him a blue pencil and editorial Freedom,to change his own writing,

Can he make you unborn by his pencil From the stillness of cavernous time? Can blue pencil make you unhappen?

Running Her own running is towards the reaper And may be away from him, poet says. At the same time ,the grim reaper runs Towards her , who shall stay in his cave. The cave shall remain wherever he is. Stop running, will you, you leaky-pants Panting, your skin is hardening for death. Tread a run mill to stay where you are. Let the reaper do the running , why not. Let his bones rattle in his creaky-pants And do the panting heavy under scythe.

Point the pointless Well, we now have made it our point A pointless point about curry point. Curry is not the point ,only a polygon, In geometry, not in school grammar, A mash of fresh vegetable growths A muddy rainwater of street puddle With flotilla of lumpy dead cabbage. We are two-salary credit card couple. Our point lies mostly in a joint curry. While we are not making a joint point We are eating it as one long argument. When we have time we will have kids And we send them to Grammar School. The point is not a full stop but a semi At a bus stop, where kids board bus.

We mean not a regular stop but semi. We do not speak a whole word, you see. We have no time to utter entire words. There is no point in uttering the whole. We just point to where our thoughts lie And try to catch up with a running time Speed away like a grammar school bus. Thank God ,we have credit card points. We make holiday packages this summer To see old suns tipping at sunset points In our woolen sweaters, to snugly point A ruddy sun dying below a fast food cart Similar to the one we have in our street.

Vague After moonlight , before morning-to-be I am stuck in a vague how, now adverb. The adverb includes hum and noiseless Nothing of a night full of absent crickets. You work in whole foods? We meet, girl. Of course , we will , neighbor in foods. You mean whole foods, the entire thing. I am vague, in vagueness of adverb how. Like mom we remember her vagueness. Vagueness was noun of time and house. You mean to say we shifted house here

Yes , we did it last year or years before. You did not tell when we had moved in. We did but you are now vague and we . We go a bit vague in our nights of sleep. Mom is vagueness that went cold to ice When there was flakes of snow a-falling In summer, or hail , we are vague about. When she banged white wall’s darkness She would go entirely vague, in tongue. Her outline shivered in our blur of eyes, Turning silhouette the very day’s sun. She is vague as ever, in all our sunsets.

Say it from happening As in ash and berry , say it from happening. Now ash ,now berry, walk up the garden path. Triumph is provoke God to laugh sardonically Under his hoary beard, stuck with bits of frost See- I told- you kind triumph in falling heavy. This way you have your triumph to gloat over. But your savoring triumph soon turns to ash. You see God-sarcasm is not to make waves Of laughter under his hoary beard, but hide His essential toothlessness and frost in beard, A way of shaking off accumulations of frost.

Fear of death Fear makes you drink as if liquid A cigarette smoke in gray swirls Of a winter morning, your myth Steaming in the trees, as clouds Gathering in sky like precursors.

Fear is anger foaming at mouth From a trapped curdle in belly, A solid gas, a toughening of belly A see- through windshield glass Made to splinter, on solid shocks. Drinking smoke is not a fatuous Exercise in language of learning An onomatopoeic gulping down But a precise description of fear A belly’s puke , in curls of smoke, A smell of death sticking to shirt.

(In some Indian languages you do not smoke a cigarette but "drink " it)

Regret

Regret gnaws at the root of girl’s life

About her birth , the very act of birth

A cataclysmic event by a sandy river.

If only one could regret others actions.

If only fingers could make accusations.

If night were less fierce and the moon Had not vanished for a while in cloud A fruit would still be hanging on tree. Two bodies would not be ivory horns Piercing a night, a man failing in sand A woman blinded by a moon’s ivory. The girl was not cause, only an effect, A thing of mutual recrimination ’tween Bodies and a moon, a cloud and a fruit. But now girl shall have her own regret

And not let others’regrets mar her life.

Eclipse A big bright moon flutters on the building Red and dead, pale from a far off eclipse. A local eclipse over a mom - sponsored bath Is only recalled as we remember her dead.

The moon is dead from my mother’s story, A moon rising to be dead for eavesdropping On a demon taking nectar to stealthy lips Defying a moon-like beauty in rows of gods. A hunter’s moon shall rise, whole and bright To be slow-eaten in crumbs by a penumbra. Good, we are not to be blamed for this here. It is a bloody American moon that is eaten.

Dirge While I was still fearing ,it came A bearded fear from a dark den Of not knowing, a high grass for Hiding,a happy swirling around Where sea is calm under the stone And a few warm things crawling.

Victorian dirge is victory on death The death be not proud moment. The poet is in grass bed by people Passing by him and not hearing it.

