Poetry written between 1st April 2001 and 30th July 2001

1. A.J.Rao's poetry Volume
5
A.J.Rao

2. A.J.Rao's poetry Volume 5
Poetry written between 1stApril2001 and 30th July 2001
A.J.Rao

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4. Contents
Authenticity 1
Climate change 2
Metaphors 3
Phony vision 4
Scream 6
Holes 7
Children in the rain 8
Bridge 10
The temple of shadows 11
Skin 12
Morning at the Tirumala temple 13
A semblance 14
Facts 15
Layers 16
The parcel 18
Goats for goddess 19

5. Arguments 20
Shapes 21
Circles 22
Rites 23
The silence 24
Collage 25
Flamingos 26
Pieces 27
Stub 29
The internet 30
Reality 31
Knots 32
Now 33
The hall of mirrors 34
Children in the afternoon 35
The messenger 36
The day’s truth 37

6. The temple god 39
Morning in Begumpet 40
The idiot 41
Secret 42
Glass 43
List 44
Scribbles 45
Ghosts in our sleep 47
Free will, free fall 48
Identity 49
The beggars 51
Tautologies 52
Room 53
The girl’s song 54
The grandmother’s narratives 55
The metrical memoranda 56
Ear pain 57

7. Snakes and planes 59
The ceremony 60
The horizon 62
Making sense 63
On the night of the lunar eclipse 64
My mother 65
Passages 66
Frames 67
Hands 69
Dance 70
The bearded painter 71
Walking 72
Strangers 73
Sorrow 74
Humor 75
Home-sickness 76
Stones 77

8. Fish 78
Monologue 79
Television 80
Poverty for poets 81
Abject 82
Lamps 83
The road 84
Overwhelmed 85
Caricatures 86
The bullock’s geometry 87
Shame 88
Murmurs 89
Coherence 90
Doubts 92
Metal 93
Power of attorney 94
The button rose 95

9. The dreamer 97
The clouds 98
Highway 99
History 101
Torpor 102
Mirrors 103
Voices of innocence 104
The tunnel 105
Suffering in poetry 107
Temporary 108
The parapet 109
Misconstrual 110
The window 111
Wind 113
Poetry without thinking 114
Sanchi 115

10. Authenticity
July 31, 2011
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.
1

11. Climate change
July 31, 2011
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.
2

12. Metaphors
July 30, 2011
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.
3

13. Phony vision
July 29, 2011
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
4

14. In tin sheds that jump out of green fields
Their milk sloshing in their pink udders.
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.
5

15. Scream
July 28, 2011
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.
6

16. Holes
July 27, 2011
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.
7

17. Children in the rain
July 26, 2011
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
8

18. And soft grannies in loving egg-heads
Seemed to vanish in the fuzzy rain.
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.
9

19. Bridge
July 25, 2011
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.
10

20. The temple of shadows
July 24, 2011
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.
11

21. Skin
July 22, 2011
Here my life began in a belly- fear of the dark
In a sky not visible, filled with fearful locusts
That comes in swarms, across the snow hills.
The swarms eat up all our grasses in the way.
But woman-insects begin life in the same way,
Afraid of the dark in their own womb houses.
I now swim in this my pool, where I had come
Not of my own, my dad being of different skin.
When I come out of these waters into the sun
My skin shall wear all those paints in the sun
So it can please the leathery skins of dad’s class
And I can build my own womb-house to host
A tiny swimming tadpole, with a swaggering tail
That shall never have belly-fears of the dark.
But I only fear that my oxygen will be cut off
Before I open my eyes to the sun in the hills.
(Female feticide is practiced in some parts of India due to
preference for the male offspring, ostensibly to carry on the family
lineage)
12

22. Morning at the Tirumala temple
July 22, 2011
The morning starts cawing in its throat in sleep
And the silky song of God’s morning shall wait
For worship flowers to come in the flower train.
Flower trains are full of milk cans and turbans
And women in colorful costumes smelling milk.
The pigtailed high-rise throats shall begin now
In god’s praises, he bleary-eyed from late night’s
Jumping across the night to wife’s house below.
The shepherd is tending sheep of yesterday evening.
The morning shall begin when the clouds move away
And stop threatening the shepherd with cloud-rain.
In the meantime of morning, let rolling people roll
Like waves in the midnight ocean, their wet bodies
Making silent noises against the stones of the temple.
13

23. A semblance
July 21, 2011
I have decided not to call on her in his death
In order to create a mere semblance of as was.
My ghost would continue to exist in this far,
As a mere shadow of a reality, just a figment
That would create a flimsy semblance of fact.
His death is now, for her, a mere semantic fact.
Let the existence of my body be a semantic fact,
Just like his lack of body in her drawing room,
Till my lack of body is a similar semantic fact.
14

24. Facts
July 20, 2011
These facts do not really speak for themselves
In the cloud cover of this weather, on a rainy night
Whose dome still stifles us beyond mortal breath,
While pursing our lips, brooding in blue thought
Speaking musty history words, empty hypotheses.
They do not hold in the crisp air of night dreams.
Truth is our viscous reality in the lower abdomen,
An open space where the breeze blows regardless.
Beauty is a reality that lay beyond the body’s crooks
In a niche where it all adds up under a petrified bone.
15

