1. Creative Images
A.J.Rao

2. Creative Images
Poems written from 5th October,2001 to 31st December,2011
A.J.Rao

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4. Contents
The year-end 1
Green inspiration 2
Light 3
Colors 4
The spectacle case 5
Woman 6
Mud-pies 8
The Golconda fort 9
Wall 10
Buttons 11
Lamp 12
North 13
Rhetoric 14
Beauty and the beast 15
The haystack 16
The inventory 17

5. The moment 18
Embrace 19
The rope of fire 20
Pets 21
I.C.U 22
Forgetfulness 23
The hospital 24
My body 25
Haze 26
Immortality 27
A joke 28
Three women and a man 29
The glass casket 30
Morning was star news 31
Oblivion 32
The morning raga 33
Words 34

6. The camera stories 35
Dogs in the night 36
Vertigo 37
The dog’s bark 38
The carpenter 39
Old age nonsense 40
Garbage 41
Hope 42
Painting the windows 43
Face 44
Knowledge 45
Water 46
A doll’s house 47
The reed 48
Noise 49
Re-occupy 50
In passing 51

7. Rest 52
The water bottle 53
Eighty and five 54
Houses 55
The full moon 56
Debt 57
Worship 58
Crowd 59
Sea-stories 60
Storytime 61
Train 62
Self-portrait 63
My mom’s stool 65
Facebook 66
Room 67
Gated community 68
Word 69

8. Moon thoughts 70
The death of an English teacher 71
The window-pane 72
The undertow 73
Symbols 74
Worship 75
The village 76
Mother’s Notes 77
Risk 78
Sounds 80
Stories 81
1949 82
Occupying wall street 83
Screws loose 85
Not writing poems 86
Gossip 87
Friends 88

9. Illusion 89
Please give us back our wings 90
Horoscope 91
Colors 93
Summaries 94
Intervals 95
The little girl 97
The old stool 99
October poem 101
Shudder 102
The temples 103
Leaving a place 105
Poetry of jobs 107
The giant wheel 108
The street with the wall at the end 109
Pensioner’s notebook 110

10. The year-end
Our change will happen not at the midnight
Of cakes and candles,loud claps and crackers
But in doorways, each time we pass them
Like ghosts, room to room, under flowers
Delicately painted on their frames on yellow.
The doorway is not inside nor there in space
But just hanging on time, as we hop and skip
Holding our hems from paint sticking to them.
The year-end is a doorway that will disappear
in the dusty lane and in the dust we can't recall
What ghosts we were in the room left behind.
1

11. Green inspiration
You may ask what is it that breeds poetry
From nocturnal thought, a green inspiration
From decay, a smell of infestation and death
As you now turn around , excessively aware
Of a role soon coming to an end on the stage,
While the green room there is still gaping open
With dress-clothes, a paint drying in its tubes.
Our scripted dialogues point to our role's end
A green grease-paint never to be put on again
A director and prompter dead in their tracks.
We still have our green faces grotesquely moving.
Their brows are still dancing of love and death.
Can we come back to make one last show please,
Before we can finally go back to our backwaters
In our snake-boats of grotesquely paddling oars
All asynchronously moving towards somewhere.
2

12. Light
This evening light is deeply intriguing
In its speckles, on parapet walls at dusk.
People seem stretched as long shadows
Stuffed with emptiness, uni-dimensional
And asking for a little glory on the floor.
The parapet walls, set in rarefied dusk air,
Stand, stripped of the gone time, bit by bit,
As yellow light deepens their history's hues .
The rocks , duly red and dead, pay lip service
To mothers of ancient discovery in kitschy
Letters of round frames and square thought.
Several suns ago ,when men were not shadows,
Women in zenana came to pray in the mosques.
Their shrouds looked like veils of light on rocks
As their naked feet descended the stone steps.
(An evening at the Golconda fort)
3

13. Colors
We believed colors mainly made our life
Such as the soft Asian paints of Royale
Of a silky touch, all smudges wiped off.
The tea was just great color on white shirt
That could be wiped off by a daub of surf.
The children played in mud, a great color
But mother could do anything for colors.
Mother's eyes can now see only a uni-color
In the dusk's shadows of dancing coconuts
Waiting for her night to remove all smudges.
Due to lack of color, her cheeks often burst
With colorless marbles of clattering words.
The kids expertly push marbles into holes
Their index fingers aching like strung bows
Below a window, with an overlooking uncle.
Luckily no holes are missed, of color or no.
Wordy marbles finally fall into their holes.
Some points are missed in color confusion.
4

14. The spectacle case
A plastic with soft contours , it stares
At my eyes ,balefully from its existence,
Its pride, outcome of seeing too much.
Eyes are love , drooping an ego's fall
On the pillar of a nose, with two extra
Eyes seeming duplication but not so.
Custodian of seeing ,often a little proud,
It encases glasses roundly, just in case,
Luckily not making a spectacle of itself.
5

15. Woman
In my rhetoric I forgot the death
In the throat, a vanishing death
In the smallness of night hours
As all is forgot, as not belonging,
A bundle of clothes left behind
A knot of a loin-string in the dark
The death of life, slowly whistling
From dusty trees of mountains.
I forgot all the untouchable days
Of passing by a house's side-lane
With a bundle of clothes in arms
To a well of waters in the backyard
Under trees of concurrent shadows
In a series as they went in the day.
I forgot my squatting in the veranda
While accosting everyone's death
On a passing road of sun and ash.
Then my touch was death and love
In the smallness of my girl-breasts.
I quickly went woman-dead in shame.
Later I forgot death in my stomach
A bloody bundle of woman-shame,
As a mere shriek that never came.
6

16. In rhetoric I forget my dying shriek
That has failed to rise from my throat
As a vanishing death, a footfall away
In the smallness of my night hours.
7

17. Mud-pies
All the genuine, deep delight of life is in showing people the
mud-pies you have made; and life is at its best when we confidingly
recommend our mud-pies to each other’s sympathetic
consideration. ~ J. M. Thorburn
We made our mud-pies well before dawn.
Our delight is in the very numbers of eyes
Half-pie eyes turning in light from inside
Their lids not falling yet , into the abyss.
We make mud-pies for each other's view.
Their soft roundness is delight to our eyes
And a deep joy to feel to our gnarled fingers.
Your roundness of pies is a smooth joy too
And is highly recommended for neighbors.
After we go, please do not forget to view
Our pies slapped on the city's broken walls
Amid hurried graffiti , bits of cinema posters
Well before they flake off of excessive sun.
8

18. The Golconda fort
Stone is to heart as sun is to cloud
Warm and golden in after-moments
Gently touching, mere finger- feeling
Softness of texture, hardness of sun.
History is full with stones and clouds.
Men's shadows in time, wives in tow
With stones in hearts, soft and warm
Flit about as history's ghosts at dusk.
Silk dupattas fly about as white clouds.
The eyes were stones in their sorrows.
The eyes were Golconda's diamonds
Traded in heaps in history's markets
Under rows of stones, arches of time.
The sultans made mosques for them.
When there was no beauty left at night
There was a God in the Western sky.
These stones are blood flowing in hearts.
Their sounds fly across in space in claps.
A matchstick is not a flame but a sound
A sound in time, a mere flame in thought .
9

19. Wall
The wall is to the street of midnight,
A bit of the night, a tiny world, a dog
With a nightly bark in its loud throat.
It is to scraps of men, to birds in sleep
On the distant branches, their chicks
Warm to the twigs, feathers in making.
The wall is to real poetry of the night,
Fears of decay, opening in a window
Nothing but a hole in wall for escape.
The wall exists because and for escape
Because you cannot climb emptiness.
The wall is curtain to dark from light
A hole for escape, a climb with a leg
A scrape of skin, escape from itself,
A burst from body, its walls painted
On the outer of inner rushing rivers .
The wall contains a monsoon burst.
10