Post-modern we do not sing back About happy graves under grass. Snow does not fall by thousands. Our snow - grass goes up in flames, Our words with it with our beards.

In media res At midnight we are right at the center A medias in res adaptation of old story A long haul of a distant tireless forest Peopled by honey bears hiding darkly In bushes, with the mountains sleeping At the furthest view of seeing nothing An opaqueness common to all dreams.

You forget you are in an opaque night And dreaming at a black core of night. Your creatures are shrouded in a dark Like bears that may yet descend hills When you are sleeping on a river bank With sticks by side to shoo them away If and when they descend for sugarcane.

But at the end of stillness is sea’s hum. A brine of vast possibility rises to moon

By aggregation of darkness in thought, A point you are neither here nor there.

Wing The bird could be aloft and fluttering Its wing but for design defect forming And falls and putters under cupboard Crying from its inner anguish to God, Inner anguish about others ineptitude For which it putters about in half wing.

No point in fears about possible cats, Possible smiling cats of the dark night. We are lucky locked in dreaming sleep. God is locked in his sleep in milk ocean. Night cat is, at all , tail-eating renewal An ouroboros of God-nature’s re-visit A deja vu thing as we sleep our night.

Meaning Meaning ? Asks a poet-thinker and replies Where I stop and proceed to other things, Notorious to reply ,all to himself ,in rhyme, A speech rhythm made as part of program. You do not need rhyme to make a meaning But a rhythm inside a programmed bastard. Bastard because you do not know your dad. Not that you are questioning mom’s morals Or of a society sanctioning meaninglessness. Somebody programmed you to his meaning. Your words do not lead to it in empty spaces. Period, the poet is pursing parsimonious lips. Says period, periodically to stop and proceed. You understand meaning of all this, don’t you?

Thingness A little rain will add up to a thingness Through a train’s blare, the morning’s Milk can clatter, a woman’s shrill train About oncoming from outer darkness. Dark is the essence of things, thingness Itself, held by scruff by incoming train . Train brings its darkness from places.

Dark falls as rain drops on moss maps A dark that comes from the outer sky To beat the moss maps to submission. Rain is thing like darkness held by train Or coconuts that have lost their moon From the hair, in a night’s rain dance.

Silk of fish In a sitting hotel foyer is silk of flesh A black motive silk in glassed water A tall glass tank , where some fish fly In ways not jostling with each other In their common fates of swimming . Fish is silk thoughts,mine not of fish. Silky to feel and think like the back Of woman to old fingers, the bones Gnarled, unsilklike to woman back Silk to water as fish fly in water sky. Poets are fish flying winter of glass. They are made to remember a food Regurgitated , after a silky wedding No more silk route, a cyclone belly . What if old fingers feel a silk of belly

Once again, as the bones briefly stop Their clatter , funny sounds in wind In a glassed water of the flying fish. Finally they no more fly and found In the inner silk of a woman’s belly The old fingers feel for them, inside The excavated pits below the earth.

Insect We came on this lowly insect in a poem In prelude to another drink, like a plane Taking off in the barren fields of a night, To its lidless death call, bang on the wall. The poet tried to lift it to window’s safety In a prelude to another drink but no way.

God is in state of delirium in the preludes. Behind window is He, unsteady of hands Tottering in feet, managing a dog’s barks. There was no way to mind aeronautical Movements of insects in rooms of walls. Never mind , a wall lizard will take care . The poet will sure wake up a giant Samsa, As God’s delirium wears off in postlude. (Reference is "Prelude to Another Drink "- a poem by Malcolm Lowry )

Thread

The thread around a tree is dream Woven by battered wives, for a son Needing a visa or a husbands health. They tie the aging tree’s torso with A hundred rounds of their dreams As many as the rings around its life.

The tree has its dreams in leaf-ends, They make a screech sound when Children slide fingers in spit on them To produce funny laughing sounds. If only the tree could have a thread For its own dreams, when its leaves Make a soft moaning sound at night When battered by a far off sea wind .

The beat poet except for the snow no one

could make out he had been

there the poet beats the crap out

of night’s snowfall

his bones were never ever

discovered.

a hexagram appeared writ

in the snow. Fail Fail is wholly temperate language But not wholly,a somewhat frail Situation of not dying by the cliff. Fail is a really really soft landing. A physicist dies of much physics And others laugh their guts out. A certain Arthur Saville’s murder Is not accomplished, to get back To living again under the bridge. Farmer has no cotton,only a swab. What if you fail partially, cocking A snook at life demanding flesh In entirety, blood by spoonfuls The bones smelling at a bottom. Let life fail , irony play out less A spoonful less bleeding, a bone Less smelling, a Plath less silent On a grave stone, a cricket less Creaking, a stanza less shrieking. You are even with it at the end.