25. Layers
July 19, 2011
As we had opened eyes we saw ourselves
In the mirror, profoundly struck by the night
Our faces serrated by layers of collected time.
The holes there carried lightless rain water
That went green in the lazy years of old fish,
Tadpoles that, by morning, turn green frogs
If only allowed their photosynthesis by day.
We then peeled our white faces layer by layer.
Our war paints then came off and snow cream,
The layers that revealed our first fears and gods
And our demons that shrieked through the day,
To be liberated from the good wishes of gods,
And placentas of unborn kids that had carried
Born sins of our fathers in their ugly plasticity.
We saw the serrated sands of the Thar desert
That had cumulated over the oceans drowning
The fish, the tadpoles, the frogs and the oyster
And all other aquatic creatures under its silica.
We saw nights piling on nights, years and ages
The grass that covered our millennia in layers
On broken walls of our cities, the moss growing
Silently on the trees, the hills covered in mist
Their peaks entirely covered in forgetful snow.
16

26. 17

27. The parcel
July 18, 2011
I had received a white parcel in my dream
Yesterday from the bank at the street-corner
Where my address was intact in ledger folios
As a man in swivel chair, gold name on door.
It will be delivered at home, when I am awake.
They have to know their customer, you know.
I have to know my balcony from where I look
When the man’s bicycle bell rings from below.
My balcony has no number, in wind and rain.
These days my name on the door is too faint.
18

28. Goats for goddess
July 17, 2011
We looked at our goddess closely in the mind.
She was much in our step, on way up the hill.
There were no snakes, no crowned peacocks
With tails that danced oncoming rain-clouds.
We only looked for our yellow-faced goddess
That stood in stone niches in the ancient hills.
We tied flags of red cloth towards loving mother
Around gnarled trees , for our women’s fertility.
When cholera struck our village we had sought
Her help in her stone temple of exquisite beauty.
On this festival day we seek her maternal blessing
As we take pots of food to her on women’s heads
Dancing our way to her heart in crowded streets.
We wish our goats to join festivities, when alive.
19

29. Arguments
July 16, 2011
The sky is dull gray, with rows of v-birds
Stitched on it in round silken embroidery.
Mountains sit there prettily, with a lone tree
That stood at the curve, bending in the sky.
The arguments went on a bit tediously
In a boring persistence by some guests.
Their chairs are now warm with victory
This side of the table as the papers rustle.
Their news emitted in the room to the roof
Returning slowly to the other side of legs.
On their laps are napkins wet with lips.
The arguments wear thin like mouth-spit.
Outside, the tree stood bare and naked.
Frogs argued with the bog interminably.
The tea ceremony has started in our eyes.
The sky is still dull gray with three rows
Of v-birds dotting its embroidered cloth
Their wings stopped flapping long ago.
20

30. Shapes
July 15, 2011
Newspapers jut out from spaces, their words
Haranguing at noon, awaiting sleep in our eyes
On stomachs well-fed, cutting the day in two.
The first part of the day is stored away, at noon.
Some words loosely fall away in the daylight.
The day soon changes to a misshapen evening
Awaiting its night, beyond light, of a black sleep.
The night will be round in shape, curtains drawn.
My train will lose its shape in a curve of its line.
The line will lose shape as the train cuts it in two
Becoming two lines, two shapes, two phone lines.
The birds on the phone lines will go up and down
Losing shapes, every now and then, triangularly.
The world will lose its shape, in the dark of sleep.
21

31. Circles
July 14, 2011
We have come down to the earth, concentrically
In our circles, ever decreasing, blazing in space.
The circumference is always in view from center
But the promontory remained outside our grasp
With little dots that flickered unmindful of us.
When we made circles we would run in them
In ontology, our circles shrinking progressively
In spherical perfection, their penciled geometry
Implemented on our puzzled feet, never too far
From the centre like the cow grazing in its tether.
22

32. Rites
July 13, 2011
Among our thoughts are rites, following words
Prescribed by pigtailed pundits of yore, talking,
In the bombastic language of our ancient gods
To airy spirits who had bodies in the olden days.
They understood us mostly in difficult language.
As words went, our hands went, our eyes went
Our tongues moved, our bodies stirred slowly.
Our thoughts remained on the dead, as if dying.
We stared at the sky in its lifeless continuum
And we took water to lips, thrice, thinking of her
Among the ones who once had bodies like us.
23

33. The silence
July 12, 2011
The silence strikes again like faint flint sparks,
That do not readily open up in fires of dry sticks
Of our old men, behind deer running for arrows
From caves of early pictures, with a blazing sun
In the day and a moon at night, in liquid silence.
The silence of rain falls on the night, on crickets
In corners of homes, along with silent brooms,
Brooms that will play song with the road at dawn
Of women whose eyes are limpid pools of silence.
The silence of words strikes, their images silent
In their fury, passions of a deep night, like waves
That broke on lonely beaches with sleeping gulls,
The silence of death on eyes closed, on seeing .
24

34. Collage
July 12, 2011
In our beginning there was this whole thing
Of a face which loomed large, a large house
Before everything happened, an empty air
Blowing it inside out, in a comically funny act.
The absurdity was our serious thing of heart
The body was ludicrous imitation of an idea
A funny caricature of living, a slowly dying act.
The images were wholes, just shattered sounds
And mere smells that struck an upturned nose
In a mind-state that absorbed the largely funny.
The critical mind dissected holes in wholes
As desiccated bodies that lay on green tables.
The naked blue bodies that lay on the floor
Stared at the ceiling fan, in a final love act
Of science and poverty, among other funny
Images of bodies, not yet blue, not yet naked.
The grotesque faces then came laughing at you
Without their torsos, in a view of the big picture
When you saw funny patches of hairless heads
Controlling the world, others in tiny fragments
Their bodies quickly vanishing in vote machines.
But fragments do not make sense, a collage may.
25

