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A.J.Rao's Poetry Volume
            2
        A.J.Rao
A.J.Rao's Poetry Volume 2
Poems written between 25July,2011 and 5th October,2011




                       A.J.Rao
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Contents
The street with the wall at the end   1

Pensioner’s notebook                  2

Death for dishonour                   3

The list                              4

The list                              5

Spaces                                6

A petromax lamp                       8

Bed                                   9

State of affairs                      10

Birds                                 12

Register                              14

Poetry of ghosts                      16

Decline and fall                      17

Forgetting                            18

The bush shirt                        19

River steps                           21
Granite                    22

Moonlight                  23

Another mother             25

Bus dust                   26

The broken moon            27

The whistle                28

Rash                       29

The door                   30

Walks                      31

Rain                       32

Fragments                  33

The wooden pillar          34

The window-sill            35

It is Krishna who did it   36

The earth-pot              37

Body                       38

Who started the wind?      39
Mirrors in mirrors                         40

The immersion of Ganesh idol in the lake   41

Literature                                 42

The men in the photograph                  43

Temple                                     44

Gravel                                     45

Tyranny of time                            46

Echoes                                     48

The sock                                   49

We stymie you                              50

Shape                                      51

Dancing beauty                             52

Putting the cart before the horse          54

Wife                                       56

Larvae                                     57

Otherness of room                          58

The mobile                                 60
The hurricane                 62

Flowers, leaves and fruit     63

The chair as object poem      64

The chair                     65

Grandmothers                  66

Sufficient                    67

The cold wind                 69

The world has already begun   71

The table lamp                72

Family                        73

Laugh                         75

Children                      77

Fractals                      79

Seminar                       80

Sorority                      81

Brakes                        82

Posthumous poetry             83
The brick wall                      84

Story                               85

Meaning                             86

The lake that was sea               88

Looking for a word                  89

Particles                           91

Seeing is dead                      92

Sleep comes                         93

Stone maidens of Ramappa temple     94

Naming the child                    95

Prices                              96

Flowers that make my window glad    97

Work                                98

A child’s birthday                  99

Soliloquies                        100

Dark circles                       102

Dust mites                         103
Wall                    104

Miracle                 105

The first flower        106

Words for trees         107

Light                   108

Figures of our speech   109

The sea of images       110

Authenticity            111

Climate change          112

Metaphors               113

Phony vision            114

Scream                  116

Holes                   117

Children in the rain    118

Bridge                  120

The temple of shadows   121
The street with the wall at the end

In the morning the feet shuffle through streets
Listening to God’s song in the ears, the splatter
Of water before houses, brooms before houses
Women making gurgling noises in night’s throat
Of water- cleaning of sleep, on tongues stretched.
The men have tooth-paste foam at their mouths.

Some days we reach the history of an old woman
Walking the feet of yesterday’s marriages, pickles
Made, worship of deities, hospitals of childbirths
Babies crying in lungs, dark nights spent on bodies
Silk sarees in steel trunks, fragrant brides of sons
Sweetmeats brought from gods, fears of violence.
An unease occurs of slowly dawning futility of it all
And the feet somehow end up at the wall at the end
And have to trace the morning back to a side street
Losing sight of the woman and her enacted history.




                                  1
Pensioner’s notebook

When the word comes, the idea’s genesis occurs
In the deep night, when idea happens in our eyes
Open from sleep, having been quiet on sleep’s bed
Or in ghostly rapid eye moments of broken dreams.

Body is thought, on a wrinkled face, deep in poems,
Or on a furrowed brow, bearing daughters like Sita
Who are destined to suffer as wives for bigger glory.
Daughter has to prove her life and innocence by fire
All because she is someone’s wife in the deep jungle.

A pensioner’s notebook has to record his existence
He has to prove his aliveness to the birds in the tree.
The birds have to prove their aliveness on the wire.
They have to hold a daily parliament on T.V. cable.
So nobody will deny their existence in color plumes.

A pensioner has to prove his existence to the world
The world needs a viable proof of earthly existence.
A body or a signed paper is proof of yearly aliveness.
September poems are not recognized for the purpose.




                                  2
Death for dishonour

A crusty old boss causes death to girl’s dad
And his dishonor weaving a swindling story.
The father’s death is daughter's beginning
The glory of womanhood, a sweet revenge
When sold body is defiled for a sweet cause.
A body has no purity when dead, in father.
The gun is boss’ own phallus, waiting to die
And wipe the dishonor on daughter’s father.

(Reading a short story titled Emma Zunj By J.L.Borges)




                                3
The list

The list is formidable, frayed in the corner
Yellowed, crawly writing, corner to corner
Like little ants in line that have lost the way
To the edge of the wall, shouts lost in legs
We have got to do these things, before dying.
Our dying list is a bucket list, a corners list
Where all is swept up to the angular edges
And we make our ant-lines, lost in our ways
Our little white stuff, on our backs all the time.
So many legs, we have lost count, so many.




                                    4
The list

The list is formidable, frayed in the corner
Yellowed, crawly writing, corner to corner
Like little ants in line that have lost the way
To the wall's edge , their shouts lost in legs.
We have got to do these things, before dying.
Our dying list is a bucket list, a corners list
Where all is swept up to the angular edges
And we make our ant-lines, lost in our ways
Our little white stuff, on backs all the time.
So many legs, we have lost count, so many.




                                  5
Spaces

I think of spaces, holes made by space in a sky of space
Holes in under-shirts like tiny stars on a stand-still night
Pockets that had the air and sea of laughing childhoods,
Villages visited, fairs that sold hair-bands, plastic flowers
Sweets of white sugar, that took the forms of noisy parrots
Of dark men who had gobbled space behind those hills
And harvesters of green fields, their feet of sinking space
In muddy rice plantings, their female throats crying songs
Of rain that sliced through space, in marriage with the sun
Spaces contained in humongous mountains, like bubbles
That issue slowly from a kid brother’s running half-mouth.



I think of space in this room that continues to the horizon
Beyond curtains, houses, trees, vehicles, rivers, hills, seas
Over heads of people, their thoughts, their sleeping dreams
The blabber of children, the wails of old women, refusals to
Speak by dead men on the bamboo stretchers, the fires that
Followed them in pitchers and rice-flakes strewn around
And yellow marigolds that celebrated their joy of dying.



I think of spaces eaten by the buffalos in their slow mouths
Their thoughts in their udders of flowing milk, in their eyes
That flickered in the blinding headlights of oncoming trucks
With the spaces that stretched from them on endless nights.



                                   6
7
A petromax lamp



A lamp burned in white light, inside a soft rib cage
Feeling like an exhausted star from the Milky Way.
Its light curdled like white milk on the mud walls.
The shadows of the rain moths swarming around it
Were a massive mess of unreal figures on the wall,
As the dots together became squares and polygons
In the way they whirred around the petromax light.

 As the wind stirred in the leaves, the lamp danced
Gently on the door frame, where it is hung by a nail
Its shadow quickly responded on the wall in dance
With the entire halo of rain-moths around its head.




                                  8
Bed



Between this ceiling and the earth is my sleep
Lying sprawled on a four-poster bed like a lizard
Warm-blooded on roof, upside down, augmenting
Knowledge and beauty, for its tiny insects waiting
For death to liberate them and it from the need
To hang upside down, to go about their business.

Stealthy spiders trap them in their silk strands
Glistening in corners among the falling shadows
Their meaning found in insects wanting to die.

My sleep hangs between the earth and the ceiling.
My four posters are the four corners of the world
That brought me to the world from the earth up.
Now I am three feet away from the earth and soon
There shall be no roof between sleep and the sky.




                                 9
State of affairs

 In regard to the present state of affairs
It is the objects here that make it, not me.
The philosopher sees light on the wall
A Wittgenstein (pp 120), in convolutions.
Our own state of affairs is a mere state.
A state exists in words but passes over.
Objects are not unhappy, only subjects
Only they have affairs, drawn from objects
And not vice versa, or even virtue versa
If I do not speak them, they are not there.

In a vast glass wall a young woman opens
The door inward, that should open out,
A blonde, her thoughts open out, in a state.
The color of hair is not her state of affairs.
But no, she is not a blonde, nor do blondes
Open their outward opening doors inside.
A glass wall that shuts out most of her light
A door that has no doorman in mustaches
Opening a door to a cold night of reason.
A body is embroiled in a state of affairs.
A body that will one day be behind the glass
Saying nothing in its pantomimic gestures.




                                  10
11
Birds




 When I was a child birds gave me ideas,
In their flights of rows, towards the lake
When they looked white and glistening
Against the autumn sky, my fingernails
Clawing the air rhythmically and my lips
Calling them to infuse whites in my nails.
Those days birds could drop their whites
Directly in the behind of our fingernails.

Actually they were bringing these whites
From the marshes of Siberia in the seas.
A little drop of whites in children’s nails
Would not diminish their white too much
When they returned from our nesting trees.

Birds gave me their ideas, from their wings
And bones full of hollow air, silky feathers
That would some times drop in our street




                                 12
Dancing down many layers of air playfully.
We would catch and curate them in pages
Of books, afraid to use them for homework.




                               13
Register



Life goes on as frogs croak in the rain puddles
And pretty little brown birds continue to make
Mothering noises over the balcony A.C. outlet.
My register is filled with the smallest of details.



In the evening the car stops at the intersection
With some human hands inserted in our eye-holes.
The car has gaping holes inside, behind the glass.
The music fills the register; our ears are full of it.
The register fills, from time to time, with details.



The buffaloes rise against buildings in the grass
Their emotions in control, but their bowels open.
Their milk overflows, grass in abundant supply.
Their milk is white, like the whites of our eyes
The register is full from time to time with details.



We heard about a boy who stared in the hospital
Trying not to cry, when they were shaving his head.
It is the uncertainty of what lies inside his skull




                                    14
That is what makes him cry, not just an egg-head.
An egg-head is a joke, a laughing matter in mirror.
But we are all egg-heads and we are in this together.
Our register gets filled with details from time to time.




                                  15
Poetry of ghosts

The poet brings up poetry from random words
Powder-dried to make a street mosquito killer fog
Enveloping ghosts of persons that never existed.
Poetry is thus made from blurbs of apparitions
Those have vaguely tapering tails in place of legs
Like you draw them roundly in kids’ magazines
Vanishing in trees, if you answer a ghost’s riddle
And if you don't answer, head will break in pieces.

Somewhere in the head you have a thing growing
That makes your head break, even if you answer
As the ghost does not accept it as the right one
Because there are no right answers to its riddles.




                                 16
Decline and fall

It is September and you mark the decline of the sun
Behind the long rows of buildings and listless trees.
From the train its decline is noticeable in arid wastes
That have straggling shepherds and their grazing sheep.
The sun does not envelop their bodies in silhouettes.
The orange of light shall wait at the mountain's mouth
Beyond the spartan colors of the lake, less its shimmer
As clouds pass without event, giving rain a sabbatical.
The decline will of course be followed by an exciting fall.




                                  17
Forgetting

 Forgetting is sound disappearing, body’s spasm
In folds of death, mind’s entrails in a stomach
As everything of you freezes in life’s green liquid
An ice block of death, whose water of life melts
The night when it happens in a death that stares
And you collect life’s water in rags of wet clothes
As body is a waiting rag torn off from your fabric.
Forgetting is fire and wood, in a crackling sound.




                                  18
The bush shirt



That was a bush-shirt with big, big flowers
A soft windy silken shirt we wore to school
To others’ envy, with pockets on both sides
That had bulged with flowery spaces and air.
We were hurling fingers in air as if clawing it
Not for any complaint, but just in boy-show.

(We had not picked it up in the wayside bush
We were not bush-men of arrows and bow)

We had left our long shirt with horn buttons.
We looked like fierce Afghan men in turbans
With moustaches that struck terror in shirts.
Our buttons were two at the top, to our neck.

When the bush shirt came our money changed
Our annas went of four to a rupee, to easy paisa
We now ate rice in shining stainless steel plates
And we played in streets seven stones and ball.

Our moustaches are silver over frayed collars.
We now have pounding hearts under our shirts
Weak of memory, but still love the big flowers.




                                  19
20
River steps

River steps are wet with village women’s baths.
A golden sunlight floods their mornings in boats
Leaving early for mountains on wrinkled rivers.
Giant banyans greet them from the other bank
Spreading their shadows of hair on the blue sky.

Mornings are for sun, palms cupped with water
Looking the sun in the eye, lips softly trembling
With prayers, as white wet clothes clung to body.

On the river bed, the buffaloes bath in shallows,
Unperturbed by the sun flashing in vacant eyes,
Like little rocks in the bed laid smooth and bare
By a dried up river, after last year’s flash floods.




                                   21
Granite



Granite is our stone, blue – black like Krishna,
That provokes strong feelings, hard on fingers
But soft and silky in its core, in hues like rain.
It is like Krishna’s belly, filled with flute music
By a river of gentle ripples flowing from trees.
There is rain and wind in it, as in moonless sky.
Feel it , play on it and sing its mountain tunes.
The more you work on it the silkier it becomes.




                                   22
Moonlight




Yesterday’s moon had slid behind the school
To surface today at midnight, behind the shed.
It is a struggle for the cow to reflect on events
Of the day, near the haystack, with tacky flies
Needlessly bothering its tail, while the moon
Is reflecting temptingly on its water trough.

The straw is all around its feet, stewed with urine
And Bengal grams tastefully added to porridge.
There at mountains all was peace and heaven.
The grass was just fine, the flies less of a bother.
A red bull came with dishonorable intentions
But was promptly ignored, as if he did not exist.

The moon is now directly above the asbestos roof.
The night is quiet with the street dogs gone to sleep
And the moonlight has become brighter and cooler.
Somehow the cow seems less angry with the bull.




                                  23
24
Another mother

Just as my own had gone out of the mind
Another mother came to night in light words
Spoken at the moon that hid still in clouds.
The night generally prevailed on the road.
A machine then kept whirring at the back
The machine that churned out hard words
In the night’s vast wastes across a dark sea,
A sea of words that surged in old thoughts
Like the sea behind humming casuarinas
In old custom houses sitting pretty morose
As a white spit hurled at them in contempt.
The night swallowed her too in its memories.




                                 25
Bus dust

The bus shelter stands against a silhouette of bus dust.
A newspaper half-read lies on a lap in its cement bench.
A towel is spread on the seat, with an open-ended smile
Hidden in beard growth, meant to forget hunger pangs.

The face inside has no travel on mind, just a killer of time.
Layers of fine bus dust have settled on it burying its years.




                                  26
The broken moon

There is a broken moon on the housetop there
Cold and soggy, snuggling to the breezy coconut.
The elephant god is not looking for it for laughter
After a heavy meal of sweets in his child-stomach.
Our dear elephant-god lies now broken himself
At the bottom of the lake, snuggling to the algae.
Time for a many-armed mother, who shall bestow
Our victory for this season, wealth for our devout.
The mother maternal, eyes wet with love for sons
And terror in tongue, trounces demons under foot.
After the victory she too will go down to the lake
To the drum beating of music and camphor flames.
Our gods are like us, of soft clay and kitschy colors.
They disappear from lives after the season is over.




                                  27
The whistle

The whistle blares it is the inky night of 2’O clock
Marked by feet in old boots, in a Himalayan walk,
With their stick tapping the earth to warn thieves.