Rear view A long breath we take ,as we now Clear forehead hair and get ready To dance our faces appropriately.

We crack our eyes into splinters To accommodate an entire world .

We see behind us inverted letters Coming at us in their legible form. Their meaning soon overtakes us - A pump , a pair of feet in rhythm Of dance with the speed bumps. Other girl’s car applies her lipstick Where beauty seeks a heartbeat, A front view that fails to translate Inverted letters to their meaning.

Semicolon; Give me a break please or a full stop A period, a time of night, before a day. A periodic thing hangs on the forehead Like a sweat drop, for breeze in leaves Among unsaid things at tongue’s end.

A fly on the nose, a buzz in the earlobe A top view whisker, escape from mind, Please break so as to stop somewhere Prevent more rolling down our nights. But now poem stops at a stanza break A wait at the tip of the tongue, a sword In making, a thought with a semicolon. Let it wear an iambic meter under belt, Get up and go , wherever stanza takes.

Calling back Through many and reportless archives We will now call her back ,from her stone By profaning of search, from the oblivion Of a young poet archive, from an atavism The breath we all feel on our nightly skin. Her poems would not now go reportless Both for her themes and for a loneliness Of blank screen, a wide sky of reporting Where stone hid many reportless worms Crawling ,from folds of a dissolved mind As letters on a yellow paper, end to end.

(A digital archive of Emily Dickinson’s poems is now available as open access at

http://www.edickinson.org/) No images were found Our galleries would all show up But sorry, no images were found. The body might be brown beauty But in the absence of any images And no palm trees to dance naked Under , felt vacant like palm trees Struck by late last year’s lightning. There was no river , a dishwasher That had whirlpool in it, smooth With no images due to whirlpool. She was image in God’s likeness A kind of truth - beauty mixture But sorry we do not fancy images Nowadays in advanced religions. We break them into constituents.

(Taking off from the famous poem"No Images" by William Waring Cuney)

Detour A story from cross border is enacted As the crow caws behind the window Striking new dawn, orange of making. Silence crackles in its desultory pages. A boy is hanging on his sleep’s edge, His sleep fingers phones on the table As his phones strive towards a silence. We are not now reaching anywhere. Let us take a detour ,via a sleeping boy Dawn’s crows ,behind curtains of night The borders shall now no longer exist Into the vast windy spaces across sea To muezzin’s call in headscarf, a wind Beyond water, a space in an oily desert Where promises of exquisite beauty lie Among glitzy oil-fed slick of tall stories.

City Get yourself drowned in the city Of squat buildings with needles Of lights piercing the dark night.

You want to be in the needle’s eye? Try to pass the desert camel in it. We are here passing mild camels. Use perfumes of Arabia and sweet Thy labors of silverhaired twilight Thro the vicissitudes of sand dunes.

(On a week’s visit to Dubai)

At the top At the top you make uneven friends With ghosts, cloud’s moist feelings As they hiss through insubstantial Men,mired in their pot-bellied bodies While they stand in a calm uneasiness . It takes approximately sixty seconds To reach the needle’s pointy top end. You time starts but you will end up A mangled mess at two quarters of it, With wind emptying your memories Even before you recollect your dreams.

(Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the tallest independent structure in the world,standing at a height of around

850 metres)

Passport We sleep in this five-seater bunker With flimsy dreams in our pockets. If we lay them out here, they might Slink away, move beyond our grasp And escape from the exhaust hole.

At times we squat on the toilet seat Hanging dreams on bathroom walls. All the time we dream of the desert That lay stretched with the exhaust As its mouth, open in seamless awe At the infinite worlds that lay there. The five of us sleep in our bunker With this blue book in our dreams. We have it floating in our joint nights And while we are shitting in toilet In separate mornings,we are afraid Of each others knocks on the door Breaking separate passport dreams.

Desert Desert is lots of sand in the hair-roots And upon a funnily high camel’s back With your belly fire going up and down As belly jiggles, up down shrill notes Against a night holding down woman. Let the sun plummet to its sand bottom. Hold on tight, will you, the ship is down To its bottom essentials ,near the sun. The sun is turning in a fiery barbecue.

Fiction We are indulging in pure fiction With its complicated ghost stories That seem to stand out from time As independent reality on our sky. Actually my mother turned ghost Before we had absorbed her essence To make fine bedside story to kids. I get eery feeling she never existed. Not sure if I am proof enough of her, Her story cannot be proof of mine. Actually the whole thing is fiction Including the kids I read stories to.

The We may try to add our own God to it To free the mountains of silken sand From thingy bodies stuck in crevices. Mere fragments , they turn sand grains, At times, a few afternoon silhouttes. We call all this ’al’, that is only ’the’, Just an article but the definitive one.