20. Buttons
I have wanted to wear the unworn shirt
Always put behind, for a missing button.
It seems the time has come to take it out
Inspect and put it back again in the closet.
The button is a mere rose, not appearing
In early dawn, in rows of reds and yellows
Pulsing like some tiny hearts, baby hearts
Full of love and gurgle, saliva on wet lips.
The button is a busy woman's lady fingers
Not appearing from a coffee not yet made,
Its magic not woven on a shirt of buttons.
The button is baby's missing tooth of laugh.
It is a missing son from the dark of a room,
A missing dream from a crying mom's sleep,
A missing button from her long train journey
A whole missing shirt of no missing buttons.
11

21. Lamp
The lamp spoke softly to mild night
Like an insect in a dusk's soft light
A paper light ,squirting in its onion
Skinned paper, gold and breaking,
Crackling softly in dancing breeze.
The waiters wore tiny insects of lips.
They brought brass pots for wash,
Yellow receptacles of a lamp light.
The yellow wall had a flushed lamp
Embedded like mirror in deep wood.
As we clicked girl stirred like a lamp
A flickering lamp in the wind of river,
A hand that vanished in its outlines
Eyes that blinked like lamp in breeze
A cloth that spilled on strands of hair.
The lamp was old oil in metal black.
A yellow wall took its falling shadow.
The shadow smelled of a dying lamp
Of a decayed night, a hair in temples
Partly graying of a growing wisdom
To a growing death in yellow leaves.
12

22. North
We would dream of the North when cold
Icy and frozen around its tree and flower,
The mountains aching with pure silver.
Up there the men moved about in stoles.
Old men in buckets on young shoulders
Muttered god-god-god under icy breathes.
It seemed God was made of ice in a cave.
We had played with waves in childhood
And sea-pebbles in teens like marbles.
The waves came from a bottom of South
And pebbles from storied monkey-soldiers
Who floated them on choppy salt waters.
We ate rice topped with grated coconuts.
Our gods lay in stony slumber in flowers.
But we had always dreamed of the North
Of rivers where corpses floated like stones
And burnt in acrid blue smoke on the banks.
The waters would flow with bright marigolds
As life unfolded each day on a new death .
We made fine round rice balls for our dead.
13

23. Rhetoric
We wanted our bodies to be more than stuff
Certain airy things floating on fluffy clouds
With a stringed instrument slung on shoulders
Chipping away at time, filling night with song.
The bodies spoke rhetoric in the most retro way
As if they were gods wearing unstitched clothes
And marigolds on torsos, signifying something..
Are we not more than stuff, we rhetorically asked
As the imaginary crowd shouted yes in their silence
Amid claps of spiritual hands, in the way of birds
Fluttering in sleep in the lonely trees of midnight.
How are you ,they asked and fine, we are dying.
So are you, we said rhetorically to empty space.
Actually we do not wear anything in such space.
These marigolds signify nothing , just rhetoric.
14

24. Beauty and the beast
In that city they have tamed all their lions
And similar other beasts from their loins.
They have here a wedding to make for son.
The wedding shall be quiet and subdued
A display of drape and some glitter of gold.
The sons pick up resplendent Pacific brides
With their moms of widowed sorrows in eyes.
Sorrows are like our own, like floods in rivers.
Their women make other women's happiness
In several other islands with their own beasts.
Here in this hall is our own local happiness.
Our beasts are in check, 'cept on some days
When they rise from dark lairs of quietude.
The woman there has her blue beauty-rays
Expertly trained on the volcano in stomach.
Happiness is rounded off with apricot desert.
15

25. The haystack
We could make hay while our sun still shone
But the needles of sun-rays are lost in the stack.
Our body is not skin-deep, surely in this dermis.
A syringe stuck in it will not easily find a needle.
Kandinsky found his needle at Monet's Giverny*
But not the yellow haystack spreading about it.
His rising sun shone brightly on such needles.
But the stacks were lost in indistinct impressions.
Our body remains a haystack of cumulated sun
Its needles lost in painterly state of impressions.
The body could be a haystack or even a horse
The horse is an illusion that has earlier bolted
Into the savannas, into grasses that left no hay.
Look, the sun seems already setting in the hills.
The haystack would soon be gone like the horse.
(Reference is to Wassily Kandinsky's epiphany about Monet's
painting Haystacks at Giverny, he saw in a Moscow exhibition of the
French impressionists' paintings)
16

26. The inventory
This my stuff is all over my yard, in the hollows of mind
Under an expanding sky, with the dusty trees nodding.
In the train it is all over my seat, under it, and above me,
As an inventory of stars twinkles from the sky to the train.
A singing boy , his eyes blinking in blindness, has pearly
Oyster shells for announcing his eye-wildness and music.
His inventory is a whole repertoire of heart rending songs.
I cannot keep inventory of the contents of the night sky,
Only what I can pick up from the weekly bazaar and shop,
And what numbers save up for me in a far off cheese land .
But the many-digit numbers are so difficult to memorize
I forget them on the foggy night , when I fuck off from here.
17

27. The moment
The moment now seems difficult to color-code
On an undistinguished night of gray monotony,
As the eyes turned quickly away in pearl- whites.
The moment now seems all that had happened
Around the frothy waves of an unspoken truth
A truth from nowhere,a chaos stirring in the wind
A frozen mind fizzling down like a tiny snow-flake .
The doctor has put the time at about three a.m.
18

28. Embrace
Whenever we do not agree, we embrace
Lack of agreement, like we do the night
When we cannot agree on sleep of birds.
The birds keep awake through the night
Keeping an eye on our misdemeanors.
We keep awake keeping an eye on theirs.
We sleep embracing pillows in folded legs.
Attention! we cry in our sheets, those days.
We pretend we like them on their backs
But in their embrace we make our faces
Ugly enough to look in mirrors, noses up.
We embrace smoke from the backs of cars.
That way tear gas works perfectly in ducts.
We embrace our evenings of empty chatter.
We embrace rain, praising our god in death
And bodies going up in a blue wood smoke.
We embrace absence, bodies turning ideas.
19

29. The rope of fire
A man sits in a tiny kiosk like a bird chick
Confined to a roosting nest, reaching out
Only for worms in its triangular baby beak.
A turban he wears and a red hue on his lips
With the tongued accent of a riverside city
Where you go to die to live for ever in heaven.
A white stuff on leaves makes clients redder
In dancing mouths with a gluey paste on leaf.
All they need is a white stick of fire in mouths
To keep their business going, at constant debt.
The man has a coconut rope with a fiery end
Tied to an electric pole, burning slowly like debt.
Its fire is enough to light white sticks all night.
No need to see faces by the light of a match.
20

30. Pets
It is difficult to find words for moist love
They all stop at the underside of a throat
Like a warm liquid moving like a caravan
In a desert of inside, stopping for a drink.
We have these six pets for our private love
We return from our journeys to feed them
And resume our journeys in wind and rain.
Their throats come alive with echo sounds,
Like big dogs tugging at morning leashes.
Our pets rise early morning without the sun,
After a night of barking at a black darkness
In eerie sounds of wind and rain on the roof.
We love them enough to come back to feed
And stroke their manes in love like our kids.
We sometimes wonder who will feed them
When rain will intensify amid wind and gale
And we will never be able to return to feed.
(The six pets are the six passions- lust, anger, greed, pride,
infatuation, jealousy, called arishadvargas in the Hindu theology,
much like the Seven Deadly Sins of Christianity)
21

31. I.C.U
It is surely a retro thing to begin with
First in the nether of body and later
In the text, a withdrawal , an absence
That flowed down from failure at top.
As liquid tubes crawl freely all around
It is nice to feel brown and retro about it.
Being here in the ICU is a warm feeling
A getting back to your mother's womb
A regression to the emerald ocean-bed
Where all seemed well that began well,
As a tailed tadpole with no accountability
For the damned world that was going on
Behind your back where men walked
As if they had it on their weighty backs,
A vintage feel born of ancient wisdom.
(I.C.U .is the Intensive Critical Unit of a hospital where critical
patients are kept under observation)
22