Another whistle, man and boy blew this morning
Whose shrillness of blowing sounded quite hollow
Across the bare earth and houses to friends down
All in mirth, the boy in a snigger after the whistle.
Their whistle is mere surrogate for night’s cricket
Since the latter has taken short leave from bushes.



When our rice is ready for meal in pressure cooker
The whistle sounds blowing the lid off afternoon nap.
The pressure rises in vapor, pressing down the valve,
A short whistle-blower on hunger pangs in our belly.




                                  28
Rash

Wife bursts into rash, as pink- hued as pollen
From the plotted hibiscus flower on balcony,
Petite, not liking birds, honey not dripping.
Mother birds causing rashes are pure baloney.

Birds do not bring allergy from A.C. outlets
Being brown and stupid with little chick-lets
Open-mouthed with wonder at mama’s feats.

Nor does the political grass from a green lake
That smells of so many dirty fluids and deeds.
The lab says unpronounceable issues for rash.
Little dots on wife’s moonless sky are its cash.

The rashes are body’s too much of a good thing
Anti-bodies wiggling in the blood ready to sting.
You must know which rascals they are fighting.
Otherwise you are doing shadow-boxing thing.




                                 29
The door

Plastic doors are much like ear membranes
They last while you last, water not touching.
The shower is effervescent in the bathroom
But the door remains calm and wet to gills.

A handle that does not go down to fingers?
Use it to upside, when the urge in you is quick
And the bathroom is getting ready for a song.

You will need it, man, in the thick of the night
As your bloody system comes to blinding stop
And doors open together to let in cold draught.




                                 30
Walks

Long are our walks, morning and evening,
Some mental walks, hearty walks, city walks.
There are walks, talk walks, like talk going on
In waking limbs, body thinking under the skull.

Body merely thinks as its mind which walks
Like a hundred-footed worm, a goods train
Of a hundred steel boxes on unending track
The mountains walk unendingly to the horizon
And the horizon walks unendingly to the sky.

Words walk, spirit walks, our hands go up
In the night air in vertical sky breaking walk.
Chilly fields walk and up down with the train
As also the blue bush birds on phone wires
The bridge noisily walks away from the train.




                                  31
Rain

Rain in the afternoon makes less noise
On a napping mind, more on a dulled skin
The way it tickles it by the wind from trees
And comes in instalments like crow-caws
And rice poundings in neighbour houses.
Half -awake eyes are shut in old thoughts
As certain rain of day and sun on the side,
Rain and sun married like dogs and foxes.
It is at leaf-ends that rain-magic happens.
The sun trains a flashing mirror into room
Way past gaps in curtains, on to the wall.




                                  32
Fragments

It seems we cannot but be mere fragments
If it would mean many parts coming together
In re-assembly just like in a natural system
Or in a page of a novel, leaving action to guess
In the snows of Kilimanjaro, a rich woman
Content to watch gangrene dying in a snarl
A Hemingway hero who forgot to put iodine
On thorn wounds under a September sky.

Here within walls, there is no further action
Except dead silence, beyond a dying gangrene
Festering on foot in proud wails, in nasty snarls.
We cannot be making up things all the time
The way nature makes assembling parts easy
In programmable sequence of parts to wholes.
Now what ,asks itself against the wall up north
When it comes to re-assembly of broken parts,
Memories that had long since trailed off in dust
Their drag marks collecting rain in their holes.




                                  33
The wooden pillar

The pillar is smoothly rounded by the girl
As she swirled with hands holding it tight.

Her eyes looked dizzily at the hot tin roof,
Her face in slant, at forty degrees to pillar.
She whirled around it holding it steadfast.

 The pillar is her friend, its shape smooth
With her fingers wrapped around it in love.
It is worn smooth with her love for years.




                                    34
The window-sill

The window is lack of matter in matter,
A hole that is wall against being alone
An open invitation to city’s darkness.

The sill is there to break abruptness
To make landing softer and smoother.
It is there as a transit point before fall.
It is there to host rain-moths that die
On the pane ,trying to embrace light.




                                     35
It is Krishna who did it

I have not made the war or these enemies,
Nor the clang of metal, nor the fall of dusk
Nor blind men, love of sons, blindfold eyes
Nor ivory dice with dots of five, four, three
Nor caves nor foreheads bleeding with truth.

I look at the fish-eyes, fight for fair maidens
Divide women into brothers, cry as they lose
Clothes for honor, never ending as Krishna.

My forehead is still bleeding for useless truth
In fluorescent letters, on the flanks of hills
Their trees precariously perched, from where
Women warriors jump on horses with babies.

A bearded man fought for his useless truth
In blazing skyscrapers with vaporous bodies
In a fall of truth struck by planes of beards
When in direct contact with a burning god
And fair maidens dancing in fire and water.
I have not made the war or burning enemies.
It is our Krishna who did it, blue as our sky.




                                  36
The earth-pot


This earth is a pot, full of light in its holes
If not holding water for crows with pebbles.
A mere wheel turns to give birth to it softly.
In summer its earth smells nicely of water.

Its shadows at bottom betray our emotions
Of deep passion, thirst for hills, dark fears
In deep down of belly, butterflies for future.
It is like our mom, silk-soft in belly for us.




                                    37
Body

Body is the essence of night, a falling of flowers
A few particles of the night, on the way to dawn.
The red of their stems is the feet up, faces down
Quietly buried in the earth of the dust, leaf-swept
By women of organic garbage, to greater dusk.

Bodies are spoken of well in heaven, their seats
Reserved where beauty is condemned to dance
In tasseled silk blouses that are not quite there.
The bodies exist till our minds permit, not there
When our eyes become shut, on not intact skulls.




                                  38
Who started the wind?

In the river, you look up from the waters,
And see the wind walking down calmly
From the hills that have holes at the top.

On your feet, if joined in a lotus posture
At the river’s bottom, the wind will push
Through currents smelling of the far hills.
Your face can smell the wind in the river
Where it touches your cheeks, in caress.

Surely the trees have not started the wind.
The trees just shake as though they did it.
It is not even a sea of giant rolling waves.
Those just pretend they brought it about.

It seems the wind comes from upstream
Riding down to the sea on the river’s back.
The sea hosts the wind from all the hills.
Who originated the wind is now answered
Finally and without equivocation, after all.




                                  39
Mirrors in mirrors

It came to you before night, before sleep
The fact that watchmen dream of sleep
While still drunk and dreaming, dreams
Within dreams, like mirrors into mirrors
Endlessly entering, never to turn back.

You drink cool milk and chocolate to calm
Your nerves before sleep, as there is a fire
In the belly, not the one they use to drive
Up the north, in the mountains and pine
Needles on floor, to collect a few in pockets.

You are concerned with foam mattresses
Left to dry in the sun by a drunk watchman
Who has smelly dreams of own to dream.
There is sunshine in his dreams, in his eyes
Betrayed by a nose-smell of alcohol in air.

Your mattresses are ready for your dreams.
You have poems that begin afresh each day.
Your dreams are in poems, poems in dreams
In eyes deeply red with forgetful liquids.




                                  40
The immersion of Ganesh idol in the lake

The lake flaunts plastics and floating gods
With their eyes and feet in clay fragments
Staring at the clouds, their dark acrylic hues
Lighting dusk fires on its smiling ripples.
Their leaves and dead flowers lie in a heap.
Dark men meditate on colored gods of clay
Their wobbling feet made of it, bottom up.

Children’s gods fade into red, blue balloons
And their stomachs ache for evening snacks,
A few warm golden teeth, with hair on top
As a golden ball, tossed in the lake, floats,
At the shore, near the holes where men live.

Men in the tall machines lift their clay gods,
Their women red in faces, their hair in knots.
The flowers turn the lake into a yellow sea.
They first hoist their gods into the blue sky
And hurl them into the waters, all in a ripple.




                                  41
Literature

You are quite a thing, as a black crow caws
A big man vertically split by mind-thought
In sky rings of white smoke, falling deeply
In love, at times, with just being beautiful.

Your everyman touches on your raw nerves,
Street men that are not yet your real people.
These are the phantoms that walk the edge
Trying not to fall off with the hems of lungis
In their hands, in walking in slippered feet.
Their walking sleep evokes big time yawns.

You have soft dreams of mirrors that show
Big time visions of you, in the grand walk
It is the lungis held by the hand in the street
That makes the world, in the street corners
And the mongrel that follows you by the lake.
It is they who make your literature for you.




                                  42
The men in the photograph

These men are in shadows, all the time
Trying to speak, to open their mouths
In the temple, at the lake, on the road
Their common destiny looks unfolding
Bounded by their collective lip-sealing
The ineptitude of their lives and bodies.

If only they opened, shouted and forgot
Their gaffes, their shame, common guilt
The primeval guilt flowing from bodies
The guilt of colors, the inevitable doom
Foreclosing of future options, the walls
Built on their words, the burden of a past.

They are there at the temple in squares,
Palms cupped to water, their heads hung
To obeisance, their songs sung in unison
Their hopes jumping from thing to thing.

The camera would bring them out of light
Their bodies dumped in squares of shade
In limpid pools of thought, under the trees.
Their water flows in thin shiny streamlets
Their words frozen at lips, still trembling
At their imagination, in a foregone reality.




                                  43
Temple

Drowned in the temple’s noon shadows
Man and tree turn phantoms, whose lips
Hardly seem to move, except in the wind
Bearing the fragrance of the smiling gods
In incense, flowers and camphor flames.

The priest‘s pot-belly quivers as god-words
Issue forth from his large lips, licking words
As if they were sweets, delectable to tongue.
The trees begin to speak their sibilant words
As shadows flow on the mosaic of the floor
Filling the camera’s eyes with a mist of love.




                                 44
Gravel

We try to sleep off our daydreams.
It is when dreams come and we try
To sleep over dreams as in the night.
We doze off on train seat, eyes shut.
The train sleeps its eyes wide open.

Its sleep sounds come from its underside
With tiny gravel stones hitting the night.
They are its shattered dreams about hills.




                                 45
Tyranny of time




A new morning is opening in my window.
A September wind is speaking in its trees
Before customary rain of the elephant-god
Who will drown in the pond later in shouts.

The poet asks to please, please let go of him
Of the stranglehold of time on his innards
A rumble at four is hardly a photo-caption
While some of our pictures do need a caption.
Of course pictures are not made for captions.

I live in the deep bowels where time rules
My bearded rebellion gets calmly put down
While body refuses to succumb to the wind
As the tree there does in its body in the sky.




                                  46
47
Echoes

Well into music, you sound your note
A jarring note, just an echo of harshness
An electric fan that has lost its bearing
A cane juice crusher that is spluttering
Shortfall of sweetness in a mouth of echo,
A gearbox dripping in thick black grease.

 Where echoes abound, the tree is bare
Of spring leaves, roots bony in the earth
Its birds de-feathered of love, of its chicks
The eagle is on roof in echoes of tragedy.
Unhappiness echoes in its wings of flight.

Well into music the goat shouts in its skin.

Its shouts are echoes from an alive skin.
Its drum beat is a mere illusion of sound,
An echo from the old sounds of mountains.




                                   48
The sock


A single cotton sock caresses the foot.
Its other seems missing in the closet.
It seems your leg pairs do not match,
Except in their holes, similar-shaped
At the toe, in its curve and asymptote
Where the toe tends to a shoe’s curve
But will meet it only at its dark infinity.
But the wind in their holes is the same
In the way it tickles the toe in the hole.




                                    49
We stymie you



Before holes, we shall stymie you
In a global challenge of the earth
Wiping deep red tears of currency
Overflowing holes, deep as night.
The holes are bottomless of money.

We mine ferrous sorrows of the earth
And of trees suspended from the sky.
Our holes are full of rain of the seas
Trapped in a hot sun, in smaller seas.
They mirror the darkness of our walls.



(About the illegal mining of the iron ore in the Obulapuram belt that
has caused large scale ecological damage)




                                 50
Shape

The shape is in the night hidden from our view.
You take to night to drown in delightful confusion
Brewing in a freedom to take shape from a word
When word is poem, a woman that comes to you
With the freedom of shape, from your innerness.




Then a crow caws in the dawn of a poem walk
A walk postponed for a poem, a thought woman
Who comes to you with your own shape of body,
The mind shaping a body you love in all shapes
A shapelessness of freedom, a release of mind



An amoeba of no shapes, with false feet all sides
Always flexible, moving only to stay immobile
With the possibility of disappearing as a shape
To be a cloud of all shapes in the space of time.




A patch of discoloration on a wall, a rain-moss
Black of the summer sun, a soft morning sound
Of wood against metal, a smell burning in milk,
A death into the sky, a dark fear, a loss of shape.




                                  51
Dancing beauty

We have to think of beauty in our dance.
Our camels look funny and quite risky
For a fall from their humps, in climbing.
But their colours make them soft in sky
When they look up from their tall necks
They really touch high-end palm trees.




In the desert we have to move our feet
Quickly, to not get scalded in hot sand.
We have to dance our feet in blue sarees
Holding their hems in both hands at back
As indulgent camels watch in their mirth.



In desert we are not our women but men.
But we dance their dance remembering
Their steps on the hot sand, as they would
Back home, in kitchens and earth-stoves
Where fire dances its tongues on breads.



Our women’s eyes are of smoke and fire.
When they dance there is fire in their eyes
Melting their kohl in streams of black tears



                                 52
Flowing on soft cheeks like rivers at night.




                                  53
Putting the cart before the horse

Horse- cart is women in laughter,
A happiness image, a moving away
From house, water tap, bitter tree

A broken wall of never to return,
A space lost on other side of wall
Of women’s heads peeping, with
Eyes of laughter, wanting to know
White dragons of surprised eyes
Eyes crinkled in round disbelief.

A guava tree of ripe fruit not theirs.
Smells lost of flowers on the roof
By smells that overwhelm senses
Of horse-turds on rhythmic hoofs.

 Loss of film songs is felt in the air
In loudspeakers over mango trees.
The annual dragonflies do not come
This season of monsoon, from grass
To lose their silly wings on the wall.

Everything is in a blind daze of rain
Its flies conspire to hide the world
Beyond a tuft of tail, in busy swish.
Horse cannot see green on other side,
Nor the world beginning with tail
But all the while, laughter goes on.



                                    54
55
Wife

Anne Bradstreet was the wife of a husband.
If ever two were one, then surely we,said she.

 It is all in the things of the night uttered
In an utter seventeenth century bleakness
Of a New England straight from the ship.
An earldom left in general vagueness of sea
For a tableless living among fierce Indians.

 Wife’s importance lies in the other of life
Not merely of the fire, seven times, round
As every year you think of the seven rounds,
In gold, in textiles, in dim-wit restaurants.

Wife-love is in the early day of a long night
A pillow night of fears, ghosts and the dead
As you turn to the left of belly fear in sleep
You hear her sleeping, re-asserting your life.




                                 56
Larvae

From trees, on a gentle wind from the hills
A new light shall fall on the fluff of marigold
Its petals scattered for bees to tempt smells
On antenna of viscous honey, pollen of love.

 The larvae are growing as luminescent dust
In beams of light that travel down from the roof
In chinks of old tiles, awaiting their change
After the moss turns on them black in sun
When new tiles will replace them, by workers
Sitting on the roof as if they are sky-birds.

The larvae are growing in white water- clouds
Hoarding river and sea for tomorrow’s festival
When they will be beating tin-roofs like drums
Pushing dried flowers down their corrugations
And send down snakes of water to our ground.