The sand would pour on us like rain. Their wonder is silk soft ,woman-like, A God,not ’al’God, not different from Our Sea ,Mountain God, a windy one. And a desert is so much like our sea. They both would make us mere grain.

Love in grave The two skeletons we saw were deeply In love ,as grave matter for archaeology, For an underground poem, a dark matter. They have brought them out from earth, A combination of elements in mid stage. Maggots could not have a crack on them. We cannot call it a final triumph of love. Down there there is no way for us to know They are in love with each other’s bones.

Before I die Here on the charcoal wall we write What we want to do one last thing Before we die, before a tongue out A cotton swab in nose,a straw mat For our mattress , a bed to sleep in. Great things we want to write here. When we begin to write , ants crawl Diagonally in letters, feet go numb. Our fingers go cold , bodies doodle. We die one last time before we die. (Before I die : The book by Candice Chang opens with a Carl Sagan quote: We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers)

Boat Boat is a memory stuck in the head The word that floated from people Sitting high to the sky making boat In the years when there was no oil But water to take them thus and far. Boat is a memoried thing in poems, A dead poet’s elegy to dead soldier, A read sticky thing , a bloody poem Of boat that spilled blood of men, Not idyllic sea thing seeking pearls. Boat is not a rat-eating discoverer In endless wastes of water and sky, Now a beauty thing white in wealth Its whiteness shining from gray oil From the viscera of a muddy earth.

City in art

In the anthropocene we have the city Of a few girders , underpasses of men Smiling through a half eating popcorn Their stillsmiles already dead from art.

City is old village of sheep and smiths Dead from their graves over epitaphs A neuro-aesthetic captured in live art, A Rodin marble arrived at chopped off In needless parts, from thinking men .

Thinking men are she-hurricanes killing Sheep cities for hid weapons , a debris Of breathless art, a killing field needed For commerce, in a politics of numbers .

City is warm in new geological epoch, Its hills chopped off in needless parts, And its trees are stalactite art in caves Frozen from a past , a frozen thinking That is much like a breathless future.

Armful We are stuck with a numb arm Being about the size of a fear Of not being there, of its going, The arm’s going gone in body. The armful sports no hyacinths And a hair wet and eyes failed. Yet when an arm stops fearing The arms are full, across a chest.

Fake Genuinely we feel our joy when fake And truly fake when we are genuine. Our handbags are behind real doors.

Doors are surreal within other doors. The fakes inside cry they are needed Like the safe environs of a fetal fetish. They are genuine fakes of real stuff. If only we can be fake like this always So our smiles come out genuine fakes.

Rubbish For ten dirrhams we can enjoy peace And the joy of shopping for rubbish So light on our pockets and elegant For lying with us ,Tutankhamen-like In buried sleep with arms crossed On chests, gazing at the North star. To future archaeologists our plastics Tell stories of our exquisite corpses. Luckily embalming oil comes in bags Thicker than the statutory 40 microns.

Matchbox A letter of note brings up the matchbox With a label of apple picture ,in a child’s Pocket full with labels that dark young Women stick boxes with in finger glue. Women stand to fill their emptinesses With fire-sticks , not sit down till evening So they quickly run away in case of fire.

Matchboxes are empty like old houses In Norway of chopped wood’s smelling Letters of note written about by poets On papers of pulp ,like Norway houses. Match boxes are like tiny empty houses Such that you roam about freely in them To experience wind between their walls Through absence of furniture, for minds To wander away from them to the hills To know where the wind has come from Or where the fire resides at stick-heads Women run away from while standing.

Wink With a wink , Crick would say of consciousness Sitting as brain layer , an orchestra conductor. The claustrum is where the secret is , O’Rama. A week later Crick passed , his knowing wink. My petition is ready , O’Rama, in prayer book About a god-love that makes romance a stink To a marriage with Him who has 16000 wives Of closed eyes on a river bank, a flute melody. We are bound in this conspiratorial silence All the 16001 of us on the river bank of flute. We have claustrums to remind us of ourselves As we close our eyes to His soft river music. He winks at us in this conspiratorial silence.

(I visited him (Crick) at his home in La Jolla in July of 2004. He saw me to the door as I was leaving and

as we parted, gave me a sly, conspiratorial wink: "I think it’s the claustrum, Rama; it’s where the secret

is." A week later he passed away. Vilayanur Ramachandran„ neuro-scientist talking about his visit to the scientist Francis Crick in the

Edge . O’Rama is the Hindu way of invoking God )

Words not written down Words are like coffee beans harvested By hapless slaves from Brazil plantings Of coffee drunk by old men in whiskers. The slaves do not show through coffee. You brewed coffee from the slave beans As slaves and women smile from bushes In words from collective guilt of atavism.