35. Flamingos
July 10, 2011
What came to me was an ornament, mere.
Its functionality extremely suspect in eyes
A high role in its augustness, silk-bordered
And flamingo-like from the distant swamps,
Little specs of whiteness, flying in the blue
Flamingos that have no use for me, in bread.
There was a light tree in the middle of the road.
Our memory spoke of a cherubic kid on its crook
And grandmother holding him aloft in the air.
Memories are flamingos, of no use in bread.
Kid is no kid, now a larger pain in his big back
And in our backs, laden with the silver of hair.
Our memories are ornaments like flamingos
Those have gone back to their Siberian plains
They have roosted and gone, vanished in blue
The whites now in the blue are new flamingos.
26

36. Pieces
July 10, 2011
The morning went into many pieces
A cuckoo’s call to rain, rain to come,
Thinking of new ways to neighbor area
Walking on mud to explore fresh skies
In visible light of yet-to poetry, photo.
A fan in room had a touch of the cold
The cold death of the tree that has been,
The sky spaces between the other trees
Where birds will speak in parliament.
In the streets are footfalls of men’s walk
A distant sing-song of morning to god
And flowers smelling from felled creepers.
The lake that cried in our filthy waters
To the machine that silently cleaned it.
Beyond the lake are its borders of flats
Where people sleep in lake mosquitoes
Those have their history mixed with us.
In the meantime women sweep streets
Their broom-sounds assailing our ears
In the liquid treatment of dusty roads.
Their husbands have froth at mouths.
Their kids get up bleary eyed for school.
27

37. 28

38. Stub
July 09, 2011
I see this stub, a broken thing from wind.
A vertical thing, rising to the sky, de-frocked
Sprawls on the earth, its mourning mother
Staring at the sky, above the electric wires.
Children dance on its body, in school uniform
They have learned how to dance on short stubs
In the school of lunch boxes, topied teachers
With horn-rimmed spectacles on their noses.
The trailer comes spluttering, this organic one,
Separating windy things from inorganic stuff,
The leaf from the wood and pick up living matter
To grow new living matter, in large windy spaces.
The stub remains in wind, still embracing mother.
29

39. The internet
July 08, 2011
The internet is a not a thingy but just mental stuff,
A few electric charges firing up from so many spaces
In assembly of plastic boxes and optic wires running
Under sea, reaching our houses here via our balconies,
Where we hang our wet clothes like many-colored flags
Quietly announcing our identity near so and so tree.
Simply, it is a skull-thing linked to several skulls
From other places, other holes in air, their balconies.
In the internet we speak to the vast oceans of people
Those have no faces worth their names, their fathers.
They move in waves, hair on brow, tails yet hanging.
Their words are early promises, forgot by dusk time
In an after-glow of pretty rhetoric and purple prose.
30

40. Reality
July 07, 2011
He woke from sleep in order to experience reality,
Waking being a reality when in a fluid state of sleep
Acknowledging sleep had been a greater reality,
Immanence in body, a severe presence in mind.
He had to listen to the whistle of the night guard
The bark of a hoarse dog, in its throat of hill echo
As if on the edge of the hills calling down the sky
The stars having come to doze in nightly flickers.
Reality begins as solidity, continuing its descent
To the fluid and thence to vapor and empty proof
Of an existential fact, a shriek from night cricket.
The phosphorous of our bones roams in the sky
As night lights in the vastness of a cold desert.
31

41. Knots
July 06, 2011
A tiny insect is now taking a tour on my mouse pad.
A machine whir heard in its wings’ flapping sound
Enters my conscious in the yellow light, in morning
Sounds of the gray sky outside, its rain yet in pouring.
My thoughts overflow my ears, along ropes that knot
In the middle of the air, in the blue spaces of sounds.
These are silver ropes that glisten in the day’s sun.
I have to pay their price in my family silver, my love.
32

42. Now
July 05, 2011
Your clothes balloon in the increasing wind.
The brown hills look bloated with spring wind
And now is merely in your future and my past
As my eyes drift past the hills into a blue sky.
A sky bird swoops upon the grass, on death
Like the swirling plane that crashed on roofs
In yesterday’s dream and today’s newspaper.
The bird is in the now, in ballooning clothes
With the wind that brought it down in circles
To death in its putrefying smells on the earth.
Your silken clothes balloon in a gust of wind.
You look bigger in flowers and fragrant love
Like butterflies in a fragmentariness of now
In refusal to meet with past, its smelly death
And set on fly-wings of future in a sky of now.
33

43. The hall of mirrors
July 05, 2011
Our faces appear funny in mirrors, looking clumsy,
Bursting quickly into loud laughter without humor.
On our way up, we hold our rusted banisters loosely
Stooping, with a hand on our hips, as if in a dance.
Here we have laughed, in hollow sounds, in spaces
Below the stairs, full of dust and in obscure corners
Filled with our dead skin cells and our stale memories
Those have remained on the attic in our long history
In cloth bundles that shrink like our faces in mirrors.
Their knots on top stick out like pigtails on our faces
When, at night, they enlarge in grotesque convexity.
34