Of light dust and snowflakes the larvae will grow
Till evening when they will vanish in our pages.




                                  57
Otherness of room

The wind blows in a light rain on the road
In gentle leaves waving the dawn to break.

Here I shall pass in the otherness of room
When the sea howls child fears in pockets
Filled with flowers plucked early morning
For worship, leaf by leaf, of gods in frames
On words uttered on trembling lips of other.




Rooms are demolished like they of the sea
Lying in string cots as they stare at the roof
With sea memories of shells on the beach
Its snails walking slowly in crooked lines.



The tea vendors of beach laugh like snails
Offering paper cups for your life’s worries.
Their footprints are demolished by waves
As soon as they are made, their paper cups
Swallowed by the sea in otherness of sea.

A loving parijat tree drops shy love-flowers
On its utter defeat, right outside my room.
Their death-smells enter holes of my room
Re-defining my room, its walls reinstated.



                                   58
59
The mobile

The mobile is now on the moving taxi seat.
Speak into it, you eyes, its Latin ring is seen
In the mauve of the taxi seat, quite agitated
Of much pants comfort, less heart- warmth
Of yesterday, in more cold of today’s words.

It is in the hot words of wax in a cold syntax
Of a mobile talk between shoulder and head
As the former comes close to a sneezing head.

 Its words are filthy, steeped in religious tunes
In the kitschy filmy tradition of the back alley.
Its tunes rhyme with the body’s foot tapping.

 The head is now leaning tower on motorcycle.
Such heads, leaning on shoulders, warm cops
In their pockets, their hearts, burning stoves.

 Its talk now walks on its feet on road like bird
A non-flying bird of the wingless, its feet tied
Together in the coop, in a joy ride to market.
It will speak in hush from someone’s stomach.




                                   60
61
The hurricane

The earth had only slightly stirred there
Leaving denizens remarkably disposed
To funny jokes and light banter, between
Wisecrack twitters of blue birds perched
On the windowsills of frivolous jokesters.

 The visitor hurricane is a delicate thing
A softer sister of earlier, who turned tough
In her underpants, blowing it really hard
On their lives in smug suburban houses.
This one is soft-spoken, unlike prior sister,
Only gently touching their lives and roofs
And ever so soft on weekend getaway cars.

Nature is not twitter stuff over fat pizzas
By sedentary geeks behind smog screens.
Mocking nature may be a happy pastime
But remember there could be worse sisters
That may not blow as softly in our faces.




                                 62
Flowers, leaves and fruit

Our flowers and leaves and fruit are here
In silver-white plates of morning fragrance
From burning incenses, flames of camphor.
Our waters stream between lips and palms.
Our flowers shall be flung at framed pictures.

Come face to face with the elephant head
That laughs on a rounded stomach of sweets
The head of a trunk from a severed north
On a torso standing guard on mother’s bath.

A father is egotistical of a divine drum dance
He that dances in snow hills of blue poison
That cannot wait to see wife bathing in cave,
He that smears his body with our death-wish.

His prankster son has to eat in his stomach.
Pock-marked moon laughs at his bloated stuff.
We all love him the way he pats his stomach
When he will pace up and down on our roof
After a heavy meal of rice cakes and jaggery.




(Tomorrow is the worship day of Ganesha, the elephant-god
who visits us every year this day)




                                 63
The chair as object poem

I dislike the word chair just before dawn
When I have to hit upon it when the wind
Outside the window falls on nearby trees
In a rhythm of rain, expected in daybreak.

 As a false positive I have to like the chair.
Its contours are deeply etched in my mind
As if they were from my very ancient man.
Here I am talking about the chair as object
While sitting in it as subject doing poems.

 The chair suddenly ceases to be the object,
An object poem in my subjective thought.
It becomes me in its pearl-white plasticity
Not deigning to melt into my light letters
Of poems materializing from air as objects.
My words turn objects, ahead of the chair.
They are now object poems like the chair.




                                   64
The chair

The chair’s memories go back to a sylvan past
Of animals, trees and foliage, in caves of dark
Men, women and kids in leaves of loin cover,
Fire in twigs and bird calls and bees of honey.

 The ancestors might have sat on its wood
Hopping from tree to tree, looking for chairs,
When there were no chairs, only branches.
You still see the ancestors’ seats delineated
In the chair, as if they had once sat on them.




(Think of the chair as Idea of chair, in a platonic sense of an object
being copy of the Idea. Reflect on the slight depression built in the
chair anticipating how the sitter’s body will fill the chair)




                                 65
Grandmothers

Our grandmother we remember vividly
In the moon and sitting on a sagging cot
Woven with old stories and waving trees
Circulating the moon wind and princes.
Coconuts join in stories of green lands lost
On daughters’ weddings, gold shining less,
Vegetables brought and cut, from groves.

Men come in rain bearing wedding stuffs
Between slippery field boundaries of rice,
Paddies with water snakes swimming early
Women ankle deep in mud, their shoulders
On level with the mountains of the horizon.

Grandmothers cry from no salt in the eye.
They cry softly from waters in the head
Of memories of husbands lost in opium
Of sons and grand-nieces lost to a moon.

They laugh toothless laughter in ripples
Over vegan jokes made specially for kids,
Not on fart jokes in high demand by them.
As they make hot evening snacks for kids
They rub their eye-whites, of blue smoke.




                                 66
Sufficient

We have never felt it sufficient in all this
In blocks of time we had made quite early
One after other, the latest one sticking out
Earlier ones fading away in a dust of time.




We have never felt it sufficient to work out
The grand logic of it all, in a clear ontology
A hierarchy of speed, a journey in the wild.

A mere outcry, a walk in the wind alone
Over dry leaves that hid a lizard, nothing.
There emerged no poetry in this blind path
Merely a fear of fears, of death and night.



 A piano solo concert, from a friend’s son
A solar energy that flowed from another’s
Were benchmarks, a few lines in the sky,
Ephemeral as eccentric son of other friend
In a clink of bangles, of a gene gone awry.

All is in a mind’s dark, in a together-guilt
A son’s failure in father’s life and thoughts.
One does not feel sufficient, father of son.




                                   67
68
The cold wind

The window has let in a benignly cold air
Between a promised rain and a buried rain
Of yesterday’s clouds dripping from trees.
I close windows to formally remove a cloth
Of needless wool warmth over old shoulders.

 A mountain arrived by a kind monkey god
Who promptly consumed garlands of eats
In his ample rolls of neck, a laughing matter
In the foolishness of our pre-facto desires.
The monkey who burnt an island with a tail
Will surely bring us mountains of smugness,
Our desires realized in solid gold and power.

The cold wind shall cease only on our graves
When our desires no more burn in temples
And our gods turn silent in their sanctums
And look away quickly from our burning eyes
Entirely embarrassed, of promises not met.




                                69
70
The world has already begun

 Look, I already hear the morning noises
Of the bird parents to their new chicks
Above the dripping A.C. unit in balcony.
White flowers have already broken out
On the wire mesh as though they were
My bath-wet clothes hanging in the sun.
I look out the parapet for parijat dropping
Its flowers, their heads down and feet up.
Looks like the world has already begun.




                                  71
The table lamp

A clipped lamp poured its light on light
Twice it went to sleep and on waking up
Its sleep-weary eyes blinked in disbelief.

A poem before dawn from knots of words
On what rhymes with a green table light!

 Nothing rhymes with a table lamp right.
Poetry of things comes from inner light.
Its music is in the very nature of things,
The way it trains its light on trite things.




                                    72
Family

Just a few bodies live together in a hole,
A burrow in a space of cement concrete.
Pigeons that return on beaks of worms.
Gophers in their holes of common space
Exploring life, sharing its outer darkness,
As the sky hangs in balance, tautly held.




Our children eat porridge off our hands.
We are their white walls, with nail-holes.
Their clothes are hung in our blankness.



Old men stare at ceilings, under the stairs.
Sagging cots bring them closer to the earth
Away from the overhanging sky of the roof.

Just a few bodies that return to the earth,
One by one, noting each other’s presence.




                                  73
74
Laugh

Laugh if you must, in your body shudders,

Especially if it would hurt, in you of night.
Pain or pleasure would vibrate in eardrum
Lately suspected to hear less of own words
That ring as though addressed to audience.

You needlessly increase volume of speech
Beyond the hearing distance in your room
Or above the market din and bees buzzing.
Otoliths may cause balance distortion in old.
Nice word this, please remember to look up
When the vibration comes in the dictionary.
You want to sense meaning, you shall vibrate.



The Buddha laughs on enormous stomach
Not the one under our ancient wisdom tree
But the yellow one, of a figurine in curio shop.
Wisdom is when one laughs at rolls of pain
Not of too much eating in moon of rice balls.
He laughs because he cannot cry in the view.
Under the circumstances, he vibrates of pain.




                                  75
You want to celebrate years in wax flames
To vibrate to sounds of breaking birth walls.
But take care of the all-around green fluid,
And a cord that has to be cut off from mamma.
That is when you vibrate in lungful of laugh.
When you cry, you laugh at the darkness left
And the pain of light on new rolls of stomach.




                                76
Children

You children from our knees down
Look upon the world as blue hills
In a fuzzy grove of far, far trees.
You play games in wood pillars
Of eye’s dreams, also-have-beens.
You hide and we seek very eyes.

Shout if you must, when the stone
Does not tumble on the sixth one.
You play cheat, ball a mere flower.
A marigold tossed from cardboard.
Your rules change like life’s rules
With no notice, now this, now that.

 From knees up don’t grow to sky.
Make clay god out of a wet earth
A funny god of an elephant-child
Eating big balls of rice and sugar
Into a stomach, rounded of eating.

 When you finish making clay god
Please make us too, in river loam
So just like him we can easily break
In the swirling waters of monsoon.




                                 77
78
Fractals

Six ’O clock and it is time to repeat
On scale, joint walks, up and yonder.
The overcast sky says much nothing.
We understand life beside the tree.

 Repeat the tree and the old dusty car
With the same old names washed off
In yesterday’s rain, waiting in new dust
For the same names, heart and arrow.

 You looking for repeat arches in art?
I have them plenty in my digital box
In old tombs where angry sultans lie
In endless repetitive arches of beauty
Where men vanish in trees at the end.

Our walks are repeat feet under shoes
Occupying space, little by little, in sky.
The feet shuffle slowly, one behind one.
Eight ’O clock is time to repeat on scale
A bus of people on rods, lunch boxes
Touching sweaty bodies tantalizingly.




                                  79
Seminar

When a midnight dog had barked at the dark
There came up a word seminar from the night
In a hall of poets chasing truths widely known
An electric fan stirring its hot air of repetitions.

Supposing the seminar is shifted to a sit-stone
Under the tree, with ant-holes brimming with views
A passing fantasy from inside a sleeping mind.

Here we have a seminar of e-poets with lulu books
Behind the window curtains, to bypass brown ants
Who vent strong acidic views on our under-legs.
We will not miss hot air of higher reaches of hall.

A man sits in the back row with a head in hands
Dreaming of golden brown lunch with lentil soup .
He has no rabid views about making verse blank
In the forenoon sessions, after a biscuit break.

Just when the speaker comes up with a rare gem
The loo at the back beckons the high and the low
The lulu poets stand in rows before filling pots.
It is in these mini-seminars that inspiration flows.




                                     80
Sorority


The soap sisters drop their doe-eyes
Too soon and pretty on the noses,
The way they sniff at their sisters
All in the race for big house power
High-ceilinged and chandeliered.

Creepy music is suited to villainy.
As they pull female legs, in music,
Around mustachioed landlordism.

 They are sisters up against sisters.
They are now in plush boardrooms
In their fight against their sorority
All for sons, fathers and husbands
Not against male tyranny, but for it.

They would even check for stomachs
Big with sorority, to finish it all off
Much before it will scream in the air.

(About woman stereotypes in Indian T.V. soaps)




                                  81
Brakes

Silent rain and rainbows of grease
Trace on the road polygonal maps.
The grease maps drop from squeals
Of rained brakes in car undersides.

Their brakes rebel against tyrant feet
And trace line-maps of free countries
As their throats shout hoarse slogans.




                                82
Posthumous poetry

We are mostly writing posthumous poems
In the corners of our souls, in the outer reaches
Of our bodies, from the despair of ripe nights.
A shrill midnight whistle causes such poems.

 Some poems come from lonely street corners
Where heavy boots will arrive, on Himalayan
Feet with large sized memories of kids and wife
In a firelight of warm coals in deep snow hills.
The street dog’s howls aggravate such poems.

 A bloody uprising in us triggers some poems
In the unreal company of a Kafka in beard
When humongous creatures fill front rooms
Of overflowings from pockets, book shelves
Our windows closed from the inside of rain.
Our literary agent has just died of our poems.
He will sure publish our poems posthumously.




                                 83
The brick wall




What came to the mind was a brick wall
In several squares of thought, a soft wind
Buffeting the creepers flying on its holes
And moss of history faded into black night.
The busy brown ants were not left behind.
If it was words of bricks we might build it
In its brown brokenness,on music of thought.

A bird visitor would come in brown stripes
Its fickle screw-head moving in sky for worms.
The creeper strutted in the sun its proud stuff
Of flowers of paper hanging in leaves in pink.
It was not a mere brick wall, but a broken wall
Of holes that hid childhood, my lost years.




                                 84
Story

It is raining lightly through the night
On muddy streets and rain-puddles
On cars under heavy veil, squatting
As if dying to make story under trees.

The trees sat there without brown birds.
The brown birds will come later to us
From a golden sun behind our house
To make nest of straw in our A.C. outlet.

 In a room of silence I make my story
Of a friend with heart that just rebelled
Against too much edible oil and work,
In a calm of death that had no foretaste
On our tongues in the fragrant harbor.

The brown birds have to make a story
Behind the A.C. outlet in green straw
And twigs that will not stay on clamps.

The rain has made story of reluctance
On muddy roads refusing reverse-flow
Under trees that yawned in boredom
As stories spread lazily around them.




                                  85
Meaning

Water has meaning when it overflows
Like god-sounds, pictures of lost color
With white faced women in old clothes
As they flow from sounds of old space.
Meaning shall continue without break.

The objects quickly lose a revised sense.
Their sounds combine with their eyes,
The seeing eyes of all objects in poems.
Their meaning shall accrue as they see
Behind senselessness, in fail interiority.

Sounds have no meaning, when heard.
Images are all meaning, when in letters.
They weave meaning around our things,
A mosquito in dark waters of steel glass,
Light pouring from steel dome in a pool.
Fan sounds feeling thoughts in its whir.

A cloth bag had dark worries at bottom.
A bird flew from our nest in a window.
A person disappeared from glass-pane.
The watchman belched from his hand.
His pockets were full of night sounds.

Our meaning jumps from thing to thing.
Under a silken veil of soft fluorescence.
A rain that hides mud-houses in moths.



                                 86
Some twigs that bird-fall from branches
A night with no sounds of song in wind
A scooter that kicked its innards to life.




                                   87
The lake that was sea

The lake went unnecessarily emotional
In the shadows of the banyan and men
Sitting on the rails of its embankment
Who looked like birds flying on the sea.
Its ripples pretended to be ocean-waves.
The trees waved knowingly on the rim
Their green hairs eating up the blue sky.