Words not written down do not show up Until you look around for them in corners Where writers leave them when they go. "Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the words not written down.”Doris Lessing ,the

venerable writer who passed the last Sunday.

Cloud The cloud shall pass a face As in a lake of rock beauty With shore trees looking on And dark cormorants back As rocks among hyacinths. Hyacinths shall go in boats And the rocks of cormorants Fly away to distant clouds. Boats fly away to shadows. Cloud shall pass cormorants Who shall pass faces of rocks And remain rocks for a while Among cloud swirls in a lake, A sky swinging as water blue. A rock shall do monkey jump In waters to eddies of think. Shore trees shall drop yellow Flowers to their own eddies.

Selfie A hash-tagged selfie behind a touch Of the capacitive screen would trip And fall into his own painted glass. The fall will go viral and big-time . The selfie will get tons of anon likes Not because he is such a cool dude. But it is a magnificent fall after all.

Poem stanz’ass are similar and like , Such big-assed falls in painted glass. Their fall does not get viral or liked.

Hear I hear her in this room A merely aural person Outside my tympanum A room thing in the ear A room that is inner ear As I wait in an outer ear. There is no hole in ear, A cool thing like winter Like the skin’s wrinkles As if the breeze passes On the gold of a wheat. Breeze is merely aural On the skin that hears, Skin that has nine holes. The breeze enters holes Rouses their sounds like Insects making ruckus Nests for short winters.

Winters are soon over Outside the tympanum That is no hole of cave. Holes do not have holes. Cave has its stalactites Like frescoes painted By your very old- man Who lives as buzz-insect In your inner ear cave.

Melancholy A great thing by our memory By its reductio ad absurdum. We noticed,a night ill spent. The desert would be brighter If we had thought of a moon While belly could contain all. But the jiggle was in a bush’s Contrast to the desert’s sand. We have fenced off our camels Electrically fuelled by diesel. Our melancholy is rarely green. The desert was a free flowing Black garment about women.

Percentage Merely a special character To access money , meaning A part of my God,who incites Poetry from the rocky hills. A rice giver ,it raises prices Like it gives well paid jobs. This mean thing raises fear Approaching an average life What makes for expectancy. Chances are a train will pass Drowning all my percentages, A mean fifty fifty possibility In poem of prose ,black verse.

Bird by bird For a bird parliament they sit On internet wire in a blue sky Swirling briefly and returning To make a point, bird by bird. They hold out for a brief while And vanish in the blue as dots. Brother by brother, our birds Vanish in the blue, after a sit-in. No one knows where the dots go.

Full and final We better collect all the stuff For our final journey ,secular Or otherwise,in a dark tunnel If you please,in a kissing dark, Just like how our ballsy thing Began in sticky green waters.

Virgil keeps his Stygian vigil Where sinners would bob up Once in a while in a torment. The souls have feeling skins. We have thought of old man Dante , for our eschatology. The body is gone for a smoke While its bird keeps fluttering Near the fan, in smoke swirls, On the top of cigarette smoke.

Poem Hope

We work up our own idyll Our hope’s trivial build up Towards living for a night In justification by words. Words are but life,a night For animals, a creaturely Existence as temporary life In epileptic fit of egotism. Our intimations are mortal Of celestial light imagined Within apparelled things By a worthy word smith’s Emotion recalled as words. Beauty is hardly the truth Nor temporary night words.

Blue The signature of spring turns blue In blue eyes against white winter

In a beard generous of Christmas. Now blue , now green ,land turns Brown and bare, to hush and hoar. Gifts of season are hey ,hey, hey. Shopping malls are hard ice rinks Slippery by foot, bones creaking. Come down an escalator, hey you You do have armfuls of packages, Like the hard snow of Frigidaire Not defrosted since the ice ages

Come down before you turn blue In the bones like a winter of sky And your packages turn weighty. Watch frisky dolphins in the blue As they do neat tricks in the pool. Bones have tendency to turn blue Like you were a baby in the face.

wood pecker

here in fidelity to life we have

stretched selves,our shadows

at noon soon trailing past us.

nothing happens day and night

by ongoing recall of existence. books are maximal creations

with verisimilitudinous detail

who did where , what and why with

many a how’s explaining. our phone happens on a ring

a morning ritual of dissecting

men in yawning daily rituals

their commonmost ablutions

painted as earth’s revolutions

our tales are acknowledgments

of existences,boring tiny holes

in time and the holes will vanish

in bigger holes,in empty spaces.

nothing happens except in time.