32. Forgetfulness
A little forgetfulness will go a long way
A frost-bound paradise is not far away.
It is somewhere in the vast wild wastes
Its tree birds buried under sheets of ice.
A path opens up for cloaked strangers
Looking back at the horizon for progress.
Now let us forget where we are headed.
Let us call a picture dirty and its women
In fleshy cleavages that fall over drapes.
Let us forget their angst, their belly fears
Of fetuses,of known genders of machines.
Let us generate a wealth of wiggles, giggles,
Addressed to the beast in our underarms
Hid under rolls of perfumed forgetfulness.
Our forgetting is a hole in our throbbing,
A forgiveness ,a sandal paste on our throat
In a throwback to more forgettable times
When death ended up a hole in icy wastes
And a December ice would cover its tracks.
23

33. The hospital
The hospital is a warm space, a pearl-white place
Of healed wounds, buzzing flies and white legs.
The wounds come here for a warm breeze to blow
From loving mouths, from hanging tails in necks
From quick beating chests of knowledge and love.
The hospital has turned a warm and a fiery place
Its white light now licked by purple tongues of fire,
Its efficient silence shattered by loud dying sounds.
(Two days ago, in Kolkata, a massive fire started by an electrical
short circuit killed eighty five patients of the Amri hospital)
24

34. My body
I empathized with my sleeping body in the night
When at midnight a pup yowled on the blackness
Of the world, from the cold of a winter basement.
As my mind was my factotum for sundry work
It had the onerous job of keeping the pup away.
The factotum was unable to keep the pup away .
I now had the burden of a mum that was absent
That had left its pups to the dark of a midnight.
But, sir, the mind is not mother's keeper nor pups.
Come to think of it, it is not even my body's keeper.
25

35. Haze
Half-awake from nap I look at a vitreous world
Taking in its sun shades and quiet fluorescence,
Its shadows on the bathroom doors that sneaked
Through windows,in fours and twos, in diagonals.
The world is now a mirror that reflects my sleep,
A blue-white kitchen with golden outlines of cooks,
A silver mirror of a dining table, reflecting clothes
Hanging, through tinted window glasses, in breeze,
A light that reflects my deep- within sounds of ears
A steady hum of in-vertigo, waves lapping on walls.
26

36. Immortality
We were looking for a fine movie for our worn out minds
Hanging selves, drooping shoulders, head held forward
In our hands, tired of the music of flesh and short years.
Our stills were to be sweet sickly music of flowing years.
This man sings because he has to sing for our happiness
The other man plays as he cannot but play a happy drum
But they are driven out by villagers due to their bad music
Together they would sing and play drum as listener turns
A stone of flesh, a standing stone with no moving fingers.
Only ghosts do not turn into stone, being eerie in music.
Nor crooked magicians who can make you twenty-younger
But cannot become immortal due to their greed for stones
If only one turned a stone by music and remained that way.
(Watching a classic Bengali movie : Goopi Bagha Fire Elo (1991)
27

37. A joke
A joke is what we have come to, a body in a joke
Full of subtle humor, engaging of mind and heart
We shake of our jokes in splutters of our bodies.
On Sunday evenings, as our Monday approaches,
Our carnal humor turns a hard to crack punchline.
Flesh on the evening , some hanging out bodies
Do hardly provide humor to our sarcastic minds.
Our stomachs are flesh bags floating with ideas.
So we lie in the hall in a glass casket of mourning;
Wait for a last joke to be performed on our bodies.
28

38. Three women and a man
One was his proximate cause, the other
A mere co-cause for the yet other one.
He a line that pierced the three circles
Fades away at the high end of the wall
Climbing to stay up all night in the tree.
The three circles stay drawn in space
But the line has already gone beyond.
It was not a path through three circles
Only a point that moved to the other side.
29

39. The glass casket
He had risen in air, to the roof and sky above
From a lumpen body , a mind like crackling paper
A sleeping giant of ego, a make-believer of world
Mother-dependent and woman- loved by a wife
From a certain race whose ancestors had come
From the far seas, in skull-caps, worshiping fire.
He lay sprawled in the hall in a glass casket
Like history's old bodies ,under mummification
He might have studied , in his younger days,
Waiting to be unraveled for future mysteries.
He will commune with a crackling fire under trees
Following wife's ancient custom of fire-worship
And would embrace it in deference and faith.
His dust may not flow with his own faith's river.
30

40. Morning was star news
As the winter sun had woke up to a reddened east
The crow announced an unwanted guest at home.
The bird brought some bad news, the fait accompli
Of a death that had taken place as an extended sleep
Just a dream the dreamer never woke up to recount.
It was in early morning that death came knocking,
The vanishing of a father and a son into the night
A night of stars he had pointed to daughter, mother,
As a bad astronomer who had got his Mars wrong
In a cluster of stars flickering on a moonless night.
Pointing to stars are the loving fathers of daughters.
Their dreams shall go on uninterrupted in the stars.
31

41. Oblivion
Having written a note and your power vanishes
It hurts much to see it go into oblivion, much .
But you have a belly-feeling of clenched teeth
When you know it is space debris condemned to
Roam around for eternity in the vast wild wastes
As some ungainly stubs of unfinished word magic.
English is not much for going to oblivion with.
Or taking it home in the pockets like trinkets.
English lets you remain suspended in time like
Brass pieces ,taken out out for family reunions
Perfectly useless for paying off long time debts.
Oblivion is a nice touristy place like icy wastes
Where you go to sled in winter with laughing men
But may not return except as a chance discovery
Years later ,as cryogenically preserved matter.
32

42. The morning raga
The todi raga enfolds a benign oval face
Recollected, with images from rice fields
From where it went to the river of bears
The bears that came nightly from hills
For sugarcane , of a ceremony of death
A banana leaf of rice, a jack fruit's curry
An oval face that laughed in black teeth
A barber stubble on a two day old face.
The todi now cries death, descent to river
Of bears,as it quickens on a drum of skin.
Quickly the face will clash with end-notes
As raga dies for the next one, for evening.
(Recollections through a todi raga , a morning raga being played )
33

43. Words
It seems words do make up for life
Whenever it lacks a sense of being
As objects are lost in continuum.
Words are mere thingies like bodies
That vaporize to make other things
That do not matter in the cosmos
Where the other things roam freely
As space clutter, as if they are gods
Of ancestors, from culture history.
Words do flow slowly sometimes
Their own under-belly seething with
Meaning, in new violence of thought,
Fisticuffs into the air, several fights
All but sound-free, as if in vacuum,
Only fury signifying nothing much.
But words are crow-caws at dawn
That serve to define my own dawn.
34

44. The camera stories
We flow here with finger music from the end of the hall
In the shadows of some potted plants on a window glass
As faces puff up with sound and fingers dance on drums
And new lives are made and bound together in a silk cloth,
With yellow rice on heads and red glow on a bride of saree.
The camera sleeps in the bag, in deep-rooted skepticism
About plucking stories from a hall of men in plastic chairs
Only to weave them into a black night against a fan's whir .
35

45. Dogs in the night
Try guessing the time of the night
By the tenor and texture of a bark.
Dogs do not easily sleep at night,
Like stick tapping Nepali watchmen
Pacing up and down on the street
Alerting of thieves in burgling holes.
The dogs have a duty to do for night.
They are of night, when not chasing
Shadows of cars with silks in luxury
Turning at the street corner at dusk.
You can guess the time of the night
By the depth barks pierce the night .
36

46. Vertigo
In the night your head would turn on the pillow
And a few mountains would rumble in emptiness
As your feet are sinking in space, from the ridge
A corner is felt , an edge slips away into your sky,
In the vestibule of your inner ear, in its dark cave.
Suddenly you cease to feel accountable for all
That will happen in your absence, to leave taking
That will make the blood tranquil, a subterranean
Stream quietly flowing under tiny polished stones
With your feet washed away to the distant forests.
37

47. The dog’s bark
The dog's bark came late in the night
Along with a motor's whir and the hum
Of my computer into a night's old age.
The trees crackled in the fallen leaves
On the floor with dog foot,a tail wagging
In the wind, afraid of night's loneliness
Its flies were yet to wake in smallness.
Two wheels went about their business
Spurred on by a station going for train.
The bark will come back later in the day
When the sun will go about its business
And men will drink morning coffee to read
Newspapers about deaths and politics
Rice and bullion ,while emptying pockets
Of the night's air , of a dog's lonely bark.
The bark will then chase shadows of cars.
38