44. Children in the afternoon
July 04, 2011
We played seven stones game, piled one on another
Toppling them with ball that would fly into bushes.
The lazy afternoon heat beat on our sleeping trees.
The birds had gone on to their own afternoon sleep.
We entered the scrunching leaves sending the lizard
Scurrying to the hole of its wall, its triangular head
Popping out a while to hear our tiny feet in the leaves.
Up on the mound we deeply looked into a dark hole
To look for the slithering sound of the resident snake
We would then run down fast, afraid of its unheard hiss
And fall to the ground with coins of kneecaps bleeding.
We then climbed the guava tree to its highest branch.
We caught the squirrel eating the fruit of our ripeness.
In the evening we played badminton with the marigold
Smelling yellow petal shreds as they spread in the sky.
35

45. The messenger
July 03, 2011
Here I am stuck with the thought of a messenger
Sans his message, my life’s meaning, sent to me
Alone in this desert, by the mighty China emperor
From the royal hall, written into unhearing ears,
By a dying emperor on his imperial death-bed.
The messenger had a rising eastern sun on chest
Where froze the possibility of his ever reaching me
Across the vast people in the expanding hallways.
There is no writer between the emperor and him
Only deaf ears and the quivering lips of a dead man
I know the message is oncoming in the vast lands.
Here in this window, I feel the wind in my bones.
I smell the smell of a silky scroll as it softly opens
And I can dream its contents as the evening comes.
(Reading A message from the emperor by Franz Kafka)
36

46. The day’s truth
July 03, 2011
The truth seemed in the half-eaten guava of the parrots
That flew away with their happy truth cracked halfway
Their colors were not the truth, but their trifling facts,
Their petite nothingness, in the tree, they ran away from
The waffle of their living reality in the tree they flew to.
The fragrant guava that fell on the wet ground bleeding
Formed the truth connected to the waving of coconuts
And the rain that came from the other world on its clouds
Bearing facts of the other time, other space in its droplets
The night they had embraced ,in its amorphous darkness
When the stars refused to come out yet in their deep sleep.
The truth was the middling reality of a cobbler’s broken life
In a leather bag he stitched in clumsy seams on a daydream,
The cussedness of a sitting reality on the road of shuffling feet.
The yellow and red bags, like green parrots, were his truth
Half –cracked in the afternoon sun ,waiting for his dusk
When all truth shall lie buried properly in drunken stupor.
The truth was the broken reality of the six ‘o clock train
That had disgorged people like ants, from holes in its wall
Their truth lay in the broken lives that would come to night
From the aggregates of other people’s broken lives of the day
Their truth lay half-cracked , in the train they just left behind
Climbing flyover steps to home truths of mamas and wives.
37

47. 38

48. The temple god
July 02, 2011
It has rained behind the tree and the evening sun comes
Intermittently in waves of laughter from clouds, splitting
The vitreous evening sky into inconsistent blue and orange.
The light from our bodies crosses its threshold rebelliously
In a lightning of the world, like a click of the flash camera.
All that we required was a god safe in his temple laughing
At our fables, at our immature art in the shadows of light
When we fail to create life, flesh natural, bones breaking,
The pure immanence of life, its glory on the lonely night
And then we are answerable to none in our question hours.
Quietly we cease to exist, with no words trailing behind us.
As if we are stones of several insects breathing under us.
Like him in the temple we wish to laugh anonymously.
39

49. Morning in Begumpet
July 02, 2011
Behind the coconuts the train
Arrives with a night’s memories
Hidden in its noisy under-belly.
The clouds have come and gone.
That seems another rainless day.
The flies, expectant of fresh rain,
Actively seek the night’s refuse.
The first train is heard in arrival
In a monotone of announcement.
The wind rustles in the coconuts
Quietly dropping a baby coconut
on the roof with a crashing thud .
Train commuters, fresh from nights,
Descend station steps in a dream.
40

50. The idiot
July 01, 2011
A girl makes you the idiot you are , against
The stone-pelting of children who will love you
On your grave, their flowers sprinkled as if rain
You are the bright idiot weighed down by love
A diamond pin you will sell for a little outcaste girl
Who loved you in delicate hanging of five minutes
On a scaffold of death, the priest of a crucifix
Who will say absolutely nothing for your Christ
Life comes to the idiot in fits, paroxysms of joy.
(Reading The Idiot by Dostoevsky)
41

51. Secret
June 30, 2011
We share our secret with the dead in their yellow leaves.
We feel it softly touching our bones in the deep light
Of the shopping mall where we go to pick up beams
Of light that need to be colourfully knitted in our own
Shadows at home, the ones we buried under our walls.
In the urban glass-palaces we feel it in our vacant eyes,
In our ears, when it touches their drums beating them
To bring out their fine city music, in its singular rhythm.
It is in the fever of its wood and glass, in its electric frost.
42

52. Glass
June 29, 2011
Now I think of the crash of the body, its broken splinters
Shining in the afternoon rain, like tiny mirrors for clouds.
I think of birds that are glass pieces embedded in the wall
Those were once airy souls living in bodies of glassy flesh.
I think of fistfuls of birds that beat like mad in glass chests
Their pace-makers, working overtime in solid plate glass.
43

53. List
June 29, 2011
Let us list things of that evening when the dusk light
Flooded, through the tree, this wiry man and his woman
As they were winnowing for the day, sifting wheat of gold
From its powdered chaff, against a light-powered wind
In a muscular swing of the male arm, an upturned face
Their bodies synchronized in an exquisite wheat-dance
As happiness lay somewhere in this jumble, in this list.
44