Weather

The sun plays hooky in the east Rousing beastly passions, nose Etchings, from some beastly tiny Creatures now dead, now living. We talk of the weather all times As a watery thing’s flow running While the sky is vapid and gray. A gray of sky is not in our blood. Overboard men may be Russians Of snowbound gulags, zombies Controlling fellow human lives But more like the stiff upper lips Froze in pain above lower ones.

Our glory sun will be back soon. Our bodies will start once again In overwrought trains to hang Perilously, on train foot-boards As he smiles in our crevices like Poets who reach everywhere.

Whirl

An orange dervish whirls in the desert As his sky whirls about men in laughter. Their bodies turn whirl gigs, their song Making ethereal supplications to God.

The child sets a top whirling as if God. The dervish loses himself in his whirl In flames of clothes that burn like sun Setting the sand dune against people.

Girls whirl in skies , hands duly locked Whirl and whirl for dreams to scatter To the sky like sand grains in the desert.

Self love Love is what electrifies my soul My own in a bath room mirror And in the rear view of my car. My hair falls lovely on temples And nose such history changing. I am a selfie from recent O.E.D Like my ancient friend catching His image in a mountain stream.

The ancient friend lost himself

In a few pieces of running brook

Into the mountains to nowhere.

The poor fellow had no ten MP

Camera phone to click himself. Things The scratch of the earth by broom Is an idea in things, a morning new Scraping the dust off our earth,our

Sky-roof felt gently by a tree’s sun. A chime of the bell beats the wind In a sea where it comes from, a sky Alien , painted by the last of herons, A laugh addressed to plants in pots.

You are dowsed with enemy virus In the things of your body, liquids Overwhelming the mind in a skull Which is thing laughing and gone.

Virus is thing like liquids and nose Nose is thing soon gone laughing Like the hollow in your ringing ear Now chiming and soon to be gone.

Ladder I see a ladder up against the water tank Nestled in the clouds in a sky full of rain .

Its two lines in gradient will gather time And lose their bottom rungs to the earth. They fall away like lines in a sketch book. Each hour going by is a rung to the sun. I better hurry before the lines fall away.

Moment The moment is a wonder of moving Away from our own body’s decisions In swimming white blood corpuscles In a debris of dying scales, a foot spa Fish eating feet away in the waters . The fish eat feet off the earth below Moment by moment, scale by scale.

Tyranny I try to escape my poetry’s tyranny

A structuralism of starting by word. Mother would start calling in again My unreality of a bare naked being At the door, under overlay of words As night turned to unfettered dawn. I cannot escape the tyranny of poetry Nor memory of the crook of her arm I would run to ,from a shadow of fear , The fear of night closing in on my bum.

Ceremony

Our ceremony is a parade of innocence In silken plumes and at once, in a flurry Pretending a body is our all and for ever. We are not yet sure what our question is, In hay bundles of broken lines mixed up Like bits of a world falling apart in motion. Only a ceremony can save our innocence.

Sound and fury We reserve all our rhetoric to our Sunday Television’s living rooms, in glitzy new rich Televisions of teenagers in starched cloths, Old men dragging their patriarchal turbans

Their drag-cloth long as Polonius lectures. We love rhetoric by young group dances Where youth commonly shivers its bellies To their furious music , its staccato beat Providing rhythm to lips- smacking lives. Our fury and sound can signify anything.

Broom the broom will now begin the day

and a late poem behind curtains.

open curtains, will you, poet bum

for the sun to enter his shadows.

the broom gently swipes the road

in touch gesture of poetry tablet

sweeping poem dust of last night

off the sleeping road, bleary-eyed

for school children to get in buses

with star dust on their yellowness. Barber You sit in chair to be subject to violence On hair, on flanks of the pliable old face In done time’s remembered sideburns.

Under shroud is itch you cannot reach. The fingers seem flowing in the shroud And stomach friends another stomach. Stomach - stomach has shroud between. A fly bridges living gap with fallen hair, The smell of hair mixing with cheap gel. Flies build bridges of understanding. The stomachs growl in mutual empathy And the electric fan whirls agreement. You want color ? The barber of hair asks Of course scalp is mostly a gray-scale. Moonstone shines splendidly in white sky.

The shroud is gone with forests of hair The flies go with incandescent stomach. A mirror enjoys liberty from fraternity.

Walking the mind At the street corner I now get to the point Of shop not open in broom dust of street Or the vital growth stage of my country Or worries about how to die with no pain

In fleshy parts of the soul leaving anytime.

Hospital bills be forgot in fumes of poetry Print by lead - start, not led nor started. These are our leaps in bounds like goldfish In cruel glass bowl going round and round Two fish not killing each other for company.

The fumes be forgot in round and round Rice in steam ,white breakfast streaming The early morning cold topped up by tea Breathing winter steam from your mouth As if it is words vaporized from thinking.