We fished for hidden grandma stories.
An auntie lent her gold in a cloth bundle.
You need jewels, you jewels of women?
Come to the lake and ask the lake auntie
Who will lend hers to you for wedding.
Remember to return them when done.

You, betrayer, have not returned them?
She is no more a jewel lending auntie.
You can hear her sad silence in ripples .


(The myth relates to the Ramappa lake , a 800-year old lake near
Warrangal in Andhra Pradesh that has remained a part of the
collective conscious of the people through such interesting myths
and folk lore in circulation in the area)




                                 88
Looking for a word

At this time, I am looking for a word
And that is when I have found them
When they come in as blood- cousins
Twice removed, I mean, not literally.

They turn sad all the time, all the time;
Their sadness is for unknown people.
At times they assume grinning faces.
They turn sad as they come to a close.
Actually they are not that important,
Meaning those the words are sad for.

It is the language that is sad in its words,
The sad language we had made our own
Coming from far, in sounds of bagpipes
The bagpipes are sad, celebrating defeat.
But their windy sounds are fine music.



(About Indian writing in English)




                                    89
90
Particles



The night advanced in floating particles
Of tiny flowers that would fall at sun rise.
Her memories floated as light particles
Of sun dust on the earth’s fallen flowers.
We offer rice particles to keep her alive
In our bellies, our throats, dusty minds.




(On the fourth death anniversary of my mother)




                                   91
Seeing is dead



The master sculptor had made tonalities
Stone upon stone, of women in dance
Men in beards, servants removing thorns
From the swollen feet of soft princesses.
Their cloth caps towered over dainty feet.

Nubile girls danced on slender midriffs
Of black tonalities, ankles high in the air.
A child god’s flute was heard in soft stone.
Gods lived in fading nights of a memory.

The vandal’s seeing is death of immortality
The death of artifice, the death of beauty.




(Several sculpted figures can be seen in deliberate disfigurement by
history’s vandals on the exquisite temple walls of the Ramappa
temple near Warrangal in Andhra Pradesh)




                                  92
Sleep comes



Sleep comes when things seem to be fizzling down,
Like late night line drawings, just over a soft pillow
In a fuzz of thoughts, their outlines vaguely formed,
As the air slowly turns heavy with cavernous yawns.

Sleep is when a red of white forms in our glassy eyes
Into a mess of capillaries supplying blood to seeing,
To dreaming in a sleep of time, in a sleep of thought.

Sleeping is body in a merger in the blue of the sky
Into a sky of nothing that rises above the apartment,
On the roof , by the water tank, listening to its water.




                                   93
Stone maidens of Ramappa temple

These stone maidens turn you to stone
If you stare at them too long, in the sun.
Their bodies are badly stuck in the wall,
They lean forward in the sky of the day
Seen by creatures that are still not dust.

At night they come out of the moonlight
For hopscotch in the chalk-lines of the sky.
Then they come out in groups and dance
To nobody’s pleasure except god-husbands
Who became stardust in the sky long ago.

Their sculptor-father is a chisel’s dust,
From the father sculptor of all-time sky.
His dust is not seen by men, not yet dust.



(About the exquisite sculptures of idealized female beauty on the
temple walls of Ramappa Gudi ,near Warrangal in Andhra Pradesh)




                                  94
Naming the child

Name filling is after our pleasure taking
And body giving, from a rubber umbilicus
Strapped to a golden lotus, from where
The Creator would spring with his wife
Highly educated, feminist in approach.

The lotus-seated god is duly hen-pecked
By a goddess of learning, his own alphabet
On our brows in disarray, in strange script
Undecipherable in far too many words.

 The navel springing the lotus shall maintain
The creation products with brilliant learning,
Including femininity of luscious apple eating
And why not, in a world of devious serpents.

The lotus-springing god shall have his feet
Pressed gently, for walking fatigue, by wife,
Without his ever walking in the sky-clouds.
He keeps the world going by wife’s wealth
And his own health on a serpent mattress
With an arching serpent hood for umbrella.




                                  95
Prices

The fish are mostly in the lake
Sometimes, found by the lake
Lumped with random friends
They do not set their own prices.

Stomachs decide how much.
They are later buried in them.

Stomachs do not set own prices.
They are later buried.




                                    96
Flowers that make my window glad

Three or four white flowers in a window sky
Demolishing curtains will surely gladden glass
With a tiny button rose to button up experience
Of a heaving chest, full of old age, death fears.

 Fears growl in the malfeasance of flesh organs
It is their dirty smell of decomposition in bones
In the phenyl smell of a dying hospital, flowers
Smelling like formaldehyde, of sickening tubes
Those carry dirty water to be emptied for money.

 But the white flowers shall gladden my window yet.
My clothes shall smell of wilted flowers in pocket.
I shall keep fears on hold, this side of the window
Under a table light that reads nice smelling words
Remembering parijat flowers waiting on the earth,
Their faces down , feet up, at the crack of dawn.




                                  97
Work

I have always work to do when I sit alone
With the passions of neurons in high fever.
Sometimes the blood runs up bloody tubes
Sending waves that rise at midnight moons.

There is serendipity, a fortuitous discovery
A mere possibility of a chance stumble-upon
By a machine perpetually in fear of stopping.

I work on words for serendipity, discoveries
In the random and derive existence from them.
That is the way I keep the machine running.




                                 98
A child’s birthday

The old poet looks from his thoughtful eyes
At the blue and white baby birthday balloons
Stuck like hearts to the roof, helpless on roof
As they had gone up from children’s mouths.
Then the children remember future birthdays
Of white cream on knowingly smiling faces.

 Their parents are high on hot lentil soup among
Rags of unprovoked conversations of no ends,
Only tassels, shreds of silk, golden embroidered.
They will, back at home, cull the gold from them
In their sleep and melt them to increase riches.




                                  99
Soliloquies



Evenings are good time for free frank talk
When our mind is full and our tired body
Echoes with incidents, day’s happenings
With a belly down there, loudly cheering.

 Our soliloquies occur then, breaking silences
In loud exclamations, puzzled question marks,
Wild hand gestures, vague finger- pointings
In vivid figures of speech, in pure blank verse.

 My own soliloquies clash with the sparrow’s
And at times with the nodding wall lizard’s
When it crouches in pure love for its insect
And quickly darts back to safety of roof-light
With the love-act smack on its happy lips.
”kitta, kitta”, it soliloquizes, quite solemnly.

 That is when the sparrow too soliloquizes.
Actually it is talking with its own alter ego
In the mirror, alleging brazen plagiarizing
Of its poise and beauty, its melody of song.
There seems no reply from the mirror’s side
So its verbal outpourings remain soliloquies.




                                  100
101
Dark circles

Dark circles do not mean refusal to beauty-sleep
Or long years of skin, into eternity of same place.
The circles are ever expanding, from outer ring.
The centre is holding contrarian views from eyes
Not seeing eye to eye, they have circular runs to do.

There are holes behind eyes, their circles hiding them.
Fathers do not see them, when they first sketch them
And as the lines proceed apace,the circles take shape.
When they are noticed it is always late, always late.
The holes behind them are bottomless quarry-holes
Where darkness rules like the night cricket in bush;
A stone’s drop in it will not even be acknowledged.




                                102
Dust mites



They had come before us, in our heads of hair,
Our flat backs with or without bony vertebrae
Dust they are and our future dust they embrace
Under flowers of our pillows, in sleep-softness
When we turn at night they turn in dusty ways
At us, in our bloodstream, in the fever of nights
Our inside fights, not knowing enemy within.
Let us get them inside out, in bedroom antics,
Carry on relentless pillow-fight, on way to dust.




                                 103
Wall

A little white wall stood between us
Of indifference, from our both sides.
Only the tree knew our day, our lives,
Comparing them meticulously above.
We could finally break its whiteness
Only to confront an indifferent wind.




                                104
Miracle

The sky is still gray, over the mountains,
Trees still in their leaves, not a whistle.
Our child shall be born anew, our miracle,
The birth from a deep night, night’s child.
The folds of the hills held it in their wind,
In haunting fragrance of thorny flowers
On the side of the mud-track, in furrows
Of rice fields, with wet feet of our women.
The hills waited expectantly and the cows
In their return, in the dust of their hoofs.

Let us get a peacock feather for his head
A little blue of the sky for his over-wear.
But the sky is still gray with shades of rain
And the peacock is dizzy in its rain-dance
Waiting for its own miracle on a gray sky.




                                  105
The first flower

The first flower is fixed in my sky, waving in wind.
Its white fragrance is mine alone in its blue space,
The wind I do not own, but here this balcony I own
In bricks and cement, in sand from river’s holes.

The flower is mine for claim to neighbors
And the squirrel that passes by, whoever.
When it dies and falls, I alone shall mourn.




                                 106
Words for trees

I do not have any words for trees, in my throat

I know them in throat, by astringency of fruit,

By disgust on tongue of caterpillars on them

In ironic glow as creatures of beauty of future

Their projected butterfly stature in the next sky,

By leaves falling one by one in October wind

Like snow in December of higher Himalayas.




I call them trees, even if they stand there alone

It is in their plurality they turn colored butterflies

When they are up and about, alone, in bunches,

Their lady-like cackle heard from jungle peacocks

As they raise blue heads from bushes under them.




                                    107
Light



Morning is pure light, on coffee and paper
A song in light raises head softly in the east
On the high place where god sits with trees
In his loin cloth and a fixed stare at the wall.

The rain flies shall begin life’s journey now
As light first reddens trees, makes them blush
Of god on their leaves, in their golden splendor
Their green then mixing in gold from the east.

 Light fills our chests, our sleeves, our hair,
In loose strands of a girl’s hair on the road
Where electricity flowed at their fiery tips,
A song on her lips lacking, but felt in breeze.
The girl’s hands flowed as water from hills.
Their music filled trees with leaves of blush.




                                   108
Figures of our speech



All the world’s layers are in our throats,
Hoarse with words, spoken way too often
With proper emphasis, some letters said
With our teeth pressed and eyes closed.
Our fingers are clenched for good effect.
Our body is distorted with much emotion.

Let us, for a change, feel the damn thing,
Before words, without flourishes of writing.
We say the cap on our head sports a knot
That looks like a ruined temple on the hill,
Specially when in silhouette against sunset.
As if our saying makes it larger than seeing.
The knot on cap is a mess of wool that bears
Not even a flimsy likeness to ruined temples.




                                109
The sea of images



 This crowd of images will not leave us in blood.
Its voices fill our minds like morning squatters,
As one din, rising to the sky ,when on the beach
Among tall trees waving good bye across the seas.

 These trees crowd all our spaces near our feet
And in the folds of our minds, musically flowing
When tall ships blow their steam-horns at them.
It is one vast sea of images, in waters and brine.

The boat goes up and down on the morning sky.
A plastic rope holds it in place, its green strands
Tying lives, in strange places, in shadow and light
Of fish in men, fire in women, smoke in old men.

Black bodies rise high in froth at the sea’s mouth.
Tiny tentacles burrow holes in its brown wet sand.
They tickle your feet and question your foot space.
The sea swallows us all, including our old shadows.




                                 110
Authenticity

I am often confronted by a feeling
Of lack of authenticity, in this river,
Of not feeling like a subject, spurious
Against mountains that sit in the far
With river waters beating on my ears.

I am words from vaporous thoughts,
A prose-poem thought in dark nooks
Of the mind, mining word after word.

 The mountains belong to the earth.
I, waving in breeze, am a mere baby
A cry-baby in quick mountain wind,
Flying words against its rock solidity
In its flowing wind and night silence.



The mountains are authentic in space
With river about me, in daily ripples.
They had come here much before me
With the waters from skies, daily sun.
I exist here in the river, as a thought
A passing thought of a real mountain,
A thought in river, a temporary rock.




                                 111
Climate change

We spoke all our recent dialogues nicely
Voicing apprehension of the big change.
Our struggle had continued underneath.
It was a monotone speech in a gray sky
When the line of trees came to a freeze
In their hostility, where they stood tall.

The gentle summer breeze did not matter.
The trees sniffed autumn and looked away.
Emaciated street dogs barked incessantly,
At hooded strangers coming at us from hills
From the edge of the sky, in clouds of dust.

Our dialogues went on in our dark robes
As our culture bristled riskily in our back,
The culture of reality, in our failed hearts
Where several realities came up together
Not as a single earth-reality in silk thread
But a failed reality of a fluid mind-state
A sky of treeless vapour, sea of flake-salt.




                                 112
Metaphors



We are nowadays happy with our new door
A membrane bathroom door that now sheds
A certain mauve hue on baths, while in song,
With the shower flowering on our cool backs
Streaming as if from a rock skirted by trees
Its vapors swirling like their winter breaths.

Our song is under breath, in some mutters.
Our vapors are on glass that hides in smoke
Our rather banal faces, their jejune laughter.
We are, in fact, searching for our metaphors,
Being upbeat about our recent turns of phrase.




                                113
Phony vision

I do not know if the thing is phony
Glass-like, with glistening dew-drops
Of a morning vision on windshield,
Pearl-glass that breaks in little coins
On endless highways, on mild impact
Of metallic bodies with drunk men.

Some cars have steam on bonnets
Like bees, in spring, on the stone.
Our vision is partly crowded, you see
With birds hiding dust in the east
That has turned orange at sunrise
A phony vision, it is partly clouded.



On the highway there are no houses
Only string cots for our dream sleep
On glasses of buttermilk, hot breads.
We have whites on our mustaches
Of too much buttermilk in throats.



You crinkle eyes enough and you will see
Wet buffaloes calmly chewing their cud
In tin sheds that jump out of green fields
Their milk sloshing in their pink udders.



                                 114
Luckily their tail-flies and smells fly away
Into tree-tops, waking the morning birds,
A phony vision indeed, partly clouded.



The sunflower beds have darker kids
That smile nicely of a little alphabet,
Like flowers that turned deep inward
When the sun went behind the hills.
Their little bees have nowhere to go,
Wait; let the sun come from the hills.

 The village school is closed for today
In honor of the guests on the string cot
The sunflowers will open with the wind
And the shadows will creep up slowly
Behind the buffaloes, with eyes closed
Their mandibles moving up and down.
The vision is clouded, a phony vision
Caused by much emotion in the eyes.




                                   115
Scream


In the bone house it would appear
The lower mandibles were stretching
And stretching to produce a scream
That would fail to reach down to ears.
Actually they were trying to bite sarcasm,
Surely a futile endeavor, especially
They do not have tongues in cheeks.




                                116
Holes



We are talking of holes, mere lack of matter
Subsisting in matter and surrounded by it
Of words that exist in crevices of thoughts,
Words making the world’s holes in whole.

My dead are matter in lack of it, globe-earths
Those spin in lack of space, in crisp night air.
They spin in the space of time, holes in space,
Phosphorus glow-worms roaming thin nights.

They are holes in space, where they had lived.
They are now words that will live in thoughts,
Those remain in my mind, as images of reality
Till I become a hole in space, a picture, a word.




                                 117
Children in the rain



We wanted clearly laid out paths
Between thin strands of July rain.
Our faces were drowned in hoods
As the rain fell softly on our heads.
Its sounds came as from the ocean.

 Our puny judgments took a beating
In such a steady patter on our ears
Where they seem to be beating us
Like angry fathers, back from office.
As we walked we made tiny circles
In rain water, under our umbrellas
That saved us from an angry sky.

The houses were a blur in white.
Our paths ended in green of trees.
Rain-mud spattered on black coats
Surprised by blurs of passing cars,
Their wipers saying no to the rain.



