1. Night
A lone flamingo shrieks in its sleep
Causing ripples in the night's stillness .
2. The tree in darkness
The tree waited in the dark
Studded with white pearls
Of sleeping flamingos.
3. Precursor of rain
Dark liquid clouds
Coagulated around the moon
Drawing a nebulous circle
Presaging silver rain .
4. The temple bell
The temple bell rang and rang
With its thick tongue in fever.
5. August sky
Clusters of acacias that had grown
Waterless under the skin of the earth
Spread their ghostly hair evenly
In the rainless , blazing August sky.
6. Time and again
I was just asking time
Once again.
Because my words had fallen
Into night.
They were not luminous.
When Rilke dropped them
They were.
But they fell into the same
Aggregate of darkness.
7. In the bear-hug of darkness
You do not see bears from bushes
And where the earth ends
And the dark of the sky begins.
8. At the death ceremony of a relative in Eluru
Trains bring people to river canals
Where death is a mere after-fact
Submerged in flowing green waters.
9. Thinking of my my dead father
Consciousness reverse-flows
Reinforced by the fluid present
In horizontal ether-filled space
He happened half a century ago
While I exist in finite space .
10. When death happened of my driver's father
In the meanwhile there is this driver's drama
When he gets into train to see ailing dad
He hears dad already dead of too much sugar
And look,death is so sweet and so prosaic!
11. Flickr. dreams
I have several black and white quot;flickrquot; dreams
Nobody touches them because they are
Just my black and white dreams ,not theirs
And it is the colored ones they are after.
12. These are no images for nest making
When one tries to get back to the muse
One is steeped ,like stick in the mud.
One keeps twittering like the night bird
Deeply afraid that the wind comes,
In the sea of night, bird does not see bird
But fallen leaves and broken twigs
These are no images for nest making.
13. What the old trees do not realize
The trouble Is they want to remain homes
To the many homeless evening-birds
Which incessantly chatter to slum kids
Pouring out of their improvised shanties
With tin roofs glistening in the sun.
They do not realize even in their death
That our gardener’s three-stone stove
Is waiting impatiently for their dry logs
To arrive in its enormous, crackling fire.
14. I stir along with the train and thought
She the train better stop thinking violent
Not puffing like her coal-eater ancestor
While mind walks slowly like the blue bird
That went up and down on the telephone wire.
15. Train thoughts
Train-fans stir cold wind and winter air
Shaking shadows of several recently fed men
Bringing out guttural sounds from sleep’s depths.
Dreams spoil their fun through monster bridges
And dark tunnels in the mountain’s wombs.
16. Train thoughts
As she writes her history on two parallel lines
In the black parchment all the while erasing it
I collect exquisite shadows of the night’s silence.
17. Myths
We have our myths,carefully polished
Over Time's washed stones of the riverbed .
Our accumulated minds enormously meshed
As a haystack of shared consciousness.
18. The road maker
This man turned the drum of liquid
The fires crackled and black smoke
Went up above the tree and red wall
Smooth and black like a snake.
19. noontime stories
trying to read stories
in the noontime,when
least rain is expected
there is a hot chimera
on the tarred road
a lone woman with a
metal pot on head
poetry strikes now
in the whir of the head,
a body posture replying.
20. We tried not to dream
We tried hard not to dream
While awake and in sleep
We leaned against the parapet
The shadows seemed to tease;
The sounds were unduly harsh
And the sights mere fragments.