48. The carpenter
The carpenter wants keenly to realize beauty
From his bearded face wearing drops of liquor
On the corners of lips, with a buddy on bench,
Sunday not surely being a holiday from beauty.
Wood is butter, to the knife and the hacksaw.
But liquor is quicker, on the body, behold and lo.
Beauty is not always dead wood imitating life.
Beauty lies in a shack, a thatch and a bench
Frothing in brown at the top, to flies buzzing
Around eyes ,the world having lost its outline.
The earth and the sky become a single mass.
39

49. Old age nonsense
We have tried to make sense of sounds
Under the breath, the old lips trembling
With light words , in running commentary
On the world, reasoned out and heuristic,
A verbal diarrhea they called it in laughter.
We understand their force, their purport.
They are time fillers, masterly previews,
Words that will define their silence ahead
As they catch their breath, trying to hold it.
40

50. Garbage
Three city women went missing
Under a garbage being foraged.
Their dusty death is suspected.
A hand juts out in the camera
Poking directly into your eyes.
Death is not fragrant ashes of incense
And mumbled prayers on tremulous lips .
Death enters your eyes as a dust particle,
As a hand that accuses, cries and sleeps.
41

51. Hope
As we tried to work out hope we fumbled
With a machine and airwaves of the night.
A tiny weedy yellow flower was popping out,
Not a flower that turned its face to the sun,
Only spelled a throttled hope,a snuffing out
Of all we had thought, hoped for in breast.
Hope ebbed away as the night thinned out.
A fine night's sleep will surely re-generate it
A dark tunnel that will obliterate all darkness
A return to the womb to pick up lost threads.
42

52. Painting the windows
We are trying to paint a white window
In a grey space, sort of hole in matter
Highly apolitical and colorless in views
Of the road, from a room of shadows.
A large shadow looms on our present
Of a brown painter in daub of off-white
Its neutral shades flowing from a body,
A body that flows in a rounded female
Of a mind recently dead of a husband.
The body is framed in a window painted
On blue sky, its essential leaves missing.
A man paints a window's fluorescence,
As also a widow's grey shades by night.
43

53. Face
We pointed with index finger at the face,
The face that fell silent in a room of faces.
Cane chairs were all that were to be pulled
But there seemed no music of the chairs
That was playing ,only some more silence.
Face is not the index of the mind, its index
Being at the tips of eyes, where words had
Frozen at some point of time in the bathroom
Before chairs moved from place to place.
We now sit and gawk in wonder at the face
In wonder at a running face that once was,
With eyes blinking behind glasses from life.
We wonder at the life in eyeballs of glass
its tender ego lurking in them as wet proof
Of life , of animated love and responsibility
For life's events, under illusions of control.
Our anxious chairs made no noises of faces.
Their light movement betrayed no emotion,
Only fear of index fingers stopping to point
At the immobile face , bursting with the past.
44

54. Knowledge
I say beware of the Greeks bearing gifts
Of knowledge,in a poetry of unspeakable
Horrors that had lifted the veil of secrecy
From our lack of humanity, bodies rotting
Of cynics in churchyard, in the trees bare
And smoky, in morning fog of early ghosts,
Hellenism of word and thought, largeness
of vision, mere words, pulsating with light.
Beware of Greek poetry in early science.
Beware of people ruling people's minds,
Of men who wear long robes of thought,
Mixing religion and politics, marrying soul
With intellect, science with exquisite art
And barbarians masquerading as nobles.
And beware of the shadows that now loom
On the acropolis, of shrunk bodies of men
Their paper monies growing in their shadows
On trees brooding on a history of betrayals.
(Greece is one of the largest shadow economies
of the world.The oligarchs are becoming fatter by the day
but the country is on the brink of bankruptcy)
45

55. Water
Of water we shall speak into a dying night
As water shall fill our cheeks, our temples
And inflate our bodies and our fleshly face
An aquatic thing of our beginning mother.
Our mother was water , we emerald island.
We owe our origin purely to her green aqua.
The green water will soon be vaporous clouds,
That shall move over the Western mountains.
Marbles of words now clatter in puffed up cheeks.
Our old memories guide talk in a predictive way,
Like water sloshing in our cheeks, as if in parody.
46

56. A doll’s house
Her dolls are cute and lively but fragile
They are made of crystal glass and clay.
Her house is decked with plastic flowers
And smiles made of society's approbation
And legal scrutiny of documents , in case.
You are a twittering skylark, says husband
Lovingly, in strict legal terms of husbands
Twittering skylarks find life such a lark
Forging signature for love's compulsions
Never looked such a bad thing for love.
Twittering larks know only love, no papers.
What do husbands want but glass dolls
In a house decorated for parties of honor?
But wives are no dolls for safe keeping.
When doors are shut their slam is heard
Through the continent, across the oceans.
(Reading a play A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen)
47

57. The reed
At rice grain dust and typha augustata
Bodies would quickly burst into flowers.
When pin- pricked they would say that .
We carry their river memories and pond
And the slush of women's feet in January
Under a blue sky of calm faces laughing
In the water and mud, in a harvest song,
And the river of typha in all its augustata,
As the breeze makes its dance and floods
The world with love's dust , in plenitude.
In the meantime we go on to fight the air,
As we would in the night when shadows
Overwhelmed us in sleep, in our dreams.
We cannot win surely against memories
In blood, we have got from our old men.
48

58. Noise
We were talking about noises in city
Of motor cars with sounds of horns
Buzzing about like halos of insects
On a night of rain, on road to riches.
Riches are high decibels ,your road
Leading to nowhere, gold and jewels
All lying in built-in cupboards waiting
For cat burglars to make wall holes.
When holes are made in egg-shape
They do not look at prevailing moons.
Men make holes like oval ears of caves
With secret formula for their opening.
So they keep wealth in foreign vaults
Where they do not make wall holes.
But at midnight you do hear noises
On the wall street,from tents of occupy.
Their noise is drowned out by batons
And footfalls at midnight and clackety
Of flying machines in an empty sky.
49

59. Re-occupy
The cops like to occupy their minds.
Like the cold that is now occupying
My body, my mind ,my throaty words
In morning under a nose of streaming
Ideas and words , as in a steady hum
Of tall casuarinas overlooking the sea,
As a sea wind passes in their needles.
We think the cops are afraid of them.
They flood their senses, mute sounds.
Lift bodies from emptiness into vans.
They have their own emptiness of sky.
They have to occupy the space below.
The cops are afraid in their bodies.
They want to evict ideas from minds.
And re-occupy park spaces and tents
They want to occupy emptied minds.
50

60. In passing
Sound is of passion, as drums that beat briefly
For musical wedding at night, not morning yet.
A certain tablet waits in the wings,without light.
Two pups from nowhere ,balk at dark of no mum.
Morning is in the waiting ,its birds still waking.
The tablet is waiting for its wings, from balcony
Under the proposed tiny flowers,now just an idea.
These will appear in later seasons, only hibiscus
In the brewing in the trees's minds now, on pot.
All was said in parenthesis, in closed whiskers.
I now say it ,in main agenda, of a life being lived
In its main focus, its music a continuation raga
A fusion of soft raga-jazz, as its strange words
Come out in sweet music, in colors of the night.
51

61. Rest
In between we rest , in our long dozing hours
During which we manage to watch hot baths
And tired steam, in stylish Jacuzzi some times
To come back to money questions that bristle
With answers, four at a time, in knowledge
Games of old man and worshipful women
Behind keyboard ,that make screech sounds.
Old man is grandfather in film star's stomach
When not asking his four-optioned questions.
We rest bodies on yellow sofas, figuring out
What our lady will make for lover's breakfast
Her doe eyes in laughter make us want more.
We then rest in eyes, on televisions of laughter
Our comedies growing by the hour, our music.
We rest minds on businessmen heroes in suits
Horizontal in growth and story, love in brewing.
Love is in the air as black Shakespearean villains
Turn up in best suits to wreck love's happiness.
( A day's television viewing)
52