We had left our school in the street.
Our home of angry smoking fathers
And soft grannies in loving egg-heads
Seemed to vanish in the fuzzy rain.



                                 118
A scruffy dog shook its body of rain.

 Back at home, we bath our wet bodies
In eucalyptus steam, as its vapors rise
Quickly to drown the rain in its smell.




                                 119
Bridge

We had passed the bridge spanning a river of sand
At dawn, when our noisy train spoke to its emptiness.
Once out of it, the train was bending like a centipede
And we took a long backward glance to see the bridge
Now smarting under noise injury on its deaf,deaf ears.

 The buffalos on its sand-bed looked up, unmindful
Of the bridge, of the noisy train that passed, and of us
In the train that saw them as mere globs on the sand.
Their black bodies longed for green puddles of water.
Their eyes seemed vacant, as their tails swished flies.
We saw they had not even once met us in our eyes.




                                 120
The temple of shadows



Men and women live here with stones
Their shadows live with them in daylight.
The shadow phalluses of shadowy gods
Live in the musty smells of kings in silks
Their soldiers in attendance on swords.
Women have their foreheads on red dots.
Priests move throats up, down like birds.
Their prayers fly like shadows to the sky,
Their hungry stomachs touch their backs
Where they produce shrill incantations.
Here god is crying inside, in the shadow.
Beauty is hunger in distended stomachs
Drunk with soft palm wine from the sky.