54. Scribbles
June 28, 2011
Between then and now is a mere scribble lost
Into an indifferent writing, by a little finger
On the night of time, some sand sculptures
On beach of ephemeral gods, lost in waves,
Some writings on waters, with wind on back
Against waves that break only to be counted
As fuzzy surf that will vanish in rising people.
A scribble in the sun that would vanish soon
In vapors of white clouds, above the blue hills
Into flying white birds that drop their whites
In calling fingers, fists raised, noses upturned.
A scribble on the slate of learning in our village
Behind shuffling buffalo feet, in udders of milk
On the silky brown sands of summer-hot rivers
Staring at the far hills emptied of their green.
Between now and then is a mere scribble lost
On faces in pony-tails, in tiny brick-red flowers
Wedged in hair, that jostled with white fragrances
On evanescent blouses, on backs smiling directly
To celebrating trees that shed many a tear of joy
45

55. In yellow leaves, on their own circles of shadows.
46

56. Ghosts in our sleep
June 27, 2011
These ghosts make you deeply afraid on the pillow.
Their torsos are human-like but bottoms taper off
Like the blurbs they speak into, in cartoon stories.
Our childhood ghosts are now dead in their trees
But new ones from cinema pop up, in wind and rain,
Under doors, in their creaky hinges, now and then.
Our ghosts these days do not have tapering bodies
Their bodies do not now laugh in tiled mortuaries
In the outskirts of town, where they cut up bodies
Nor live in tamarinds in shrieking street-corners
Where suicide ghosts once lived with their families.
They sleep quietly under our skull-plates till midnight
When they come out in moonlight for a ghost-dance.
47

57. Free will, free fall
June 27, 2011
I land on my free will this eventful night
Like the cat that lands softly on its rubber feet
Before getting up to pick fight with another
Screaming cat in the dark, as the night swells.
Here I am doing things, falling on my own
With no other sons of mothers in between
Stopping my free fall, so I nicely land on feet.
I get up and shake the dust off my clothes.
I some times land on my two feet for nothing
And the prospects of bound legs loom large.
I am no feral cat from brooding jungle trees
Just a hospital cat with high- slung legs in air.
Free fall is not free, merely gravity-bound.
Actually there is nothing free in rarefied air
Only a crashing fall that comes entirely free.
We are bound to act according to free will.
48

58. Identity
June 26, 2011
In the evening some identity questions popped up
In the tinkle of a few china cups of rising tea steam
And stainless steel spoons of sugar in place of cubes
Brought in by two whitely dressed men from Kolkata.
Themselves plagued by identity in their white dress
They inverted bed ,took out your air in the broadsheet.
Their fathers have their unending tales to unwind
Their wind fresh from the marshes of Sunderbans
Where tiger tails deftly elude experienced hunters.
Their uncles are government clerks in frayed red files
Their brother’s wives doting mothers of soft love
With saree over heads, of wholly hidden identities.
There are others in the room that do not have faces
The ones that seem to speak out in clanking sounds
From the corners, their spanners at work on the wall
They may be spiders who have just woven their web
They will climb the wall, their shadows on the roof
Over the electric fan coaxing it to whir in its shadow.
The taxi man to here was a communist with dreams
His son painted slogans and politicians that stared
From stately billboards rising above electric wires.
A communist has no identity apart from the state
The state just stares in empty space from its heights.
49

59. 50

60. The beggars
June 24, 2011
These beggars tug at your sleeve, smelling your money
In thin sheets of small paper, lying in your leather wallets
With decisions about their life, marriage and God inside.
Their thoughts mainly look into a sitting plastic tumbler
Of loose change, where water should have flowed smoothly.
They dream of scraps of music, sung in trains, with breeze
That came in and went out, through a whir of train fans
And a sad song could easily flow to a single wire of music.
Outside the temple their cloth spreads like the night sky
And the coins glisten in it, like stars on a moonless night
Lying loosely with decisions about life, women and God.
51

61. Tautologies
June 23, 2011
The world eludes, sleep to sleep, in the deep night.
Cobra-snakes writhe and flying planes from the sky
Come crashing on house-roofs, the logical consistency
Of images in serious doubt, their semantic context.
Flowers open in pearl-white, their petals unfold,
To golden sunlight from the hills, to water mirrors
In early morning lotus fragrance from the pond.
Women in colour return with plastic vessels of waters.
The lotus stems in knots writhe like green snakes.
Here the pillow turns upside down, its rectangle of rest
Changing its sides, scraping the ears, ruffling your hair.
The mosquito buzzes night’s happy mosquito song
Enters the cave of your ear, restless on a thinking pillow
The rectangle of rest, outlying on a square of the night.
Our cobra-snakes are a tautology and our flying planes.
Luckily the women images are not of widow women.
Our dreams continue, sleep to sleep, in repeat images
Their underlying vocabulary many times tautological.
52

62. Room
June 23, 2011
(Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be
proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast
and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when
everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling
of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.- Kafka)
Everyone has a room he carries about him, within him
Surveyed vigorously, some times, by a friendly night insect
On its white wall, a tiny friend from an unfathomed night
That makes wing noises of friendship in a proposed death
On the wall, its carcass to be untraceable under our cot.
We then carry our room with us, about us, into the balcony
For a free fall from the heights of vertigo into darkness.
Everyone has this room in him and he carries it about him.
Its whirring electric fan noises keep him from actively dying
In the pool of darkness, in the vastness of night’s anonymity.
We only die in others’ rooms, like the friendly night insect,
That had come to die, in its immensity, on our white wall.
53