62. The water bottle
The water bottle has an inner life of its own
On the table, among the people of all ages
On sunny mornings and old and young lips.
Its lips are wet with a luminous passion born
Of a serious relationship with morning light.
The girl takes its blue mouth to maiden lips
Soft and ruby-red, of unopened mind-secrets
And silver laughter ringing in nature's alleys
A love born ,a life begun,an idea taking wing.
You woman, old and grey, over several suns
Will need it for your own subliminal fantasies
When morning sun lights up your grey curls
And a glass table mirrors a white glazed bottle
Water dancing inside stomach to sun's music.
You the poet photographer will need it badly
On your brown lips, that have gone bone dry
Looking for pearly dew-drops on morning grass,
Stuff of dreams gathered in an old box of glass.
53

63. Eighty and five
Eighty and five springs in leaf-ends later
She still finds her life a song , a number
Not numeric, but mere music and matter.
She can hear crickets' music in lumber
Frog-lets croaking in night's rain-puddle.
In autumn years perhaps you imagine
Her steeped in mixed aural sounds, in muddle
A vague spectacle of death in a life's din.
In such music one hears yellow leaves crunch
As if they are the dress one wears for lunch.
(sonnet)
54

64. Houses
We make our houses in holes in the air
So our kids are safe from wind and rain
And we are not poorer by a large amount.
Actually we make them for kids not born.
We had come here as soft young brides
In silks and fragrances, in jewels of gold
In sandalwood oil and jasmines flowing.
We had done our computers ,on keyboards
Where we had typed our dreams in silk.
We have often waited outside on the bench
In institutes where dreams are hard wired.
Here , as our house is ready we enter it
In mists of confusion, in semantics of loss
In broken word pictures , our mirror images
Born in our mind, on blue screens of death.
As the music flows we find ourselves floating
To the edge of the world, away from holes.
55

65. The full moon
On this very day of full moon , long years ago,
Oil lamps of earth had flickered before a basil
In a backyard, their flames trying to reach trees,
Among shadows of women with half-shut eyes .
The woman who was my beginning had arrived
Under this very moon, an oiled bundle of flesh
In a village house, among calm cows chewing cud
At the full moon, their flaccid bodies shivering
Their leather at flies , in moony nonchalance.
I am now open-ended , where I had then begun.
My series now broke, backwards to the green sea.
Some day I shall be open-ended at the sky end .
(Remembering my departed mother on her eightieth birthday on the
full moon day of Kartik)
56

66. Debt
We all owe a debt of gratitude for this here.
In our mid-nights we fly away from bondage
Crying in throats, hoarse with age and love.
Money binds us, men to men, in our women.
Women bind us in our men and in our doing.
Our debt is a trap, a night happening thing
That leaves us befuddled, in body and state.
Debt makes us feel creepy in sleeping beds
Like a thousand-legged worm of leg things.
It makes our women cry leaving doors ajar,
As doors will shut for the last time of night.
Debt is mere words of men in vacant houses.
Their hollow laughter sounds creepy by night.
Debt is letters that crawl like wiggly worms
From brittle paper, that is fast turning to dust.
57

67. Worship
Here I come face to face with my god
That comes to my mind, as a mere word.
I squat in this little marble room of gods
With yellow rice in palms, a dot on brow.
Outside the words I cannot think of him
In a sky of vapor, floating about wearing
Flower garlands, with music on the body .
God is a word ringing in a marble corner
Of fragrant smoke, of some white flames
Smiling in ancient clothes, in long arms
Owning bows and arrows, ready for evil.
Lotuses bloom in milk ponds with ripples
From folds of snake hood protecting him
From rain and sun, from the winter cold.
He is still a word from our wordy ancients.
The words are images, pictures of things
Sorrow and lightness, recalled in thought.
The words are ancient, as gods are wood
Stone and clay and paper,in some fine art.
As we recall the words in the marble room
We are filled with warm goodness in belly.
58

68. Crowd
The crowd is many bodies rising in numbers
Under a coiffure that feels like a bird's nest,
Hatching a cute chick in winter, a bright idea
That takes wings and flies away to far space.
An idea is born ,a discovery, a tweak in time
Whose author is not crowd but common mind
A buzz in a disheveled hair, a clash of minds
Not knowing ourselves, ancestors in blood.
A miracle this living, this giving up the ghost
Watching television in a lonely village of birth.
A crowd of voices rises over a herd of cattle
To high above trees, the high years of men.
A crowd of thoughts swarms in our minds alone,
A crowd of moths found dead on the window-sill
After a rainy night , hugging light in window glass.
59

69. Sea-stories
Nice to tell sea-stories , of cattle grazing in peace
On a dipped sand beach, as a tranquil sea watches.
A cluster of cactii rising in sand with a tiger’s face
Seems a plaything by prankster kids of the beach
As adults sip their Sunday beer in casuarina trees.
The sea rises on both sides of sand where you stand.
A ship or two looms on the horizon, with an idle boat
On the beach ,its crook dipping into a luminous sea.
This dead fish on the beach a bird has yet to pick up
Looks like a drop from flying beak of a passing bird.
Girls of many hues enter the beach in between palms
Wanting a joyous time on the Sunday beach, their ears
Swelling with tales of men from plots of latest movies .
Their pig-tailed shadows shake like echoing laughter.
Walking the sea-beach at Kallepally, near Srikakulam (A.P.)
60

70. Storytime
Lawyers are eternal as their words hover
Just above people's heads, buzzing about
Like creatures of the night, rudely woken
From their deep slumber ,in a nasty shock.
They tell their stories ,raising the specter
Of thin people fighting their own shadows,
Shadows fighting people, in orange light
Under the tree,as its white birds have left
For the distant plains,in reverse migration.
Lawyers some times die fighting battles
As justice looks imminent in taut stories
Told among tiny people huddled together
Warming their winter palms by the fires.
They are people's stories piling on time.
61

71. Train
In the train there is love ,friendship, eating
And piling of bodies,in movement and wind
The wind catching you off guard, with tales
You will squirm in your deep stomach about.
Down below there is somewhere green lust
For passing by things, birds on phone wires
A gentle breeze, that ruffles a train kids' hair
As it presses its face against the iron bars
Smelling deep iron on its face, its old paint.
In train new married wife touches chords
Steeped in smells of flowers, smell of face
As eyes speak flowers, new friendship, faith.
It is also live mother , eyes of love and rain
A noisy train, wind, from sky of childhood.
In the upper berth is overhanging lower sky
A brown dome, hanging above with no stars
But eyes, in body that cannot change sides,
Body that sleeps in dreams, of running train
With no brown earth below but an empty air
And some bodies deeply drowned in dreams.
62

72. Self-portrait
On the canvas you sit languorously
Like woman ,waiting for the skin tones
To appear , in a soft brown jute texture.
You daub a little paint to clear spaces.
You now have a nose and some eyes.
One two or three or more depending
On whether you sit on haunches or stand
With your back against the white wall
So your body is two-dimensional frame.
A nose defines you above ruby lips
Wet with eating for navel and above,
Its packed contents ,inside, sealed
Hermetically, under mind's guidance.
Mind is jelly not coming on the canvas
Yet you can see dirty hand everywhere.
The eye-brows look on the eye-holes
Vigilantly so the eye-balls do not get up
And go away when nobody is noticing .
You capture them live with their wet fear
So they cannot deny their existence.
You are now on the canvas ,yet outside.
You do not agree with your sly smile,
As you are not you but somebody else
May be, a dog in the street or a lizard
63

73. On the wall ,with triumph over insect.
64

74. My mom’s stool
Stools are like ladies, in brown, of old wood.
Their spirit endures, like that of past women
Who live beyond their existence and color
In sons' black and white memories in sleep.
This one keeps awake on the cold balcony,
Sniffing night air spread by the fourth moon .
When you open the door to the old balcony
It makes odd affectionate sounds on the floor
Like postmen pushing letters through the door.
We stand on its soul to reach our light-bulbs ,
Our feet terribly wobbly , but our souls stable
In an earth-sky chain that connects vast spaces
And standing on it we often reach out to mom.
65