                                121
A.J.Rao's Poetry Volume 3

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A.J.Rao's Poetry Volume 3

  • 2. A.J.Rao's Poetry Volume 2 Poems written between 25July,2011 and 5th October,2011 A.J.Rao
  • 3. This file was generated by an automated blog to book conversion system. Its use is governed by the licensing terms of the original content hosted at poetryindailylife.wordpress.com. Powered by Pothi.com http://pothi.com
  • 4. Contents The street with the wall at the end 1 Pensioner’s notebook 2 Death for dishonour 3 The list 4 The list 5 Spaces 6 A petromax lamp 8 Bed 9 State of affairs 10 Birds 12 Register 14 Poetry of ghosts 16 Decline and fall 17 Forgetting 18 The bush shirt 19 River steps 21
  • 5. Granite 22 Moonlight 23 Another mother 25 Bus dust 26 The broken moon 27 The whistle 28 Rash 29 The door 30 Walks 31 Rain 32 Fragments 33 The wooden pillar 34 The window-sill 35 It is Krishna who did it 36 The earth-pot 37 Body 38 Who started the wind? 39
  • 6. Mirrors in mirrors 40 The immersion of Ganesh idol in the lake 41 Literature 42 The men in the photograph 43 Temple 44 Gravel 45 Tyranny of time 46 Echoes 48 The sock 49 We stymie you 50 Shape 51 Dancing beauty 52 Putting the cart before the horse 54 Wife 56 Larvae 57 Otherness of room 58 The mobile 60
  • 7. The hurricane 62 Flowers, leaves and fruit 63 The chair as object poem 64 The chair 65 Grandmothers 66 Sufficient 67 The cold wind 69 The world has already begun 71 The table lamp 72 Family 73 Laugh 75 Children 77 Fractals 79 Seminar 80 Sorority 81 Brakes 82 Posthumous poetry 83
  • 8. The brick wall 84 Story 85 Meaning 86 The lake that was sea 88 Looking for a word 89 Particles 91 Seeing is dead 92 Sleep comes 93 Stone maidens of Ramappa temple 94 Naming the child 95 Prices 96 Flowers that make my window glad 97 Work 98 A child’s birthday 99 Soliloquies 100 Dark circles 102 Dust mites 103
  • 9. Wall 104 Miracle 105 The first flower 106 Words for trees 107 Light 108 Figures of our speech 109 The sea of images 110 Authenticity 111 Climate change 112 Metaphors 113 Phony vision 114 Scream 116 Holes 117 Children in the rain 118 Bridge 120 The temple of shadows 121
  • 10. The street with the wall at the end In the morning the feet shuffle through streets Listening to God’s song in the ears, the splatter Of water before houses, brooms before houses Women making gurgling noises in night’s throat Of water- cleaning of sleep, on tongues stretched. The men have tooth-paste foam at their mouths. Some days we reach the history of an old woman Walking the feet of yesterday’s marriages, pickles Made, worship of deities, hospitals of childbirths Babies crying in lungs, dark nights spent on bodies Silk sarees in steel trunks, fragrant brides of sons Sweetmeats brought from gods, fears of violence. An unease occurs of slowly dawning futility of it all And the feet somehow end up at the wall at the end And have to trace the morning back to a side street Losing sight of the woman and her enacted history. 1
  • 11. Pensioner’s notebook When the word comes, the idea’s genesis occurs In the deep night, when idea happens in our eyes Open from sleep, having been quiet on sleep’s bed Or in ghostly rapid eye moments of broken dreams. Body is thought, on a wrinkled face, deep in poems, Or on a furrowed brow, bearing daughters like Sita Who are destined to suffer as wives for bigger glory. Daughter has to prove her life and innocence by fire All because she is someone’s wife in the deep jungle. A pensioner’s notebook has to record his existence He has to prove his aliveness to the birds in the tree. The birds have to prove their aliveness on the wire. They have to hold a daily parliament on T.V. cable. So nobody will deny their existence in color plumes. A pensioner has to prove his existence to the world The world needs a viable proof of earthly existence. A body or a signed paper is proof of yearly aliveness. September poems are not recognized for the purpose. 2
  • 12. Death for dishonour A crusty old boss causes death to girl’s dad And his dishonor weaving a swindling story. The father’s death is daughter's beginning The glory of womanhood, a sweet revenge When sold body is defiled for a sweet cause. A body has no purity when dead, in father. The gun is boss’ own phallus, waiting to die And wipe the dishonor on daughter’s father. (Reading a short story titled Emma Zunj By J.L.Borges) 3
  • 13. The list The list is formidable, frayed in the corner Yellowed, crawly writing, corner to corner Like little ants in line that have lost the way To the edge of the wall, shouts lost in legs We have got to do these things, before dying. Our dying list is a bucket list, a corners list Where all is swept up to the angular edges And we make our ant-lines, lost in our ways Our little white stuff, on our backs all the time. So many legs, we have lost count, so many. 4
  • 14. The list The list is formidable, frayed in the corner Yellowed, crawly writing, corner to corner Like little ants in line that have lost the way To the wall's edge , their shouts lost in legs. We have got to do these things, before dying. Our dying list is a bucket list, a corners list Where all is swept up to the angular edges And we make our ant-lines, lost in our ways Our little white stuff, on backs all the time. So many legs, we have lost count, so many. 5
  • 15. Spaces I think of spaces, holes made by space in a sky of space Holes in under-shirts like tiny stars on a stand-still night Pockets that had the air and sea of laughing childhoods, Villages visited, fairs that sold hair-bands, plastic flowers Sweets of white sugar, that took the forms of noisy parrots Of dark men who had gobbled space behind those hills And harvesters of green fields, their feet of sinking space In muddy rice plantings, their female throats crying songs Of rain that sliced through space, in marriage with the sun Spaces contained in humongous mountains, like bubbles That issue slowly from a kid brother’s running half-mouth. I think of space in this room that continues to the horizon Beyond curtains, houses, trees, vehicles, rivers, hills, seas Over heads of people, their thoughts, their sleeping dreams The blabber of children, the wails of old women, refusals to Speak by dead men on the bamboo stretchers, the fires that Followed them in pitchers and rice-flakes strewn around And yellow marigolds that celebrated their joy of dying. I think of spaces eaten by the buffalos in their slow mouths Their thoughts in their udders of flowing milk, in their eyes That flickered in the blinding headlights of oncoming trucks With the spaces that stretched from them on endless nights. 6
  • 16. 7
  • 17. A petromax lamp A lamp burned in white light, inside a soft rib cage Feeling like an exhausted star from the Milky Way. Its light curdled like white milk on the mud walls. The shadows of the rain moths swarming around it Were a massive mess of unreal figures on the wall, As the dots together became squares and polygons In the way they whirred around the petromax light. As the wind stirred in the leaves, the lamp danced Gently on the door frame, where it is hung by a nail Its shadow quickly responded on the wall in dance With the entire halo of rain-moths around its head. 8
  • 18. Bed Between this ceiling and the earth is my sleep Lying sprawled on a four-poster bed like a lizard Warm-blooded on roof, upside down, augmenting Knowledge and beauty, for its tiny insects waiting For death to liberate them and it from the need To hang upside down, to go about their business. Stealthy spiders trap them in their silk strands Glistening in corners among the falling shadows Their meaning found in insects wanting to die. My sleep hangs between the earth and the ceiling. My four posters are the four corners of the world That brought me to the world from the earth up. Now I am three feet away from the earth and soon There shall be no roof between sleep and the sky. 9
  • 19. State of affairs In regard to the present state of affairs It is the objects here that make it, not me. The philosopher sees light on the wall A Wittgenstein (pp 120), in convolutions. Our own state of affairs is a mere state. A state exists in words but passes over. Objects are not unhappy, only subjects Only they have affairs, drawn from objects And not vice versa, or even virtue versa If I do not speak them, they are not there. In a vast glass wall a young woman opens The door inward, that should open out, A blonde, her thoughts open out, in a state. The color of hair is not her state of affairs. But no, she is not a blonde, nor do blondes Open their outward opening doors inside. A glass wall that shuts out most of her light A door that has no doorman in mustaches Opening a door to a cold night of reason. A body is embroiled in a state of affairs. A body that will one day be behind the glass Saying nothing in its pantomimic gestures. 10
  • 20. 11
  • 21. Birds When I was a child birds gave me ideas, In their flights of rows, towards the lake When they looked white and glistening Against the autumn sky, my fingernails Clawing the air rhythmically and my lips Calling them to infuse whites in my nails. Those days birds could drop their whites Directly in the behind of our fingernails. Actually they were bringing these whites From the marshes of Siberia in the seas. A little drop of whites in children’s nails Would not diminish their white too much When they returned from our nesting trees. Birds gave me their ideas, from their wings And bones full of hollow air, silky feathers That would some times drop in our street 12
  • 22. Dancing down many layers of air playfully. We would catch and curate them in pages Of books, afraid to use them for homework. 13
  • 23. Register Life goes on as frogs croak in the rain puddles And pretty little brown birds continue to make Mothering noises over the balcony A.C. outlet. My register is filled with the smallest of details. In the evening the car stops at the intersection With some human hands inserted in our eye-holes. The car has gaping holes inside, behind the glass. The music fills the register; our ears are full of it. The register fills, from time to time, with details. The buffaloes rise against buildings in the grass Their emotions in control, but their bowels open. Their milk overflows, grass in abundant supply. Their milk is white, like the whites of our eyes The register is full from time to time with details. We heard about a boy who stared in the hospital Trying not to cry, when they were shaving his head. It is the uncertainty of what lies inside his skull 14
  • 24. That is what makes him cry, not just an egg-head. An egg-head is a joke, a laughing matter in mirror. But we are all egg-heads and we are in this together. Our register gets filled with details from time to time. 15
  • 25. Poetry of ghosts The poet brings up poetry from random words Powder-dried to make a street mosquito killer fog Enveloping ghosts of persons that never existed. Poetry is thus made from blurbs of apparitions Those have vaguely tapering tails in place of legs Like you draw them roundly in kids’ magazines Vanishing in trees, if you answer a ghost’s riddle And if you don't answer, head will break in pieces. Somewhere in the head you have a thing growing That makes your head break, even if you answer As the ghost does not accept it as the right one Because there are no right answers to its riddles. 16
  • 26. Decline and fall It is September and you mark the decline of the sun Behind the long rows of buildings and listless trees. From the train its decline is noticeable in arid wastes That have straggling shepherds and their grazing sheep. The sun does not envelop their bodies in silhouettes. The orange of light shall wait at the mountain's mouth Beyond the spartan colors of the lake, less its shimmer As clouds pass without event, giving rain a sabbatical. The decline will of course be followed by an exciting fall. 17
  • 27. Forgetting Forgetting is sound disappearing, body’s spasm In folds of death, mind’s entrails in a stomach As everything of you freezes in life’s green liquid An ice block of death, whose water of life melts The night when it happens in a death that stares And you collect life’s water in rags of wet clothes As body is a waiting rag torn off from your fabric. Forgetting is fire and wood, in a crackling sound. 18
  • 28. The bush shirt That was a bush-shirt with big, big flowers A soft windy silken shirt we wore to school To others’ envy, with pockets on both sides That had bulged with flowery spaces and air. We were hurling fingers in air as if clawing it Not for any complaint, but just in boy-show. (We had not picked it up in the wayside bush We were not bush-men of arrows and bow) We had left our long shirt with horn buttons. We looked like fierce Afghan men in turbans With moustaches that struck terror in shirts. Our buttons were two at the top, to our neck. When the bush shirt came our money changed Our annas went of four to a rupee, to easy paisa We now ate rice in shining stainless steel plates And we played in streets seven stones and ball. Our moustaches are silver over frayed collars. We now have pounding hearts under our shirts Weak of memory, but still love the big flowers. 19
  • 29. 20
  • 30. River steps River steps are wet with village women’s baths. A golden sunlight floods their mornings in boats Leaving early for mountains on wrinkled rivers. Giant banyans greet them from the other bank Spreading their shadows of hair on the blue sky. Mornings are for sun, palms cupped with water Looking the sun in the eye, lips softly trembling With prayers, as white wet clothes clung to body. On the river bed, the buffaloes bath in shallows, Unperturbed by the sun flashing in vacant eyes, Like little rocks in the bed laid smooth and bare By a dried up river, after last year’s flash floods. 21
  • 31. Granite Granite is our stone, blue – black like Krishna, That provokes strong feelings, hard on fingers But soft and silky in its core, in hues like rain. It is like Krishna’s belly, filled with flute music By a river of gentle ripples flowing from trees. There is rain and wind in it, as in moonless sky. Feel it , play on it and sing its mountain tunes. The more you work on it the silkier it becomes. 22
  • 32. Moonlight Yesterday’s moon had slid behind the school To surface today at midnight, behind the shed. It is a struggle for the cow to reflect on events Of the day, near the haystack, with tacky flies Needlessly bothering its tail, while the moon Is reflecting temptingly on its water trough. The straw is all around its feet, stewed with urine And Bengal grams tastefully added to porridge. There at mountains all was peace and heaven. The grass was just fine, the flies less of a bother. A red bull came with dishonorable intentions But was promptly ignored, as if he did not exist. The moon is now directly above the asbestos roof. The night is quiet with the street dogs gone to sleep And the moonlight has become brighter and cooler. Somehow the cow seems less angry with the bull. 23
  • 33. 24
  • 34. Another mother Just as my own had gone out of the mind Another mother came to night in light words Spoken at the moon that hid still in clouds. The night generally prevailed on the road. A machine then kept whirring at the back The machine that churned out hard words In the night’s vast wastes across a dark sea, A sea of words that surged in old thoughts Like the sea behind humming casuarinas In old custom houses sitting pretty morose As a white spit hurled at them in contempt. The night swallowed her too in its memories. 25
  • 35. Bus dust The bus shelter stands against a silhouette of bus dust. A newspaper half-read lies on a lap in its cement bench. A towel is spread on the seat, with an open-ended smile Hidden in beard growth, meant to forget hunger pangs. The face inside has no travel on mind, just a killer of time. Layers of fine bus dust have settled on it burying its years. 26
  • 36. The broken moon There is a broken moon on the housetop there Cold and soggy, snuggling to the breezy coconut. The elephant god is not looking for it for laughter After a heavy meal of sweets in his child-stomach. Our dear elephant-god lies now broken himself At the bottom of the lake, snuggling to the algae. Time for a many-armed mother, who shall bestow Our victory for this season, wealth for our devout. The mother maternal, eyes wet with love for sons And terror in tongue, trounces demons under foot. After the victory she too will go down to the lake To the drum beating of music and camphor flames. Our gods are like us, of soft clay and kitschy colors. They disappear from lives after the season is over. 27
  • 37. The whistle The whistle blares it is the inky night of 2’O clock Marked by feet in old boots, in a Himalayan walk, With their stick tapping the earth to warn thieves. Another whistle, man and boy blew this morning Whose shrillness of blowing sounded quite hollow Across the bare earth and houses to friends down All in mirth, the boy in a snigger after the whistle. Their whistle is mere surrogate for night’s cricket Since the latter has taken short leave from bushes. When our rice is ready for meal in pressure cooker The whistle sounds blowing the lid off afternoon nap. The pressure rises in vapor, pressing down the valve, A short whistle-blower on hunger pangs in our belly. 28
  • 38. Rash Wife bursts into rash, as pink- hued as pollen From the plotted hibiscus flower on balcony, Petite, not liking birds, honey not dripping. Mother birds causing rashes are pure baloney. Birds do not bring allergy from A.C. outlets Being brown and stupid with little chick-lets Open-mouthed with wonder at mama’s feats. Nor does the political grass from a green lake That smells of so many dirty fluids and deeds. The lab says unpronounceable issues for rash. Little dots on wife’s moonless sky are its cash. The rashes are body’s too much of a good thing Anti-bodies wiggling in the blood ready to sting. You must know which rascals they are fighting. Otherwise you are doing shadow-boxing thing. 29
  • 39. The door Plastic doors are much like ear membranes They last while you last, water not touching. The shower is effervescent in the bathroom But the door remains calm and wet to gills. A handle that does not go down to fingers? Use it to upside, when the urge in you is quick And the bathroom is getting ready for a song. You will need it, man, in the thick of the night As your bloody system comes to blinding stop And doors open together to let in cold draught. 30
  • 40. Walks Long are our walks, morning and evening, Some mental walks, hearty walks, city walks. There are walks, talk walks, like talk going on In waking limbs, body thinking under the skull. Body merely thinks as its mind which walks Like a hundred-footed worm, a goods train Of a hundred steel boxes on unending track The mountains walk unendingly to the horizon And the horizon walks unendingly to the sky. Words walk, spirit walks, our hands go up In the night air in vertical sky breaking walk. Chilly fields walk and up down with the train As also the blue bush birds on phone wires The bridge noisily walks away from the train. 31
  • 41. Rain Rain in the afternoon makes less noise On a napping mind, more on a dulled skin The way it tickles it by the wind from trees And comes in instalments like crow-caws And rice poundings in neighbour houses. Half -awake eyes are shut in old thoughts As certain rain of day and sun on the side, Rain and sun married like dogs and foxes. It is at leaf-ends that rain-magic happens. The sun trains a flashing mirror into room Way past gaps in curtains, on to the wall. 32
  • 42. Fragments It seems we cannot but be mere fragments If it would mean many parts coming together In re-assembly just like in a natural system Or in a page of a novel, leaving action to guess In the snows of Kilimanjaro, a rich woman Content to watch gangrene dying in a snarl A Hemingway hero who forgot to put iodine On thorn wounds under a September sky. Here within walls, there is no further action Except dead silence, beyond a dying gangrene Festering on foot in proud wails, in nasty snarls. We cannot be making up things all the time The way nature makes assembling parts easy In programmable sequence of parts to wholes. Now what ,asks itself against the wall up north When it comes to re-assembly of broken parts, Memories that had long since trailed off in dust Their drag marks collecting rain in their holes. 33
  • 43. The wooden pillar The pillar is smoothly rounded by the girl As she swirled with hands holding it tight. Her eyes looked dizzily at the hot tin roof, Her face in slant, at forty degrees to pillar. She whirled around it holding it steadfast. The pillar is her friend, its shape smooth With her fingers wrapped around it in love. It is worn smooth with her love for years. 34
  • 44. The window-sill The window is lack of matter in matter, A hole that is wall against being alone An open invitation to city’s darkness. The sill is there to break abruptness To make landing softer and smoother. It is there as a transit point before fall. It is there to host rain-moths that die On the pane ,trying to embrace light. 35
  • 45. It is Krishna who did it I have not made the war or these enemies, Nor the clang of metal, nor the fall of dusk Nor blind men, love of sons, blindfold eyes Nor ivory dice with dots of five, four, three Nor caves nor foreheads bleeding with truth. I look at the fish-eyes, fight for fair maidens Divide women into brothers, cry as they lose Clothes for honor, never ending as Krishna. My forehead is still bleeding for useless truth In fluorescent letters, on the flanks of hills Their trees precariously perched, from where Women warriors jump on horses with babies. A bearded man fought for his useless truth In blazing skyscrapers with vaporous bodies In a fall of truth struck by planes of beards When in direct contact with a burning god And fair maidens dancing in fire and water. I have not made the war or burning enemies. It is our Krishna who did it, blue as our sky. 36
  • 46. The earth-pot This earth is a pot, full of light in its holes If not holding water for crows with pebbles. A mere wheel turns to give birth to it softly. In summer its earth smells nicely of water. Its shadows at bottom betray our emotions Of deep passion, thirst for hills, dark fears In deep down of belly, butterflies for future. It is like our mom, silk-soft in belly for us. 37
  • 47. Body Body is the essence of night, a falling of flowers A few particles of the night, on the way to dawn. The red of their stems is the feet up, faces down Quietly buried in the earth of the dust, leaf-swept By women of organic garbage, to greater dusk. Bodies are spoken of well in heaven, their seats Reserved where beauty is condemned to dance In tasseled silk blouses that are not quite there. The bodies exist till our minds permit, not there When our eyes become shut, on not intact skulls. 38