63. The girl’s song
June 22, 2011
Her song begins abruptly, being born and raised
In a forest of words that has not seen the blue sky.
Her lyrics are stewed in myth and grandma’s tales
Where fish remain to dry for ever and they are seven
And seven of king’s sons brought them hunting.
It is all in an icy tingle of magic words, ice cubes
Of music- notes on the soft downy back of a girl
Slipping through the unreal magic of girl-thought
And now she is slowly riding on your back with hair
Flowing in an autumn wind of ripe fruitfulness.
Her song trails off just like her girl’s abrupt body
That has floated into the room in a bottomless dance
Her feet vanishing into the mosaic floor in its mist
Her body’s contours merging in the morning sun.
54

64. The grandmother’s narratives
June 21, 2011
Sitting luxuriously on a string cot in the moon
A lovely grandmother spoke her long narratives
To the little ones at her feet, as a soft liquid night
Touched their baby cheeks through many holes
In the moonlight that fell on the coconut’s head.
The night bristled with unanswered questions
But that will be for later and in the meantime
The ghosts cannot wait in the washer-man’s ghat
That had clay pots seething with village laundry
And the black stone on which he had beat clothes
Was in fact a ghost by night, living in the palm .
There were of course kings who had seven sons
And all of them went hunting and brought back
Seven wet fishes that refused to dry in the sun
A probe revealed the tiny red ant to be the culprit.
The narratives went on till the night owl’s hoot.
The herons settled down in the tree’s darkness
But their wings fluttered intermittently in sleep.
55

65. The metrical memoranda
June 21, 2011
In meter and music we make our many memoranda.
Our language is orchestrated, as in the green houses
Waiting to accumulate green air, as they quietly grow.
Our language is after-thought, mere shadow of reality.
In enclosed space we enact shadow-plays, on cave walls
Like Plato’s prisoners in the cave, confusing shadows
With their reality, to imbue souls with aimless vapor.
Our memoranda, like our words, are airy pretty-nothings,
Mere echoes like the cuckoo-calls that do not bring rain
But just document the existence of the bird on the branch.
56

66. Ear pain
June 20, 2011
Ear pain comes out of too much thought
When thought contradicts logic in a maze
Of words that strike you as so many moths
From the rain seeking light in your patio.
The doctor of the ears sees too much in nose.
His obiter dictum says the nose, in its septum,
Is deviated from its straight, primrose path.
He is a doctor with a sharp nose for money.
So if you have too much ear pain in the drum
The nose is corrected from running astray.
The tooth doctor sees fault with the gums.
He will try to get to the root of their canals
And both your ears will be made to behave.
Surely money lies at the root of the canals.
Actually ear pain comes of too little thought
And far too many words striking eardrums
Fired, at once, in excess parental enthusiasm.
57

67. 58

68. Snakes and planes
June 20, 2011
We dream of snakes that hold top gods in their coils
And the ones they stand on in green ponds spewing fire.
We love them all in our eye- sleep and white daylight.
Snakes and planes, coiling and flying, green and blue
Happen in libidinous dreams, in wet life and dry death.
Our bearded professor called them from our inside,
The dark cave where they all arose in their angry hoods
And the planes, all of them, fly about houses helplessly
In three sorties, looking at us from their window-holes
Only to crash on our pitiful houses of mud and earth.
Some times we catch our snakes by tails in the plane
And whir them in the air in childish triumph of power
And the planes will go away catching their breath again
These incidents are few and far between in our sleep.
59

69. The ceremony
June 18, 2011
We all went into a tedious little ceremony
Of lost innocence, in our rainbows of wisdom.
A man issued his words that touched souls
And softly spoken in the smells of turmeric
And a faint fragrance of innocence and flame.
His words flowed from his soft liquid eyes
As though he was child entering knowledge
Wild-eyed and with tiny bits of the blue sky
The earth having lost its contours in space
Water and fire emerging in a litany of words.
It was a child who sat in his lap, with fingers
In a bed of rice grains that filled stomachs
As though it was food that fuelled wisdom.
He wrote his first letters as if in a secret code
To the treasure-trove of burning treasures
Searing to the eye, hot on the painted brow
A certain secret gold thread on the little chest
That qualified him for the arduous journey.
He then gurgled first letters, word and song.
(The initiation ceremony of a child’s first learning in which the
Goddess of learning bestows her blessings on the child before his
60

70. long and arduous journey in education)
61

71. The horizon
June 17, 2011
The train passes in the station without stopping.
Its hanging men in blue cloth are a mere blotch.
The woman talking on cell phone is now horizon.
The horizon that had shifted this side a while ago
Is back to the wall behind train with cinema posters
Of a hairy- chested actor lying sprawled on boobs
Not his, of a buxom heroine of dreamy shut eyes.
The train comes again and stands, emptying people.
The horizon is now bursting with people in color
Their dresses hang out as a rainbow of many hues.
(Looking at the Begumpet Railway Station from my roof)
62

72. Making sense
June 17, 2011
We try to stitch together desultory fragments
Of what have happened, on the tongue of now
And find a common thread with what existed
In the airy minds of then of us and those others
As if there is salivary consistency about them,
A continuum of space in their holding together
Where time and space hold hands in bodies.
We try to make sense out of our mere being,
Out of the sound of words and their ceremonies,
Symbols that hold race memories like crucibles.
We try to build corridors in the spaces of time.
We then destroy bodies to make sense of it all.
63