75. Facebook
There is no need to read real books, when all
Comes inside of opening skull-plates wide
Your brain operation done after head of hair
Removed , synapses located and offending
Thoughts ,where painful removed, like flies
From the cold milk tea, left waiting in sugar.
We now enjoy playing our farmville games
Expensive plots, sold in unreal real estate
Where friends try to sell their kitchen garden
Produce of cabbages , lettuce and sprouts
Mind mushrooms waiting to be made soup.
How we love losing our faces in the facebook!
Our wisdom comes mostly in mashed form
In tiny nuggets of knowledge, nicely curated
By shadows of friends,in a chronic finger itch.
66

76. Room
The room hangs with books, licking
The shadows from the sunlit window
Their mouths some times wide open
In wide-eyed wonder ,at white walls
Where the trees dance in their wind
And flies buzz about in nonchalance
Their wings several times magnified.
The corners sit pretty in light shadows.
Their sounds refuse to come from hush,
A splendor forgot in quietness of wall.
The drawers are an old chest, heaving
With pure pride of mahogany, their light
Shut in an ancient time, their shadows
Long forgot under lock and key of time.
The curtains are saviors from thought.
The people outside enter the window
As ghosts that glide on their textures.
They are some times puppet shows
At night, feet busy walking on asphalt
Their feet shuffling, their minds shut.
67

77. Gated community
A watchman sits at the high gate, checks pulse
Before entry,all cars entering at their own risk.
On the kerb, children are careful, playing ball.
Sundays we play golf in unending green spaces.
We see neighbors smile from swimming pool.
We had lived in holes,crawling with people.
We are now in bigger holes with smaller ones
Inside them for morning ablutions and yoga.
We have separate holes for individual men.
Our holes smell nice with room fresheners
Made from the private parts of civets in heat.
We are a gated community, staring from gates
At the passers-by and listless cattle dropping
Their green feces on the wet road nonchalantly.
Our lawns are manicured green like our minds.
We buy all our cattle droppings by kilograms
For our green plants that have arrived like us.
Thank god we are now suited ,booted and gated.
68

78. Word
If looking for the word in the night
In tiny eruptions of sound on darkness
A word or sound makes no difference
To light or its absence ,a mere paper.
Not even a paper but a thought one
In deep recesses, when chest beats
Under the skin ,in vague fear of revolt.
A ruled paper makes a word perfect
A sticky note filed in memory's pages
As a cough on darkness ,a soft throat,
A splash of water on the earth, its air
A powdered color of white on asphalt
Flowers on earth dropped from a sky
A word fallen from a passing pocket.
If looking for other people's words
On a light screen ,from early fingers
When fingers have thoughts on tips,
Words flow from a music of fingers
When fingers play on the keyboard
Their sibilant notes on its dark nights
As soft light pours from green domes
On a slew of words , in yellow splash.
69

79. Moon thoughts
At seven,we thought we had seen the moon
From the roof, in the waving coconut leaves.
Actually the chair we sat on was a blue moon
Inciting these moon thoughts in early nights.
In point of fact the moon was just a light bulb
Lying on the distant roof, beyond the station.
Every coconut has to have a moon in its fate.
You see the moon happens as an appendage
To our coconut trees, mostly, in early nights.
On a rain less night the moon rises over them
As a beauty-flower in their hair in a dark sky.
At times moons are mere light bulbs hovering
On rooftops,peacefully existing with coconuts.
When they are moons, not dim-wit light bulbs
They may be broken with some moon missing.
But they always stand by the listless coconuts
Encouraging them with a characteristic cool.
70

80. The death of an English teacher
I came across his book on English recently
The way it behaved lacking commonsense.
This frail teacher pouting in thin mouse-lips
Had taught us English leaving us in a daze
While we had sat waiting for the bell to toll.
His own bell finally tolled yesterday for him
As it did then , for us , his hapless students.
He had poked fun at English, spoke by a queen.
Commonsense has never been its strong point.
His book tickled many a funny bone, underside.
His bones are now dust but their laughter will rise,
71

81. The window-pane
The man sits in his shop with a pair of glassy eyes.
He has no time to fix a see-through window-glass
That is deeply in love with the sun in our kitchen.
The pane sits there tight ,basking in the sun's glow .
Our women love the sun but not when making tea.
There are trees in the pane waving in the wind.
Their birds chirp at dawn, their speckled throats
Heaving up and down, as we calmly eat breakfast.
It is not winter yet ; the fog is yet to blind its eyes.
Later when the sun turns angry, he will beat it down
On its smoothness of cheeks ,gate-crashing in kitchen
Invading our women's privacy as they make our tea
And the gas-flame will lose its blue face in the glare.
It looks like the pane has to embrace its dark night.
72

82. The undertow
The memory went all the way down thinking
Of the sea, remembered from its undertow.
The skin has an undertow, below the dermis
Protesting much about nothing, about things
Imagined like dogs running after cars in rain.
The sea has an undertow like what I remember
Of years ago , a fit of passion, at the full moon
When the pearl-white surf became almost blue.
The skin blushes for nothing, no errors by bones.
It is much like the sea, with a large undertow.
You never know the sins lying unpunished inside.
73

83. Symbols
Looking for symbols ,largely,in iterations of of night
We chanced upon light that struck us in our small face
Blinding a child's understanding, where everything
Was predicative and unfailingly stood for a real thing.
We now stand in rain with song on lips,in eyes of love.
We stretch our palms to collect our raindrops of love.
We look for life-size images, life's burning ugliness
Several times glossed over,in mortal fear of symbols
Fading away to nothing, a grey sky stopping to rain.
Our symbols are largely flesh, without it and outside it.
Our mornings do not stand for anything in the window.
We have thrown a few rice-flakes around from white vans
In deathly silence, where even a flower drops in sound.
74

84. Worship
We mostly sit to worship, with the walls opposite to us
Leaving us no room for getting up and crossing the streets.
In the marble our gods listen, from the shelves of flowers
And fragrances, as if out in the garden ,in the early hours
Plucking white flowers from black darkness one by one.
The walls face us with their hanging gods smiling below
A hole that lets in morning sun and some pleasant wind.
Many times we lie to worship, with a false roof above us
Leaving no room for getting up and flying into space above.
We mostly worship under closed eyelids, our lips muttering.
In sleep our gods come dressed in vintage dresses and jewels
Of exquisite beauty,their light blinding us in our closed eyes.
We worship our gods in the dark caves, their bodies in stone
Sprouting lotuses in navels ,where a master craftsman is born.
It is he who chisels our foreheads, hiding our futures in them.
75

85. The village
The village sat in fields looking toward the sea.
A ribbon of road passed its hill that had a hole
That looked as if it might spew smoke and fire.
But it was a knowledge hole, by monks of men
With a few orange fires that smoked to the skies
In deep-throat chants, in flowing orange robes
That tempted away wealth in refuge of the Wise.
But they are now broken stones, their fires dust.
The village sat on the sands of the river in summer.
Its boats pretended to sail in the wind on dry bed
The river refusing to touch their bottoms in love.
The river bed had black charcoal spots on its brown
Where men burned , in logs and ashes,orange once.
The monsoon brought floating carcasses of cattle
String cots of men in far off villages ,felled trees.
The village floated water pitchers of shining metal
On the swirling waters that smelled the mountains.
They drank its waters filtered with the indup seed
And ate rice and onions, buttermilk on mustaches.
In the winter bears came down from the mountains
Looking for lush sugar cane that waved in the breeze.
The village slept on the fields ready with their sticks
And shouts that rent the night air, echoing in the hills.
The nights were so dark that the bears turned bushes.
76