Poemspace A write-pad is sprung on my time Of before morning, near a balcony Leaning into a mildly diluted night. The paled moon has not diluted it But rather a daily sun for our time

Still a mere thought in poem space Beyond my curtains with its flowers Blooming innocently like real ones. The lines go on in higgledy-piggeldy. A new theme on space is imposed A poem by chance, a certain spring’s Gorgeous nothings like the naughty Poet aunt who wrote them time ago. She persisted to write posthumously- What an idea, this business of dying, Before poems spring on poem space. How exciting to die for poemspace ! (Gorgeous nothings by Emily Dickinson)

Landscape

We had gone into fields , so to speak On the bunds between field and field Looking beyond was the triangular hill With a hole in the top, that once had Monks ,their voices floating on river. The river sand went dry for a summer And for village bones to bid goodbye. Boats came halfway middle of sand, And held your hands and took you in. A rupee was they charged other side. In deep of summer they did not exist Because river vanished into the bay.

Polished brass vessels spun and spun In eddying waters, floating away from Bathing women dipping hair of heads Right below them to bring them up Suddenly like they were brass vessels The landscape is gone from our world. Women heads do not bob up nor brass. The women are just a landscape in us.

Branches She has branched off our big branch Our own child, drinking the same sap And her leaves shall fall as if our own

On an autumn earth, from the branch. My own blood relatives keep flowing Along with hers streaming in my flow. This baby is her branch but mine too In the branch, branching off my own.

She is the same branch, as the man In the shirt-sleeves staring in space Unremittingly from my whitest wall From among dozen heads stopping To say nothing, branching their own.

Traffic We are going to respective suns. We shall have our guilty pleasures Of thumbing books for no reading. Actually we do not read any books, Just finger their bodies and spines. Our cars shall go bumper to bumper. Love is a bit sensual , back to front. Many times their love turns violent

But their father-in law looks down Indulgently, warm in his pockets.

We are on way to respective suns. They all set beyond tall buildings In a common sunset ,leaving roads To a reluctant rule of streetlights. We will return bumper to bumper To our respective holes in the dust Where we sleep for our respective Suns to rise, to start a new journey Bumper to bumper, of mutual love Between our cars, dimpled darlings.

Machine Look how inside machine sputters To live to work and not stop , work A knotted snake inside, well spread In the dirty waters flowing to stop.

The machine thinks why is the how Of what it thinks , in the bone box. Other machines think in the similar

Boxes hermetically sealed but with Hairline cracks in uppermost plates, The warning fragile duly displayed.

Machine blinks to ask why it should Stop to think , let dirty waters flow. But poor thing has no idea where its On/off button is in a jangle of wires.

Clouds Clouds are smoke of a burning sea. They get in your hair in the jungle When trees burn and climb up a sky. Trees are a green sea below clouds.

They are vapor to please moody sun.

A sea burns too to please angry sun Sympathetically, its bosom heaving In waves , a somewhat platonic love.

Smoke happens on the street fires, Near boss trees who shed their love In leaves, scooped up by old women For money to keep stomachs going.

The old women shall turn smoke too When the stomachs will stop going. Then they will go in the black clouds And rain down on the grandchildren.

Grandchildren will point their fingers At dark clouds looking for lost bears. They forget to recognize grandmas In between so many clouds of smoke.

Bricks Let us make bricks to our understanding From the foot slush of the twelve year old In Peru or Orissa, not one with the i-pad.

Bricks are so much like the sleek i-pads Gleaming in yellow buses, in school bags On low backs weighed down by knowledge. The brick slush feels soft on child’s feet Ankle -deep in the earth mother’s love. Let us make bricks to our understanding.

Less sugar Less sugar is more sweet,in a movie Beat it, old man ,the young woman Says , her eyelids softly falling with Ancient love, love for the ancient. It is all in food,the richly spiced rice

With a bone or two of dead chicken For the young woman, in love with The old man’s lost words in beard A vegetarian’s first words of love. It rains all the time here in London Over dry umbrellas for young girls Lent by old men from restaurants Recent lovers of a spring chicken. London bridge is not falling falling. The old man cannot reach his arms About entire girth of Kutub tower. Mom says old man never went gym. Tea must be sugar-free for old men. After watching the Hindi movie Chinee Kum (less sugar)

Trapped The painting theme is fuzzy , its armpit Like the woman who did it ,not the didi But perhaps dada or a post-modernist Painting recent warm , flesh from sleep.

I was looking for stories of grandmas About princess trapped in an island By monster captor trapped in parrots. Everyone seemed trapped everywhere And children seemed trapped on lips.

Now I am trapped in armpit painting. Open the painting , will you, to stars And the sun who is set to rise outside Closed by the curtains, the bird still Sleeping,the dark crow just back from A long sabbatical in the neighborhood.