73. On the night of the lunar eclipse
June 16, 2011
You have two faces, city, like Janus
One on either side of the rail track
The incoming train divides you in two
The rain-breeze soothing your sorrow.
But the smells of morning milk packets
And the buffaloes waiting to be milked
On either face speak the same story.
The city’s sorrow began in the night
When the moon hid in earth’s shadow
For no fault of the moon or the sun
But our own, of our own green earth
In our midnight wakefulness to clouds
After an evening of togetherness in meal
Disturbed by a threatening wet rain.
64

74. My mother
June 15, 2011
I have now managed to fix my mother in soft silks
And brocades of years ago, that smelled of mothballs
There was nothing else in me to slot her absence with
In the recesses of my own history in the mind’s folds
Except a pallid figure, in pieces of bones and ashes
In a clay-pot in waters that came from the snow hills,
Yellow marigolds and fickle flames floating on waters
A clay-pot that had overturned to the bottom of a boat
In a watery sound that came as if from my drowning.
It was now the rustling silks of her wedding, a clarinet
Of silky tunes that flowed sweetly in jasmines and scents.
These now prevailed in my thoughts of her long absence.
It did not matter I had not been present in her wedding.
65

75. Passages
June 14, 2011
I hear these passages in my waking moments
Of clicking shoes, hands on banisters, shadows
On infinitely white walls stained with lizards
That seemed to know me so well all the time
The way they wave their heads up and down.
I have my eyes to look up to a hole of hot sky.
Some times the rain is very angry in the stairs
Like the cat that purred under the dusty stairs
Tensing for the roaches from the kitchen sink.
Here I am and now taut with the sounds of fear
From the falls of cockroaches that defy death
Not the scary ghost-creaks of old house-doors
But doors that are never there but mere holes
Where the wind hisses angrily as in a hill bush.
I dread these very passages and this very page.
66

76. Frames
June 13, 2011
My frame is ephemeral, just an illusory screen
That existed for a mere eye-blink on the road
Like a miasma that shimmered in afternoon,
As I walked past with my eyes set on the road.
The mountains there rose above human heads
That talked in phones to other human heads,
Heads of hair with things to do, trivial events,
Politics that provoked the laughter of history
Of humankind, in sheets of crackling leaves
They made out of palm and bamboo of jungle,
In movie- tales, smelling of money and power
That bought the comfort of tomorrow’s love.
My frame is ephemeral that brought it all together
Into a single world, a coconut, its shimmering lake,
And the shadows of mountains, boats overflowing
With men in tucked lungis that harvested hyacinth
The silent paddle-sounds in a lagoon, smug birds
That sat cool on wooden poles in murky waters
A white girl who chased the whiteness of a rabbit.
My frame is ephemeral that brought it all together
The tree in the temple that arched over its pagoda
In clouds that floated above the sun-gold of its top
67

77. A shirtless man who hung in the sky to fly His flag
The amorous couple who made love on the stone
The Gods of wood who looked with lidless eyes
At various follies done in the dark of our souls.
My frames are ephemeral, just fog-screens of beauty
That fizzled down between dreams and wakefulness.
68

78. Hands
June 13, 2011
We dance with both hands and grab space rapaciously.
At the same time we kick space sideways into the dust;
Our hands are supple fingers with sound tales to tell
And fine colors to mix on white surfaces of silk finish.
With our fingers we claw our way into blue sky space.
We love our earth-space, brown and oozing with love.
We love our earth and we dig it up and make scars on it
And whomever we love we destroy them in quiet hours.
We love women with our hands clawing into their bodies.
Our hands are fingers that make music from their bodies
But our fingers tear up their bodies leaving scars on them.
We make surreal paintings of their scars for art auctions.
69

79. Dance
June 11, 2011
She was her mom in fullness of dance
A color complement to her in space
In wind and rainbow hues like those
One would imagine in grease-bubbles
On a rainy evening at the gas station.
Ephemeral are her steps that flowed
Exactly as daughter’s, viscerally flowing,
The same way as her mom’s, to faces
As lines of rain slanting to our faces in
Closed eyes and sticking-out tongues.
Together they poked our innocent eyes
In the middle of space where inertia rests
Our hair flowed upwards as if Shiva’s.
(About the Kuchipudi dance performance of a mother-daughter
pair ,Vijayanti and Prateeksha Kashi I had witnessed in Bhopal
some time ago)
70

80. The bearded painter
June 11, 2011
It seems his bird went away in the early hours.
The Goddess he had made naked with his beard
Quickly got up and went her way to her Creator,
Leaving sophisticated critics with a memory hole
And with nothing that they could stop to conquer.
He is now laughing behind his enormous beard.
He would no more paint all those pretty pictures
In pastels for society women of perfumed leisure.
But the hole he made in art-space is a lasting one
As white in the dark night of oblivion as his beard.
(A tribute to the memory of M.F.Hussain, India’s famous painter
who recently passed away in London at 95)
71

81. Walking
June 11, 2011
The waters walked slowly, from the red mountains
Entering the parched plains, with wind on their backs.
Their forked snake tongues proceeded smoothly,
Exploring, gently patting short grasses on their heads
And feeling for living creatures, their thingy existences
Under the sky and on the earth, brown with the sun.
The mountains bled with muddy water in their hearts
And renewed the lives of our rivers for one more year.
72

82. Strangers
June 09, 2011
I find my strangers are perfect almost always
When one would meet them on the road at dusk.
They become perfect strangers, perfect in words
Picture perfect in white shirt and student tie.
As their words issue ,strangely they are perfect
Like the stranger I saw yesterday assaulting
My space with words about a certain college
Its location on a road at right angles with mine.
My words strangely collided with him in street.
His words were strangely at perfect right angles
With my old man’s life which was in a rectangle
Of a closed space of vegetables and evening rain.
When I intersect their brief spaces on a busy road
The text is always empty but the templates remain
And they become perfect strangers to memory.
73