86. Mother’s Notes
I see history's pages from life and death, diary notes
Brimming with a city left, thoughts of a garden swing
In letters crawling like live ants out of them carrying
Spirit messages of all things being nothings ,nothings
That encompass us over time,in space of our house.
Here is a window to noise of crackers bursting in light,
Bottles that send sounds from their mouth in a dark sky
Darkness that pervades the corners of the world, light
In colored crackers,the festival of lights, a defeat of evil.
It is all that is to it in earthen lamps, burning at the door
Some powder sprinkled on flames , smelling nice incense
Some fruit pieces going around celebrating light on earth.
Her notes make out a hole in space, as a piece of time
A hole in eternity, a hole in mind, a gaping hole in time.
Her letters crawl, rounded like black ants, out of pages
Flowing with life , with death, with my living , with hers.
77

87. Risk
Our gods are thirty million, evenly spread in the sky.
Their population is ever rising in our lonely dreams
Highly incandescent, like flickering insects of light
Roaming the mountains, giant trees and lonely crags.
At night, from bus windows, we see fires raging
On mountains, lighting the sky alongside stars
As eyes are half-shut from night videos showing
Film heroes dealing with evil on one to one basis
In punches of musical sounds, in full orchestra.
We have covered every possible fear in our bellies
Every possibility of snakes, ghosts, every danger
In nook and corner, trees of canopies, glacial rivers
Lives and deaths of ancestors, their spirits roaming
The country, lonely washer men’s ponds and pots
Old tamarinds with hair shrieking in the night sky.
Due to lurking dangers we are not taking chances.
We have taken a census of gods of full thirty million
Not a god less, in count, covering every possibility.
A 2.5% ratio to population seems a fair risk cover.
78

88. (We are now 1200 million, but the gods of our pantheon have
remained stable at 30 million)
79

89. Sounds
Sounds come from drums and pipes
From silence ,vacated by crickets
Owl's shrieks, crane's sleep-sounds
Men turning in sleep, from dreams.
These are wedding sounds , of joint sleep
Of countless liquid nights and tear sounds
From black-lined eyes, red noses of hurt.
Sounds of two bodies sleeping and rising.
80

90. Stories
In the night I read a little, by the starlight
Gathering snippets from men on the side.
It is like gleaning gold grains left on the road
After the highway vehicles passed on them
All through the day, till the sun would sink
When the farmer would collect them in bags
With his twirled mustaches on orange fire.
I flit page to page, reading the first few lines.
My story is made quickly with inscrutable logic
That is close to reality, to the nature of things
They only make beginnings; I supply the story.
All stories are the same, the way they draw out
From the cave, through the wooded passages
To the depths of trees, where the drums beat
To reach a crescendo and a fire burns the night
As the stars disappear slowly in the grey skies
Making way for a new story, a new beginning.
81

91. 1949
That was when there were no shirts on the back
Only glistening oils on body, anger bawling out
Breath surmounting cloth, sweet sick baby smell.
Wonder where it had been all along, a watery thing
That had sprung as an idea in somebody's mind.
Its anxious people laughed at the undue hurry
To reach pink nipples, forget dark that had passed
The green fluid , the beginning of white memory
As colors began, grays flowed softly from the sky
A summer of light pouring in shafts of sunlight .
The idea might not have sprung in someone's mind.
The 1949 summer might have been like any summer.
82

92. Occupying wall street
We propose to occupy your minds now.
Please give us back our cash, keeping
All its derivatives with you, your swaps
Under your soft silken collars and caps.
Give us the cash on which you had made
Your glitzy skyscrapers of sizzling money
In tall trade centers, in the clipped accents
Of portals of business schools constructing
Mathematical models of money making
On overblown market caps of flimsy cash.
We shall begin in the park, in cold tents
Overflowing to drown bankers, wizards,
Who stole our money in bags of hot air.
Our cash slipped through bony fingers
While you made its structured products
Creating debt, the mud that drowned us
While you collected cash in your bags.
Keep with you your structured products
But give us our hard cash to pay our bills,
Our student debt, our wives grocery bills.
Please give us back our jobs, our money
83

93. We had made making things in factories
In real factories of sweat and salty tears.
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94. Screws loose
Her screws loose and rusted she stands alone ,
Jabbing fingers at men in the air in a cloud
Of cement like ghosts in scaffold, wind-blown
Bearing wet cement up without be'ng loud.
Men pass the cement pans up to top crews
On bamboo stairs going up to sky dizzily
Building dreams all the way up with no screws
That,in rust and loose ,have come off easily.
Up there in head there is no need for screws
The skull plates will stay inter-locked in blank
Like a football's seams or temple stone's rows
Or lazing crocodile's jaws on river bank.
Since her screws are loose she's never in blues
Without screws she only has topmost views.
(A sonnet)
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95. Not writing poems
A creepy thing, this business of not writing poems,
Especially as the night is ticking away and the leaves
Are not appearing to trees, as lightweight keywords
Appearing autonomously on the silence of the night.
Poetry words should come as spring leaves to trees.
The men occupy whole streets, walls, spaces, horizon,
Men who speak different languages,each for himself,
So that language is not stolen, but patented for royalty.
They keep shouting into space, in the dust of a war
That should close at dusk as per the rule, before night.
Not being Mahabharata ,the war will not close at dusk.
They have powerful halogen lights in which to fight
And because the language of closing is not understood.
Each of them speak a different language for himself
Protected by intellectual property rights, copyrights.
A creepy thing, this business of our not writing poems
Especially ,when each of them speaks his own language
And poetry seems the only closing language before dusk.
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96. Gossip
The two are on their phones about certain
Woman dealing with boredom in marriage
A wimp of husband stays behind curtain
With no efforts but home he would manage.
She is killer by words- arrows and slings
Fire in eyes that burns long after cinders
Her nightly yoga , head down, sprouts wings.
Her volcanic word flow nothing hinders.
Her poor cook, dumb of tongue, bears guilt.
The und'rdog bears the cross for silver's loss.
But husbands do take tongue's lashes to hilt
The fall guy takes blame for infamy and loss .
These women do their theater rather well.
Their narratives are taut, worked to detail.
( A sonnet)
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97. Friends
A bearded man sells white flowing shirts
Down in the street,near the four minars.
There is a dazzling smile under his beard.
Friends are made except in the fruit garden.
The dog is barking this hour at its darkness
In the hollow of its throat,that never had
A regular leash, to tug at anybody's fingers.
Dogs are our best friends sniffing our leg.
We not only move in our friends circles
But never come back to where we began.
We move in our friends circles slowly
In liquefied somnolence, sleep resting
On bellies of stale food fighting to stay.
Our upper halls are flooded with friends
Drowning together in the chemical process
Of eyes turning pearls for sale to rich ladies
Cauterized in their early eyes of wonder.
We have our many friends in high places
With their red eyes deep-set on blaring vans.
Their rich wails sing of men's puny statures.
We are waiting for our eyes to turn pearls.
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98. Illusion
Four years after her, we see this paper now
Written in a neat scroll, a plain white paper
Crawling with several upward-looking words
Of knowledge and its absence , lack of form
A lack of God in form, refutation of all form
A form that existed only in words and in sea.
The wind has no form as the sea takes its form
And the teacher's , her form in white clothes,
A ghost of a teacher, knowledge being illusion.
The sea is illusion, the wind a ghost dancing in it.
The ghost is a flatness of form felt in form.
The teacher is now a ghost riding the waves.
The disciple is loss of form changed into fire.
The paper is ant- hole crawling with words
About lack of matter in matter, about absence.
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99. Please give us back our wings
We live our inner lives, our words quietly dropping,
Like the faucet dripping on a midnight bathroom.
Our thinking comes to a head, in our young bodies.
Our wise hair had gone in a ring through a window
On to the side-walk, in company with a plastic bag.
We are a cockroach that is lying curled up on the sill
Waiting for a window of sun to quicken its wings.
We are the 99 %, our wings being with them of 1% still
We like to get our wings back, please, on the window- sill.
90