A woman outside is sweeping the sky Outside the curtains, its dust flying In piano music, just above my head And a keyboard that orders its notes. Everything is trapped in something.

World And the world appears in the moment And disappears as a handful of earth, In its lip-smacking flavours and slurps, Some sounds later,a truly trite silence. Silence matters to nobody or to God. We keep yapping about golden silence. Silver version is average Adam’s apple

Going up and down ,in indecent haste Something of a woman-induced effort In a garden of mischievous serpents. Actually world never happened except In a night’s sleep, as somebody’s dream In the cloth-cradle ,as a bundle of sleep, As electric fan whirred above ,to breeze The bawling bundle to sleep off dreams.

Mirrors The way the mirrors stood We felt like recent sparrows Pecking at their bird selves To an infinity that goes on In such mirrors of history . They had built the mirrors

To selves off men’s wealth And work, but soon wealth Was over and in the zenana The women stayed huddled In incompleteness of space.

The palace is like the queen’s, Beyond the green of Atlantic. A king guest offers its manna And palace stands in splendor, With banquet for a hundred. Now, a new hotel preened Its feathers to men’s wealth. The nobles in long mustaches Stared down from roof wood Like they were old sparrows Looking at their own infinity. (On a visit to the Falaknuma palace in Hyderabad)

grammar we live by a grammar of thought

a beginning with clause, ending

with a noun, adverbs in between

with taut grammar holding them

the thoughts follow cold syntax

of English, with embellishments

of flying strokes and blank verse

with enjambments, never ending.

never ending will leave a mouth

open with a new fly type guttural

consonants by the trembling lip, upper

teeth’s speak in a lower lip we have since dispensed with all punctuation for fear of full stops nothing ends except in a comma its abruptness will be hardly felt

with the lower mandible missing

Meaning We are a bit haunted, some times. Sagan bro says we are custodians Of life’s meaning, freed from past. Our trusteeship is found in a deed As God’s camera flashes up there.

In reality ,God’s day’s wet clothes Hung there for a drying , dripping In faces, pearls on our eyelashes Like balcony roses holding pearls In the early morning rain and fog. Trouble is we are almost haunted And bells sound somewhat eerie As they ring from the garbage van. The bells ring for all ,for our creed. And god, what smell to our noses!

Our creed is the garbage dumped To yard where it burns to smoke. Meaning is a self-congratulatory Facebook message going up like Garbage smoke, beyond the lake.

Gloom On the Christmas eve the poet Would hardy go into the gloom To witness dumb oxen kneeling At a twelve of the clock’s elders Saying so, by a hearth’s embers . Faith’s embers burn within us As in the poet’s Victorian gloom. Oxen are mild meek creatures From a stew of straw and urine

In a tail swishing sleepless flies. Gloom sits yet at twelve of clock Awaiting the paper star to shine. A few drones appear in a desert A peace offering by far off men, Ever lasting peace for strangers. (Reference is to Thomas Hardy’s poem "The Oxen")

Forgottenness Speaking we do, to forget and erase, The hotel eats a food for our thought Right up to the chandelier in a bloom, A memory that is lost of forgot moms.

Our years come back in the thought Like Christmas snow, bearded men

In each year’s pretending differently, The festivity in hearts some fine ice.

Let us now have a clink of ice back, Drink to the health of the deceased, Spread flaked rice outside a hearse, As we freeze the moment in a page Of forgottenness torn from memory.

Rust Even the roughest among them Cannot stand rain , this weather While it is a nice camera picture Of iron cable holding up clothes. Any iron shall love a village rain, And succumb to long term charm. Take bald eagle man seen rusting On park bench looking at the sky

With his eyes , tiny white flowers Dropped from sky’s white clouds. His iron slowly collects its oxide And will drop away by iron bench . The eagle rusts in its baldness, As bald eyes fail to swoop down On lowly creatures, two in bush. Its eyes slowly rust and fail away. Book At the night’s end is our own book Of what we have printed all along A certain recorded history in pages That lie buried in collective memory. Memory is the little wiggling thing In kids , creatures of future skies Made of acerbic acid of little shape A rogue tongue wagging little hope, With rasping sarcasm where it curls.

Our book is not in papyrus of river But an electric thought streaming Through myriad acid rivers of time Flowing relentlessly to grand irony. Random Random is the thing that strikes us Like lightning under a rained tree. Any tree could be inviting enough To any sky’s open bursts of anger. Why not other tree, asks every tree Whose birth was accidental on bird Of a random flying in and dropping A seed from a random tree far away.

Here we stand in our rain randomly, Our leafy tops open to an angry sky, Our coming chance biological event.

We keep asking why not other tree.