  • 48. Who started the wind? In the river, you look up from the waters, And see the wind walking down calmly From the hills that have holes at the top. On your feet, if joined in a lotus posture At the river’s bottom, the wind will push Through currents smelling of the far hills. Your face can smell the wind in the river Where it touches your cheeks, in caress. Surely the trees have not started the wind. The trees just shake as though they did it. It is not even a sea of giant rolling waves. Those just pretend they brought it about. It seems the wind comes from upstream Riding down to the sea on the river’s back. The sea hosts the wind from all the hills. Who originated the wind is now answered Finally and without equivocation, after all. 39
  • 49. Mirrors in mirrors It came to you before night, before sleep The fact that watchmen dream of sleep While still drunk and dreaming, dreams Within dreams, like mirrors into mirrors Endlessly entering, never to turn back. You drink cool milk and chocolate to calm Your nerves before sleep, as there is a fire In the belly, not the one they use to drive Up the north, in the mountains and pine Needles on floor, to collect a few in pockets. You are concerned with foam mattresses Left to dry in the sun by a drunk watchman Who has smelly dreams of own to dream. There is sunshine in his dreams, in his eyes Betrayed by a nose-smell of alcohol in air. Your mattresses are ready for your dreams. You have poems that begin afresh each day. Your dreams are in poems, poems in dreams In eyes deeply red with forgetful liquids. 40
  • 50. The immersion of Ganesh idol in the lake The lake flaunts plastics and floating gods With their eyes and feet in clay fragments Staring at the clouds, their dark acrylic hues Lighting dusk fires on its smiling ripples. Their leaves and dead flowers lie in a heap. Dark men meditate on colored gods of clay Their wobbling feet made of it, bottom up. Children’s gods fade into red, blue balloons And their stomachs ache for evening snacks, A few warm golden teeth, with hair on top As a golden ball, tossed in the lake, floats, At the shore, near the holes where men live. Men in the tall machines lift their clay gods, Their women red in faces, their hair in knots. The flowers turn the lake into a yellow sea. They first hoist their gods into the blue sky And hurl them into the waters, all in a ripple. 41
  • 51. Literature You are quite a thing, as a black crow caws A big man vertically split by mind-thought In sky rings of white smoke, falling deeply In love, at times, with just being beautiful. Your everyman touches on your raw nerves, Street men that are not yet your real people. These are the phantoms that walk the edge Trying not to fall off with the hems of lungis In their hands, in walking in slippered feet. Their walking sleep evokes big time yawns. You have soft dreams of mirrors that show Big time visions of you, in the grand walk It is the lungis held by the hand in the street That makes the world, in the street corners And the mongrel that follows you by the lake. It is they who make your literature for you. 42
  • 52. The men in the photograph These men are in shadows, all the time Trying to speak, to open their mouths In the temple, at the lake, on the road Their common destiny looks unfolding Bounded by their collective lip-sealing The ineptitude of their lives and bodies. If only they opened, shouted and forgot Their gaffes, their shame, common guilt The primeval guilt flowing from bodies The guilt of colors, the inevitable doom Foreclosing of future options, the walls Built on their words, the burden of a past. They are there at the temple in squares, Palms cupped to water, their heads hung To obeisance, their songs sung in unison Their hopes jumping from thing to thing. The camera would bring them out of light Their bodies dumped in squares of shade In limpid pools of thought, under the trees. Their water flows in thin shiny streamlets Their words frozen at lips, still trembling At their imagination, in a foregone reality. 43
  • 53. Temple Drowned in the temple’s noon shadows Man and tree turn phantoms, whose lips Hardly seem to move, except in the wind Bearing the fragrance of the smiling gods In incense, flowers and camphor flames. The priest‘s pot-belly quivers as god-words Issue forth from his large lips, licking words As if they were sweets, delectable to tongue. The trees begin to speak their sibilant words As shadows flow on the mosaic of the floor Filling the camera’s eyes with a mist of love. 44
  • 54. Gravel We try to sleep off our daydreams. It is when dreams come and we try To sleep over dreams as in the night. We doze off on train seat, eyes shut. The train sleeps its eyes wide open. Its sleep sounds come from its underside With tiny gravel stones hitting the night. They are its shattered dreams about hills. 45
  • 55. Tyranny of time A new morning is opening in my window. A September wind is speaking in its trees Before customary rain of the elephant-god Who will drown in the pond later in shouts. The poet asks to please, please let go of him Of the stranglehold of time on his innards A rumble at four is hardly a photo-caption While some of our pictures do need a caption. Of course pictures are not made for captions. I live in the deep bowels where time rules My bearded rebellion gets calmly put down While body refuses to succumb to the wind As the tree there does in its body in the sky. 46
  • 56. 47
  • 57. Echoes Well into music, you sound your note A jarring note, just an echo of harshness An electric fan that has lost its bearing A cane juice crusher that is spluttering Shortfall of sweetness in a mouth of echo, A gearbox dripping in thick black grease. Where echoes abound, the tree is bare Of spring leaves, roots bony in the earth Its birds de-feathered of love, of its chicks The eagle is on roof in echoes of tragedy. Unhappiness echoes in its wings of flight. Well into music the goat shouts in its skin. Its shouts are echoes from an alive skin. Its drum beat is a mere illusion of sound, An echo from the old sounds of mountains. 48
  • 58. The sock A single cotton sock caresses the foot. Its other seems missing in the closet. It seems your leg pairs do not match, Except in their holes, similar-shaped At the toe, in its curve and asymptote Where the toe tends to a shoe’s curve But will meet it only at its dark infinity. But the wind in their holes is the same In the way it tickles the toe in the hole. 49
  • 59. We stymie you Before holes, we shall stymie you In a global challenge of the earth Wiping deep red tears of currency Overflowing holes, deep as night. The holes are bottomless of money. We mine ferrous sorrows of the earth And of trees suspended from the sky. Our holes are full of rain of the seas Trapped in a hot sun, in smaller seas. They mirror the darkness of our walls. (About the illegal mining of the iron ore in the Obulapuram belt that has caused large scale ecological damage) 50
  • 60. Shape The shape is in the night hidden from our view. You take to night to drown in delightful confusion Brewing in a freedom to take shape from a word When word is poem, a woman that comes to you With the freedom of shape, from your innerness. Then a crow caws in the dawn of a poem walk A walk postponed for a poem, a thought woman Who comes to you with your own shape of body, The mind shaping a body you love in all shapes A shapelessness of freedom, a release of mind An amoeba of no shapes, with false feet all sides Always flexible, moving only to stay immobile With the possibility of disappearing as a shape To be a cloud of all shapes in the space of time. A patch of discoloration on a wall, a rain-moss Black of the summer sun, a soft morning sound Of wood against metal, a smell burning in milk, A death into the sky, a dark fear, a loss of shape. 51
  • 61. Dancing beauty We have to think of beauty in our dance. Our camels look funny and quite risky For a fall from their humps, in climbing. But their colours make them soft in sky When they look up from their tall necks They really touch high-end palm trees. In the desert we have to move our feet Quickly, to not get scalded in hot sand. We have to dance our feet in blue sarees Holding their hems in both hands at back As indulgent camels watch in their mirth. In desert we are not our women but men. But we dance their dance remembering Their steps on the hot sand, as they would Back home, in kitchens and earth-stoves Where fire dances its tongues on breads. Our women’s eyes are of smoke and fire. When they dance there is fire in their eyes Melting their kohl in streams of black tears 52
  • 62. Flowing on soft cheeks like rivers at night. 53
  • 63. Putting the cart before the horse Horse- cart is women in laughter, A happiness image, a moving away From house, water tap, bitter tree A broken wall of never to return, A space lost on other side of wall Of women’s heads peeping, with Eyes of laughter, wanting to know White dragons of surprised eyes Eyes crinkled in round disbelief. A guava tree of ripe fruit not theirs. Smells lost of flowers on the roof By smells that overwhelm senses Of horse-turds on rhythmic hoofs. Loss of film songs is felt in the air In loudspeakers over mango trees. The annual dragonflies do not come This season of monsoon, from grass To lose their silly wings on the wall. Everything is in a blind daze of rain Its flies conspire to hide the world Beyond a tuft of tail, in busy swish. Horse cannot see green on other side, Nor the world beginning with tail But all the while, laughter goes on. 54
  • 64. 55
  • 65. Wife Anne Bradstreet was the wife of a husband. If ever two were one, then surely we,said she. It is all in the things of the night uttered In an utter seventeenth century bleakness Of a New England straight from the ship. An earldom left in general vagueness of sea For a tableless living among fierce Indians. Wife’s importance lies in the other of life Not merely of the fire, seven times, round As every year you think of the seven rounds, In gold, in textiles, in dim-wit restaurants. Wife-love is in the early day of a long night A pillow night of fears, ghosts and the dead As you turn to the left of belly fear in sleep You hear her sleeping, re-asserting your life. 56
  • 66. Larvae From trees, on a gentle wind from the hills A new light shall fall on the fluff of marigold Its petals scattered for bees to tempt smells On antenna of viscous honey, pollen of love. The larvae are growing as luminescent dust In beams of light that travel down from the roof In chinks of old tiles, awaiting their change After the moss turns on them black in sun When new tiles will replace them, by workers Sitting on the roof as if they are sky-birds. The larvae are growing in white water- clouds Hoarding river and sea for tomorrow’s festival When they will be beating tin-roofs like drums Pushing dried flowers down their corrugations And send down snakes of water to our ground. Of light dust and snowflakes the larvae will grow Till evening when they will vanish in our pages. 57
  • 67. Otherness of room The wind blows in a light rain on the road In gentle leaves waving the dawn to break. Here I shall pass in the otherness of room When the sea howls child fears in pockets Filled with flowers plucked early morning For worship, leaf by leaf, of gods in frames On words uttered on trembling lips of other. Rooms are demolished like they of the sea Lying in string cots as they stare at the roof With sea memories of shells on the beach Its snails walking slowly in crooked lines. The tea vendors of beach laugh like snails Offering paper cups for your life’s worries. Their footprints are demolished by waves As soon as they are made, their paper cups Swallowed by the sea in otherness of sea. A loving parijat tree drops shy love-flowers On its utter defeat, right outside my room. Their death-smells enter holes of my room Re-defining my room, its walls reinstated. 58
  • 68. 59
  • 69. The mobile The mobile is now on the moving taxi seat. Speak into it, you eyes, its Latin ring is seen In the mauve of the taxi seat, quite agitated Of much pants comfort, less heart- warmth Of yesterday, in more cold of today’s words. It is in the hot words of wax in a cold syntax Of a mobile talk between shoulder and head As the former comes close to a sneezing head. Its words are filthy, steeped in religious tunes In the kitschy filmy tradition of the back alley. Its tunes rhyme with the body’s foot tapping. The head is now leaning tower on motorcycle. Such heads, leaning on shoulders, warm cops In their pockets, their hearts, burning stoves. Its talk now walks on its feet on road like bird A non-flying bird of the wingless, its feet tied Together in the coop, in a joy ride to market. It will speak in hush from someone’s stomach. 60
  • 70. 61
  • 71. The hurricane The earth had only slightly stirred there Leaving denizens remarkably disposed To funny jokes and light banter, between Wisecrack twitters of blue birds perched On the windowsills of frivolous jokesters. The visitor hurricane is a delicate thing A softer sister of earlier, who turned tough In her underpants, blowing it really hard On their lives in smug suburban houses. This one is soft-spoken, unlike prior sister, Only gently touching their lives and roofs And ever so soft on weekend getaway cars. Nature is not twitter stuff over fat pizzas By sedentary geeks behind smog screens. Mocking nature may be a happy pastime But remember there could be worse sisters That may not blow as softly in our faces. 62
  • 72. Flowers, leaves and fruit Our flowers and leaves and fruit are here In silver-white plates of morning fragrance From burning incenses, flames of camphor. Our waters stream between lips and palms. Our flowers shall be flung at framed pictures. Come face to face with the elephant head That laughs on a rounded stomach of sweets The head of a trunk from a severed north On a torso standing guard on mother’s bath. A father is egotistical of a divine drum dance He that dances in snow hills of blue poison That cannot wait to see wife bathing in cave, He that smears his body with our death-wish. His prankster son has to eat in his stomach. Pock-marked moon laughs at his bloated stuff. We all love him the way he pats his stomach When he will pace up and down on our roof After a heavy meal of rice cakes and jaggery. (Tomorrow is the worship day of Ganesha, the elephant-god who visits us every year this day) 63
  • 73. The chair as object poem I dislike the word chair just before dawn When I have to hit upon it when the wind Outside the window falls on nearby trees In a rhythm of rain, expected in daybreak. As a false positive I have to like the chair. Its contours are deeply etched in my mind As if they were from my very ancient man. Here I am talking about the chair as object While sitting in it as subject doing poems. The chair suddenly ceases to be the object, An object poem in my subjective thought. It becomes me in its pearl-white plasticity Not deigning to melt into my light letters Of poems materializing from air as objects. My words turn objects, ahead of the chair. They are now object poems like the chair. 64
  • 74. The chair The chair’s memories go back to a sylvan past Of animals, trees and foliage, in caves of dark Men, women and kids in leaves of loin cover, Fire in twigs and bird calls and bees of honey. The ancestors might have sat on its wood Hopping from tree to tree, looking for chairs, When there were no chairs, only branches. You still see the ancestors’ seats delineated In the chair, as if they had once sat on them. (Think of the chair as Idea of chair, in a platonic sense of an object being copy of the Idea. Reflect on the slight depression built in the chair anticipating how the sitter’s body will fill the chair) 65
  • 75. Grandmothers Our grandmother we remember vividly In the moon and sitting on a sagging cot Woven with old stories and waving trees Circulating the moon wind and princes. Coconuts join in stories of green lands lost On daughters’ weddings, gold shining less, Vegetables brought and cut, from groves. Men come in rain bearing wedding stuffs Between slippery field boundaries of rice, Paddies with water snakes swimming early Women ankle deep in mud, their shoulders On level with the mountains of the horizon. Grandmothers cry from no salt in the eye. They cry softly from waters in the head Of memories of husbands lost in opium Of sons and grand-nieces lost to a moon. They laugh toothless laughter in ripples Over vegan jokes made specially for kids, Not on fart jokes in high demand by them. As they make hot evening snacks for kids They rub their eye-whites, of blue smoke. 66
  • 76. Sufficient We have never felt it sufficient in all this In blocks of time we had made quite early One after other, the latest one sticking out Earlier ones fading away in a dust of time. We have never felt it sufficient to work out The grand logic of it all, in a clear ontology A hierarchy of speed, a journey in the wild. A mere outcry, a walk in the wind alone Over dry leaves that hid a lizard, nothing. There emerged no poetry in this blind path Merely a fear of fears, of death and night. A piano solo concert, from a friend’s son A solar energy that flowed from another’s Were benchmarks, a few lines in the sky, Ephemeral as eccentric son of other friend In a clink of bangles, of a gene gone awry. All is in a mind’s dark, in a together-guilt A son’s failure in father’s life and thoughts. One does not feel sufficient, father of son. 67
  • 77. 68
  • 78. The cold wind The window has let in a benignly cold air Between a promised rain and a buried rain Of yesterday’s clouds dripping from trees. I close windows to formally remove a cloth Of needless wool warmth over old shoulders. A mountain arrived by a kind monkey god Who promptly consumed garlands of eats In his ample rolls of neck, a laughing matter In the foolishness of our pre-facto desires. The monkey who burnt an island with a tail Will surely bring us mountains of smugness, Our desires realized in solid gold and power. The cold wind shall cease only on our graves When our desires no more burn in temples And our gods turn silent in their sanctums And look away quickly from our burning eyes Entirely embarrassed, of promises not met. 69
  • 79. 70
  • 80. The world has already begun Look, I already hear the morning noises Of the bird parents to their new chicks Above the dripping A.C. unit in balcony. White flowers have already broken out On the wire mesh as though they were My bath-wet clothes hanging in the sun. I look out the parapet for parijat dropping Its flowers, their heads down and feet up. Looks like the world has already begun. 71
  • 81. The table lamp A clipped lamp poured its light on light Twice it went to sleep and on waking up Its sleep-weary eyes blinked in disbelief. A poem before dawn from knots of words On what rhymes with a green table light! Nothing rhymes with a table lamp right. Poetry of things comes from inner light. Its music is in the very nature of things, The way it trains its light on trite things. 72
  • 82. Family Just a few bodies live together in a hole, A burrow in a space of cement concrete. Pigeons that return on beaks of worms. Gophers in their holes of common space Exploring life, sharing its outer darkness, As the sky hangs in balance, tautly held. Our children eat porridge off our hands. We are their white walls, with nail-holes. Their clothes are hung in our blankness. Old men stare at ceilings, under the stairs. Sagging cots bring them closer to the earth Away from the overhanging sky of the roof. Just a few bodies that return to the earth, One by one, noting each other’s presence. 73
  • 83. 74
  • 84. Laugh Laugh if you must, in your body shudders, Especially if it would hurt, in you of night. Pain or pleasure would vibrate in eardrum Lately suspected to hear less of own words That ring as though addressed to audience. You needlessly increase volume of speech Beyond the hearing distance in your room Or above the market din and bees buzzing. Otoliths may cause balance distortion in old. Nice word this, please remember to look up When the vibration comes in the dictionary. You want to sense meaning, you shall vibrate. The Buddha laughs on enormous stomach Not the one under our ancient wisdom tree But the yellow one, of a figurine in curio shop. Wisdom is when one laughs at rolls of pain Not of too much eating in moon of rice balls. He laughs because he cannot cry in the view. Under the circumstances, he vibrates of pain. 75
  • 85. You want to celebrate years in wax flames To vibrate to sounds of breaking birth walls. But take care of the all-around green fluid, And a cord that has to be cut off from mamma. That is when you vibrate in lungful of laugh. When you cry, you laugh at the darkness left And the pain of light on new rolls of stomach. 76
  • 86. Children You children from our knees down Look upon the world as blue hills In a fuzzy grove of far, far trees. You play games in wood pillars Of eye’s dreams, also-have-beens. You hide and we seek very eyes. Shout if you must, when the stone Does not tumble on the sixth one. You play cheat, ball a mere flower. A marigold tossed from cardboard. Your rules change like life’s rules With no notice, now this, now that. From knees up don’t grow to sky. Make clay god out of a wet earth A funny god of an elephant-child Eating big balls of rice and sugar Into a stomach, rounded of eating. When you finish making clay god Please make us too, in river loam So just like him we can easily break In the swirling waters of monsoon. 77
  • 87. 78
  • 88. Fractals Six ’O clock and it is time to repeat On scale, joint walks, up and yonder. The overcast sky says much nothing. We understand life beside the tree. Repeat the tree and the old dusty car With the same old names washed off In yesterday’s rain, waiting in new dust For the same names, heart and arrow. You looking for repeat arches in art? I have them plenty in my digital box In old tombs where angry sultans lie In endless repetitive arches of beauty Where men vanish in trees at the end. Our walks are repeat feet under shoes Occupying space, little by little, in sky. The feet shuffle slowly, one behind one. Eight ’O clock is time to repeat on scale A bus of people on rods, lunch boxes Touching sweaty bodies tantalizingly. 79
  • 89. Seminar When a midnight dog had barked at the dark There came up a word seminar from the night In a hall of poets chasing truths widely known An electric fan stirring its hot air of repetitions. Supposing the seminar is shifted to a sit-stone Under the tree, with ant-holes brimming with views A passing fantasy from inside a sleeping mind. Here we have a seminar of e-poets with lulu books Behind the window curtains, to bypass brown ants Who vent strong acidic views on our under-legs. We will not miss hot air of higher reaches of hall. A man sits in the back row with a head in hands Dreaming of golden brown lunch with lentil soup . He has no rabid views about making verse blank In the forenoon sessions, after a biscuit break. Just when the speaker comes up with a rare gem The loo at the back beckons the high and the low The lulu poets stand in rows before filling pots. It is in these mini-seminars that inspiration flows. 80