100. Horoscope
When we looked up the horoscope, from the shelf
We thought of the body, divided into neat divisions
Of time, as it went back, precision-cut in time phases
Folded in deep shelves, as of smiling film heroines
Of yesterday’s glory, their time nicely worn on lips.
Horoscopes can be back-read, in fine phases of stars
Ruling stars that seem to say bright things in night air
Withdrawing love at a moment’s notice, in flickers.
We have gone back to where it all began in the cloth,
In the smell of placenta, a flickering lamp of midwife
Highly unread, in fears of love, in the shrieks of a baby
In oil, seeking oxygen in the stale wind of closed room.
We then look out from the folds of our swaddle cloth
Looking for her who was the cause celebre of our cry.
She who brought us all about is serving her time
In flickering stars, her existence just in thought.
But our horoscope is somehow tied up with hers
Only our time divisions slightly overlapping hers.
The stars forsake their protégés in the last phase
When it all ends up on the earth, in fires at dawn
Waters dried up in streams on the sandy river bed,
Wind stoking the fires of trees on its orange fringe.
The horoscope is now just a crackling piece of paper
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101. Waiting to be archived in the stars along with hers.
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102. Colors
In the walk an extravagance of colors hits you
At the end of the street, blazing red in its blue
As though apartments are pretty sitting birds
Of natural hues, waiting to fly, matured wings
In clipping, their thoughts caught up in clouds.
These are holes in the air with colored clothes
Fluttering in balconies, women brushing teeth
Men out in the lower clothes hanging on knees.
The only thing white about them is milk bags
They bring from an early can-clattering shop
And vans just in from a far off morning dust.
The chickens, though white in their sitting coops
In the chicken vans, are excited to be offloading
But colors are missing in their thoughts of death
The shrieks inside the van are colors of violence,
The colors of meat celebrating meat in its inside.
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103. Summaries
My summaries are made hour to hour
So I catch the flow that will go to the sea
Like a check dam on the hills, stopping
A little rain water on the ridge, for flow
To the parched city, crying want of love.
I recapitulate words said from the heart
It is in the bottom, somewhere, at night.
It is in its sound and music, some times,
Paper-thin, crisp, spreading out in arms.
Love is my summaries made of the night.
Words are rain water, finding way to sea.
I love to catch this love’s ineluctable flow
That comes this way to drown, a moment
That would spread its arms wide in the sky,
On night’s edge, against the shrill whistle
Of a brief cricket, a spider in golden sunrise
A temporary lizard ticking love on the wall.
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104. Intervals
After a long interval I have come across her
In dead face book pages, calling across time
In a birthday greeting, a canvas lying frozen
In time, in space between house and house.
The intervals have to occur between times.
Art is long but life is brief and has intervals.
A naked female of books flits across mind
But promptly disappears in the dusty attic
Where woman stays and looks lying indecent.
My art too has intervals, hungry poetry art
Raised in the early hours, just before dawn
Just like the fine naked book females flitting
Across past canvasses in tribute to beauty.
Beauty eludes the artists with fame-hunger.
But a baby in arms enhances artist’s beauty.
A man increases her beauty but not art-frame.
Fame-hunger fills the artist’s eyes with gleam.
Naked figures do not stay all that permanent
All the space on the dusty attic of memories.
It is delicious to guess what beauty flourished
In the intervals between then and this now.
95

105. (Recalling an association with a young fledgling artist who has
today come back to my attention after a five year hiatus, through
face book pages)
96

106. The little girl
She was crawling like a floor lizard last year.
Now erect, she smiles and fiddles with things
Puts them in God’s order, on dusty surfaces
Setting them right like an airy angel from sky.
In the corners of her eyes, she smiles a moon smile
As if she has known these things and you all along
And all the dark secrets behind your shirt-pockets.
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107. 98

108. The old stool
It is a four-legged stool made years ago
And got colored by her who is no more.
The stool she had fiercely guarded as own
As a thing of the heart, next to the bird.
The stool that would not be left behind
In house relocations, giving us body-lift
To the light-bulb, to a loft of empty things
To airy things of the sky and earth’s sweet
Water, the elixir of life, a support to logic.
It is from it we shall reach higher worlds
As it shall continue to leave us all behind.
99

109. 100

110. October poem
I came to this October poem on a thinking night
When it was dark under a future promise of dawn
And a gentle wind blew on dry leaves in the street.
Temples made it, in stone centuries of time, space
That had trees to show for and old women praying
Their eyes closed in meditation, on temple steps,
When temples were yet to open for long time men.
Girls danced in steps, their hands up beating space.
October made the evening turn hugely on wheels
As we went high up in the air and land, like birds.
A bird chick had fallen from the nest in balcony,
A question in my mind if it flew back to its mother
Atop the air-conditioner unit, on its brown beauty.
October rain needed to be caught in cupped palms
In the mind’s eye, on electric screen, in silver lines.
A mere camera of ephemeral fame could not do it.
A poem in early dawn wet with soft rain may do it.
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111. Shudder
Like you, Rilke, we want to shudder in our God
As in a song, leaving much before our due parting
Chasing its long shadows much before the sunset
In the smell of water in the temple, of old flowers
Camphor of flames, priests locking temples away
Shuddering in their throats, stomachs of god food
Stones that lay dead in centuries of time, in paint.
Our gods are stones, dark in the closed sanctums
Of musty old air of flowers, camphor and flames.
We want to shudder in them in a plight of truth
Of death possibility, carrying it on our shoulders
Heavy under a God of petrified centuries on them.
We want to shudder in God, all the while , dying.
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112. The temples
We shall recall a second life in vivid colors
Within pillars of time, with little girls’ hands
Stretching for eternity, in a rhythm of waking.
A dance went on in little girls, in body bends.
Their hands twisted the air as if it was a flower
As the leaves went deep green on a sunless sky
And temples stretched out in spires of figures
Of men and women frozen in color in the sky.
There were other gods in deep pits of dark time
Ladies in laughing annoyances, men in struggling
Farming lives, grains coming from earth-furrows,
Priests chanting words to gods listening in smoke
Kings hunting tigers, growling from stone gods
Appearing in night dreams of temples for people.
Others from far come rushing with crow-bars
To dislodge stone gods from their stone corners
There can be no gods in others’ stones or ponds
Only gods of sand, over dunes and camel humps.
Temple stones turn dust, beliefs dust, people dust.
But there is thunder on crow-bars, voices booming.
103

113. For temples to be dust flesh hearts should be stone.
For, in the end both temples and hearts are dust.
104

114. Leaving a place
In the wild we never really leave a place
We always walk into it, noses turned up
The bears are always crawling some place
A night place like bush in the darkness.
Our white birds are always up in trees.
The sea is swishing tail in the tall leaves
In its wind application, white surf foam.
The sounds are soft, tranquil on the ears.
Midnight place disappears slowly in steps
Gently sloping, hedged by a wall of trees.
Our place is always midnight or morning
Or some place else before or after death
Or in going, looking back at going place.
The market sounds are place we leave.
The crowd is place over their still heads.
From the sea memorial, a crow is place
We leave looking at the shoreline in sea.
Our light is place in the room we classify
And ossify in memory, a memory place
Bare of bones, fleshly existence in place
A bone marrow in a far someone’s place.
Cells are place in bone, lumps in mind
Mind is place we leave, we look back on
Against the wall of trees, against steps
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115. That slope downward to fragrant trees.
Our poems are place in the table light
Near the soft window of Basel and rose
Bird chicks are place in air-conditioner.
Their mothers are place for grass blades
We classify in the balcony sky of clothes.
Our fathers leave our time on balcony
Our longtime mothers are place in ice.
106

116. Poetry of jobs
In the Book of Jobs God in thunder hated questions
Directly addressed to Him from ashes of sons, wives
Cattle , body, mind, prayers, rosaries of faith-all lost
To an arrogant divine omni- desire to prove a point.
Forget it if you mean to ask anything about apples.
Apples do not mean anything, even when polished.
A bite is sin when prompted by serpent of knowledge.
Every Steve bites his apple, even the apple of eye.
Every apple shall turn ashes, once the job is done.
(remembering Steve Jobs of the Apple fame who passed this
week)
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117. The giant wheel
When you land there briefly with your flying feet
Touching the hem of the sky, you will not live there
With your treacherous blood coursing down dizzily.
Men’s heads and things turn into a milky path of stars
A blur of light nothingness, a tangled knot of history.
You will return with a bit of the sky in your pockets.
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118. 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.
109

119. 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.
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