This document contains a list of 102 poems written throughout the year of 2013, with each poem assigned a page number and date. The poems are organized by month, with multiple poems listed under each month from January through March.
15. page3691.12.17 Clouds (2013-12-16 23:59) . . . . . . .
page3701.12.18 Bricks (2013-12-18 00:47) . . . . . . .
page3711.12.19 Less sugar (2013-12-19 01:39) . . . . .
page3721.12.20 Trapped (2013-12-20 01:21) . . . . . .
page3731.12.21 World (2013-12-21 01:07) . . . . . . . .
page3741.12.22 Mirrors (2013-12-22 01:49) . . . . . . .
page3751.12.23 grammar (2013-12-23 00:00) . . . . . .
page3761.12.24 Meaning (2013-12-24 01:52) . . . . . .
page3771.12.25 Gloom (2013-12-25 00:17) . . . . . . .
page3781.12.26 Forgottenness (2013-12-26 00:41) . . .
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
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16. 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 theyto the walledpictures,
Their beauty adds up are flung at 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.
17. 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
18. 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
19. 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
20. 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.
21. 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
22. 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.
23. 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)
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. 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
29. 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
30. 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.
31. 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.
32. 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.
33. 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.
34. 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.
35. 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
36. 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.
Thesestretched endin Charukesi of our God
Who were words 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
37. 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.
38. 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.
39. 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.
40. 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.
41. 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.
42. 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.
43. 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.
44. 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.
45. 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.
46. 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)
47. 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.
48. 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)
49. 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)
50. 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)
51. 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.
52. 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.
53. 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)
54. 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.
55. 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
)
56. 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.
57. 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.
58. 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.
59. 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)
60. 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.
61. 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.
62. 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.
63. 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.
64. 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
65. 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
66. 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
67. 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
68. 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
69. 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.
70. 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
71. 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
72. 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
73. 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
74. 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
75. 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
76. 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,
77. 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
78. 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.
79. 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
80. 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.
81. 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
82. 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
83. 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
84. 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.
85. 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.
86. 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
87. 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
88. 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.
89. 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
90. 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
91. 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.
92. 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.
93. 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.
94. 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.
95. 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.
96. 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.
97. 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.
98. 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.
99. 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.
100. 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.
101. 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.
102. 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.
103. 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.
104. 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.
105. 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.
106. 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)