  • 90. Sorority The soap sisters drop their doe-eyes Too soon and pretty on the noses, The way they sniff at their sisters All in the race for big house power High-ceilinged and chandeliered. Creepy music is suited to villainy. As they pull female legs, in music, Around mustachioed landlordism. They are sisters up against sisters. They are now in plush boardrooms In their fight against their sorority All for sons, fathers and husbands Not against male tyranny, but for it. They would even check for stomachs Big with sorority, to finish it all off Much before it will scream in the air. (About woman stereotypes in Indian T.V. soaps) 81
  • 91. Brakes Silent rain and rainbows of grease Trace on the road polygonal maps. The grease maps drop from squeals Of rained brakes in car undersides. Their brakes rebel against tyrant feet And trace line-maps of free countries As their throats shout hoarse slogans. 82
  • 92. Posthumous poetry We are mostly writing posthumous poems In the corners of our souls, in the outer reaches Of our bodies, from the despair of ripe nights. A shrill midnight whistle causes such poems. Some poems come from lonely street corners Where heavy boots will arrive, on Himalayan Feet with large sized memories of kids and wife In a firelight of warm coals in deep snow hills. The street dog’s howls aggravate such poems. A bloody uprising in us triggers some poems In the unreal company of a Kafka in beard When humongous creatures fill front rooms Of overflowings from pockets, book shelves Our windows closed from the inside of rain. Our literary agent has just died of our poems. He will sure publish our poems posthumously. 83
  • 93. The brick wall What came to the mind was a brick wall In several squares of thought, a soft wind Buffeting the creepers flying on its holes And moss of history faded into black night. The busy brown ants were not left behind. If it was words of bricks we might build it In its brown brokenness,on music of thought. A bird visitor would come in brown stripes Its fickle screw-head moving in sky for worms. The creeper strutted in the sun its proud stuff Of flowers of paper hanging in leaves in pink. It was not a mere brick wall, but a broken wall Of holes that hid childhood, my lost years. 84
  • 94. Story It is raining lightly through the night On muddy streets and rain-puddles On cars under heavy veil, squatting As if dying to make story under trees. The trees sat there without brown birds. The brown birds will come later to us From a golden sun behind our house To make nest of straw in our A.C. outlet. In a room of silence I make my story Of a friend with heart that just rebelled Against too much edible oil and work, In a calm of death that had no foretaste On our tongues in the fragrant harbor. The brown birds have to make a story Behind the A.C. outlet in green straw And twigs that will not stay on clamps. The rain has made story of reluctance On muddy roads refusing reverse-flow Under trees that yawned in boredom As stories spread lazily around them. 85
  • 95. Meaning Water has meaning when it overflows Like god-sounds, pictures of lost color With white faced women in old clothes As they flow from sounds of old space. Meaning shall continue without break. The objects quickly lose a revised sense. Their sounds combine with their eyes, The seeing eyes of all objects in poems. Their meaning shall accrue as they see Behind senselessness, in fail interiority. Sounds have no meaning, when heard. Images are all meaning, when in letters. They weave meaning around our things, A mosquito in dark waters of steel glass, Light pouring from steel dome in a pool. Fan sounds feeling thoughts in its whir. A cloth bag had dark worries at bottom. A bird flew from our nest in a window. A person disappeared from glass-pane. The watchman belched from his hand. His pockets were full of night sounds. Our meaning jumps from thing to thing. Under a silken veil of soft fluorescence. A rain that hides mud-houses in moths. 86
  • 96. Some twigs that bird-fall from branches A night with no sounds of song in wind A scooter that kicked its innards to life. 87
  • 97. The lake that was sea The lake went unnecessarily emotional In the shadows of the banyan and men Sitting on the rails of its embankment Who looked like birds flying on the sea. Its ripples pretended to be ocean-waves. The trees waved knowingly on the rim Their green hairs eating up the blue sky. We fished for hidden grandma stories. An auntie lent her gold in a cloth bundle. You need jewels, you jewels of women? Come to the lake and ask the lake auntie Who will lend hers to you for wedding. Remember to return them when done. You, betrayer, have not returned them? She is no more a jewel lending auntie. You can hear her sad silence in ripples . (The myth relates to the Ramappa lake , a 800-year old lake near Warrangal in Andhra Pradesh that has remained a part of the collective conscious of the people through such interesting myths and folk lore in circulation in the area) 88
  • 98. Looking for a word At this time, I am looking for a word And that is when I have found them When they come in as blood- cousins Twice removed, I mean, not literally. They turn sad all the time, all the time; Their sadness is for unknown people. At times they assume grinning faces. They turn sad as they come to a close. Actually they are not that important, Meaning those the words are sad for. It is the language that is sad in its words, The sad language we had made our own Coming from far, in sounds of bagpipes The bagpipes are sad, celebrating defeat. But their windy sounds are fine music. (About Indian writing in English) 89
  • 99. 90
  • 100. Particles The night advanced in floating particles Of tiny flowers that would fall at sun rise. Her memories floated as light particles Of sun dust on the earth’s fallen flowers. We offer rice particles to keep her alive In our bellies, our throats, dusty minds. (On the fourth death anniversary of my mother) 91
  • 101. Seeing is dead The master sculptor had made tonalities Stone upon stone, of women in dance Men in beards, servants removing thorns From the swollen feet of soft princesses. Their cloth caps towered over dainty feet. Nubile girls danced on slender midriffs Of black tonalities, ankles high in the air. A child god’s flute was heard in soft stone. Gods lived in fading nights of a memory. The vandal’s seeing is death of immortality The death of artifice, the death of beauty. (Several sculpted figures can be seen in deliberate disfigurement by history’s vandals on the exquisite temple walls of the Ramappa temple near Warrangal in Andhra Pradesh) 92
  • 102. Sleep comes Sleep comes when things seem to be fizzling down, Like late night line drawings, just over a soft pillow In a fuzz of thoughts, their outlines vaguely formed, As the air slowly turns heavy with cavernous yawns. Sleep is when a red of white forms in our glassy eyes Into a mess of capillaries supplying blood to seeing, To dreaming in a sleep of time, in a sleep of thought. Sleeping is body in a merger in the blue of the sky Into a sky of nothing that rises above the apartment, On the roof , by the water tank, listening to its water. 93
  • 103. Stone maidens of Ramappa temple These stone maidens turn you to stone If you stare at them too long, in the sun. Their bodies are badly stuck in the wall, They lean forward in the sky of the day Seen by creatures that are still not dust. At night they come out of the moonlight For hopscotch in the chalk-lines of the sky. Then they come out in groups and dance To nobody’s pleasure except god-husbands Who became stardust in the sky long ago. Their sculptor-father is a chisel’s dust, From the father sculptor of all-time sky. His dust is not seen by men, not yet dust. (About the exquisite sculptures of idealized female beauty on the temple walls of Ramappa Gudi ,near Warrangal in Andhra Pradesh) 94
  • 104. Naming the child Name filling is after our pleasure taking And body giving, from a rubber umbilicus Strapped to a golden lotus, from where The Creator would spring with his wife Highly educated, feminist in approach. The lotus-seated god is duly hen-pecked By a goddess of learning, his own alphabet On our brows in disarray, in strange script Undecipherable in far too many words. The navel springing the lotus shall maintain The creation products with brilliant learning, Including femininity of luscious apple eating And why not, in a world of devious serpents. The lotus-springing god shall have his feet Pressed gently, for walking fatigue, by wife, Without his ever walking in the sky-clouds. He keeps the world going by wife’s wealth And his own health on a serpent mattress With an arching serpent hood for umbrella. 95
  • 105. Prices The fish are mostly in the lake Sometimes, found by the lake Lumped with random friends They do not set their own prices. Stomachs decide how much. They are later buried in them. Stomachs do not set own prices. They are later buried. 96
  • 106. Flowers that make my window glad Three or four white flowers in a window sky Demolishing curtains will surely gladden glass With a tiny button rose to button up experience Of a heaving chest, full of old age, death fears. Fears growl in the malfeasance of flesh organs It is their dirty smell of decomposition in bones In the phenyl smell of a dying hospital, flowers Smelling like formaldehyde, of sickening tubes Those carry dirty water to be emptied for money. But the white flowers shall gladden my window yet. My clothes shall smell of wilted flowers in pocket. I shall keep fears on hold, this side of the window Under a table light that reads nice smelling words Remembering parijat flowers waiting on the earth, Their faces down , feet up, at the crack of dawn. 97
  • 107. Work I have always work to do when I sit alone With the passions of neurons in high fever. Sometimes the blood runs up bloody tubes Sending waves that rise at midnight moons. There is serendipity, a fortuitous discovery A mere possibility of a chance stumble-upon By a machine perpetually in fear of stopping. I work on words for serendipity, discoveries In the random and derive existence from them. That is the way I keep the machine running. 98
  • 108. A child’s birthday The old poet looks from his thoughtful eyes At the blue and white baby birthday balloons Stuck like hearts to the roof, helpless on roof As they had gone up from children’s mouths. Then the children remember future birthdays Of white cream on knowingly smiling faces. Their parents are high on hot lentil soup among Rags of unprovoked conversations of no ends, Only tassels, shreds of silk, golden embroidered. They will, back at home, cull the gold from them In their sleep and melt them to increase riches. 99
  • 109. Soliloquies Evenings are good time for free frank talk When our mind is full and our tired body Echoes with incidents, day’s happenings With a belly down there, loudly cheering. Our soliloquies occur then, breaking silences In loud exclamations, puzzled question marks, Wild hand gestures, vague finger- pointings In vivid figures of speech, in pure blank verse. My own soliloquies clash with the sparrow’s And at times with the nodding wall lizard’s When it crouches in pure love for its insect And quickly darts back to safety of roof-light With the love-act smack on its happy lips. ”kitta, kitta”, it soliloquizes, quite solemnly. That is when the sparrow too soliloquizes. Actually it is talking with its own alter ego In the mirror, alleging brazen plagiarizing Of its poise and beauty, its melody of song. There seems no reply from the mirror’s side So its verbal outpourings remain soliloquies. 100
  • 110. 101
  • 111. Dark circles Dark circles do not mean refusal to beauty-sleep Or long years of skin, into eternity of same place. The circles are ever expanding, from outer ring. The centre is holding contrarian views from eyes Not seeing eye to eye, they have circular runs to do. There are holes behind eyes, their circles hiding them. Fathers do not see them, when they first sketch them And as the lines proceed apace,the circles take shape. When they are noticed it is always late, always late. The holes behind them are bottomless quarry-holes Where darkness rules like the night cricket in bush; A stone’s drop in it will not even be acknowledged. 102
  • 112. Dust mites They had come before us, in our heads of hair, Our flat backs with or without bony vertebrae Dust they are and our future dust they embrace Under flowers of our pillows, in sleep-softness When we turn at night they turn in dusty ways At us, in our bloodstream, in the fever of nights Our inside fights, not knowing enemy within. Let us get them inside out, in bedroom antics, Carry on relentless pillow-fight, on way to dust. 103
  • 113. Wall A little white wall stood between us Of indifference, from our both sides. Only the tree knew our day, our lives, Comparing them meticulously above. We could finally break its whiteness Only to confront an indifferent wind. 104
  • 114. Miracle The sky is still gray, over the mountains, Trees still in their leaves, not a whistle. Our child shall be born anew, our miracle, The birth from a deep night, night’s child. The folds of the hills held it in their wind, In haunting fragrance of thorny flowers On the side of the mud-track, in furrows Of rice fields, with wet feet of our women. The hills waited expectantly and the cows In their return, in the dust of their hoofs. Let us get a peacock feather for his head A little blue of the sky for his over-wear. But the sky is still gray with shades of rain And the peacock is dizzy in its rain-dance Waiting for its own miracle on a gray sky. 105
  • 115. The first flower The first flower is fixed in my sky, waving in wind. Its white fragrance is mine alone in its blue space, The wind I do not own, but here this balcony I own In bricks and cement, in sand from river’s holes. The flower is mine for claim to neighbors And the squirrel that passes by, whoever. When it dies and falls, I alone shall mourn. 106
  • 116. Words for trees I do not have any words for trees, in my throat I know them in throat, by astringency of fruit, By disgust on tongue of caterpillars on them In ironic glow as creatures of beauty of future Their projected butterfly stature in the next sky, By leaves falling one by one in October wind Like snow in December of higher Himalayas. I call them trees, even if they stand there alone It is in their plurality they turn colored butterflies When they are up and about, alone, in bunches, Their lady-like cackle heard from jungle peacocks As they raise blue heads from bushes under them. 107
  • 117. Light Morning is pure light, on coffee and paper A song in light raises head softly in the east On the high place where god sits with trees In his loin cloth and a fixed stare at the wall. The rain flies shall begin life’s journey now As light first reddens trees, makes them blush Of god on their leaves, in their golden splendor Their green then mixing in gold from the east. Light fills our chests, our sleeves, our hair, In loose strands of a girl’s hair on the road Where electricity flowed at their fiery tips, A song on her lips lacking, but felt in breeze. The girl’s hands flowed as water from hills. Their music filled trees with leaves of blush. 108
  • 118. Figures of our speech All the world’s layers are in our throats, Hoarse with words, spoken way too often With proper emphasis, some letters said With our teeth pressed and eyes closed. Our fingers are clenched for good effect. Our body is distorted with much emotion. Let us, for a change, feel the damn thing, Before words, without flourishes of writing. We say the cap on our head sports a knot That looks like a ruined temple on the hill, Specially when in silhouette against sunset. As if our saying makes it larger than seeing. The knot on cap is a mess of wool that bears Not even a flimsy likeness to ruined temples. 109
  • 119. The sea of images This crowd of images will not leave us in blood. Its voices fill our minds like morning squatters, As one din, rising to the sky ,when on the beach Among tall trees waving good bye across the seas. These trees crowd all our spaces near our feet And in the folds of our minds, musically flowing When tall ships blow their steam-horns at them. It is one vast sea of images, in waters and brine. The boat goes up and down on the morning sky. A plastic rope holds it in place, its green strands Tying lives, in strange places, in shadow and light Of fish in men, fire in women, smoke in old men. Black bodies rise high in froth at the sea’s mouth. Tiny tentacles burrow holes in its brown wet sand. They tickle your feet and question your foot space. The sea swallows us all, including our old shadows. 110
  • 120. Authenticity I am often confronted by a feeling Of lack of authenticity, in this river, Of not feeling like a subject, spurious Against mountains that sit in the far With river waters beating on my ears. I am words from vaporous thoughts, A prose-poem thought in dark nooks Of the mind, mining word after word. The mountains belong to the earth. I, waving in breeze, am a mere baby A cry-baby in quick mountain wind, Flying words against its rock solidity In its flowing wind and night silence. The mountains are authentic in space With river about me, in daily ripples. They had come here much before me With the waters from skies, daily sun. I exist here in the river, as a thought A passing thought of a real mountain, A thought in river, a temporary rock. 111
  • 121. Climate change We spoke all our recent dialogues nicely Voicing apprehension of the big change. Our struggle had continued underneath. It was a monotone speech in a gray sky When the line of trees came to a freeze In their hostility, where they stood tall. The gentle summer breeze did not matter. The trees sniffed autumn and looked away. Emaciated street dogs barked incessantly, At hooded strangers coming at us from hills From the edge of the sky, in clouds of dust. Our dialogues went on in our dark robes As our culture bristled riskily in our back, The culture of reality, in our failed hearts Where several realities came up together Not as a single earth-reality in silk thread But a failed reality of a fluid mind-state A sky of treeless vapour, sea of flake-salt. 112
  • 122. Metaphors We are nowadays happy with our new door A membrane bathroom door that now sheds A certain mauve hue on baths, while in song, With the shower flowering on our cool backs Streaming as if from a rock skirted by trees Its vapors swirling like their winter breaths. Our song is under breath, in some mutters. Our vapors are on glass that hides in smoke Our rather banal faces, their jejune laughter. We are, in fact, searching for our metaphors, Being upbeat about our recent turns of phrase. 113
  • 123. Phony vision I do not know if the thing is phony Glass-like, with glistening dew-drops Of a morning vision on windshield, Pearl-glass that breaks in little coins On endless highways, on mild impact Of metallic bodies with drunk men. Some cars have steam on bonnets Like bees, in spring, on the stone. Our vision is partly crowded, you see With birds hiding dust in the east That has turned orange at sunrise A phony vision, it is partly clouded. On the highway there are no houses Only string cots for our dream sleep On glasses of buttermilk, hot breads. We have whites on our mustaches Of too much buttermilk in throats. You crinkle eyes enough and you will see Wet buffaloes calmly chewing their cud In tin sheds that jump out of green fields Their milk sloshing in their pink udders. 114
  • 124. Luckily their tail-flies and smells fly away Into tree-tops, waking the morning birds, A phony vision indeed, partly clouded. The sunflower beds have darker kids That smile nicely of a little alphabet, Like flowers that turned deep inward When the sun went behind the hills. Their little bees have nowhere to go, Wait; let the sun come from the hills. The village school is closed for today In honor of the guests on the string cot The sunflowers will open with the wind And the shadows will creep up slowly Behind the buffaloes, with eyes closed Their mandibles moving up and down. The vision is clouded, a phony vision Caused by much emotion in the eyes. 115
  • 125. Scream In the bone house it would appear The lower mandibles were stretching And stretching to produce a scream That would fail to reach down to ears. Actually they were trying to bite sarcasm, Surely a futile endeavor, especially They do not have tongues in cheeks. 116
  • 126. Holes We are talking of holes, mere lack of matter Subsisting in matter and surrounded by it Of words that exist in crevices of thoughts, Words making the world’s holes in whole. My dead are matter in lack of it, globe-earths Those spin in lack of space, in crisp night air. They spin in the space of time, holes in space, Phosphorus glow-worms roaming thin nights. They are holes in space, where they had lived. They are now words that will live in thoughts, Those remain in my mind, as images of reality Till I become a hole in space, a picture, a word. 117
  • 127. Children in the rain We wanted clearly laid out paths Between thin strands of July rain. Our faces were drowned in hoods As the rain fell softly on our heads. Its sounds came as from the ocean. Our puny judgments took a beating In such a steady patter on our ears Where they seem to be beating us Like angry fathers, back from office. As we walked we made tiny circles In rain water, under our umbrellas That saved us from an angry sky. The houses were a blur in white. Our paths ended in green of trees. Rain-mud spattered on black coats Surprised by blurs of passing cars, Their wipers saying no to the rain. We had left our school in the street. Our home of angry smoking fathers And soft grannies in loving egg-heads Seemed to vanish in the fuzzy rain. 118
  • 128. A scruffy dog shook its body of rain. Back at home, we bath our wet bodies In eucalyptus steam, as its vapors rise Quickly to drown the rain in its smell. 119
  • 129. Bridge We had passed the bridge spanning a river of sand At dawn, when our noisy train spoke to its emptiness. Once out of it, the train was bending like a centipede And we took a long backward glance to see the bridge Now smarting under noise injury on its deaf,deaf ears. The buffalos on its sand-bed looked up, unmindful Of the bridge, of the noisy train that passed, and of us In the train that saw them as mere globs on the sand. Their black bodies longed for green puddles of water. Their eyes seemed vacant, as their tails swished flies. We saw they had not even once met us in our eyes. 120
  • 130. The temple of shadows Men and women live here with stones Their shadows live with them in daylight. The shadow phalluses of shadowy gods Live in the musty smells of kings in silks Their soldiers in attendance on swords. Women have their foreheads on red dots. Priests move throats up, down like birds. Their prayers fly like shadows to the sky, Their hungry stomachs touch their backs Where they produce shrill incantations. Here god is crying inside, in the shadow. Beauty is hunger in distended stomachs Drunk with soft palm wine from the sky. 121