83. Sorrow
June 09, 2011
One tends to culture a veil of sorrow in body
On a cloudy day, as one would, in sericulture,
Where boiling cocoons are cultured painfully
For drape as filaments in weddings and regalia.
Garbage bells here keep chiming in with sorrow
On a trailer, to which watchmen from basements
Add their sorrows, one by one ,in fetid garbage.
The silk that comes out of it is soft and smooth,
Happy to touch but smells awful to a deep nose.
On a cloudy day mankind turns deliberately sad
Under a mournful banyan, sitting cross-legged
To avoid the much deeper sadness of ancestors
Who stood on one leg in the hills for soul-freedom.
74

84. Humor
June 08, 2011
We remained alive to humor possibilities
As we gurgled toothlessly in the cloth cradle.
Later when we would piss in our half-pants
We felt wet and were rather pissed off at life
Looking for dry answers to wet questions.
But we learnt to look at non-existence of pants
On others’ bottoms to have a booming laugh.
Our humor was black like night, at night.
At times we looked at a mental possibility
Of separating real pants from wet bottoms
For their dark potential for night humor.
Now, back in diapers, we are wet in bottoms.
Our humor is smelly, our jokes are not funny.
Our words now come with tongues held in cheek,
As our eyes go blank, brows grotesquely knit.
75

85. Home-sickness
June 07, 2011
Now, as we lean on the parapet in rain
We become home-sick, way beyond the line
Where the pipal tree meets the blue sky.
The tree’s hushed whispers at midnight
In windy rain will catch us in the stomach
Like dad who once slept on the veranda
With his night growls of half-remembered
Wisps of dreams about his children playing
On the memory wall of a winter sunset.
We become home-sick of him of years ago.
76

86. Stones
June 06, 2011
We were surrounded by stones, in steep steps,
And taken by surprise, in their sun hues and sky
Climbing the sky like birds to the sun in clouds,
White fluffy clouds that came from somewhere
From beyond the west hills, for just a day’s rain.
Rain spoiled them, blurring outlines luxuriously
To make them glisten like silks, finery of wedding.
Bush and tree towered over them stifling their souls
As they sat cowering in dread of their aliveness.
We were two, me and shadow, against their many.
Beyond the bush and fire, a black- ash stubble
Shone on stones covered in last year’s dry grass.
77

87. Fish
June 05, 2011
In the fish spa you have your foot nicely eaten
By schools of fish, in the blue aqua- transparency
Of the tiny creatures swimming around your feet.
For a change they eat you instead of you them.
In the fish eyes your foot is the whole of a whale,
A foodstuff of alive -stomach filling dead cells.
They tickle your under-feet to make them laugh.
You have a foretaste of the spa of the maggots.
78

88. Monologue
June 04, 2011
Monologue is a threat to sleeping innocence,
A revival of lost innocence like the cruel April
Breeding lilacs out of inherently dead land
Re-mixing memory and love of pretty words.
You threaten the world all the time in lips.
The world cringes before their pouted words
As if Mount Etna will explode in orange fire
And the expectant sky rumbles it right now.
Little birds speak about it from night trees
Their monologue remains a nocturnal wail.
Monologue comes in white froth at the mouth
When a frail body speaks black words of death
From a deep sigh, a rounded end of the word.
79

89. Television
June 04, 2011
Sleep flows softly with the sun, eyes half-shut
With thin fragments of dreams under the lids.
Weary- and bleary-eyed, I look at the solid world
Of furniture wood and wall television for space
For a release of wall space from concrete pillars
Into the air like tiny birds flapping their wings
Of avian freedom and heavenward ascent in sun
As their puny bodies rise against his golden glory.
80

90. Poverty for poets
June 03, 2011
Actually there was no poverty in the beginning.
Later innocence had begun and started to grow
To be a fiery youth with soft-figured girls in mind.
Girls then took shape in sinuous bodies, floating,
In diaphanous silks, chiffon and yards of length.
Their pink bodies rustled like bougainvillea in breeze.
And poverty happened because they needed to store
Stuff for tomorrow use, to tell girls what they own.
Poverty becomes less glamour below the hem line
For poetry when body-cloth barely covers the body
And grubby hands poke eyes at the traffic junction
And their nose runs in to the mouth uninhibitedly.
81

91. Abject
June 02, 2011
At what level does one become abject;
That is our question for a mere asking
In polite gatherings of people, with kids
Cluck-clucking when asked if they care
For history, of race, of future mankind.
You see it becomes real hot in the collar
When the child asks what is there in it
For us, if you guys who have brought it
All about, the fire-clouds of destruction.
You play silly child-games in adult world
Of child-like white innocence, yoga-games
In ochre robes on indecent rolls of stomachs
Shaking as though innocence is restored.
All you say is mere air-words, double puns
Quickly thought up in musical bathrooms
As you come under the shower thinking.
We are abject, below poverty line, the line
Below the navel where it eminently adds up
Our poverty line is a few statistics of bread
And some fry-oil, in the tents of non-work.
82

92. Lamps
June 01, 2011
When lamps are lit in oil and flame
They flood our smells in early morning
With God’s jasmines, sweet cardamom,
In offerings of fruit and leaf to pictures.
Gods are smiling pictures that smell
Of camphor fragrances, of lamps dying
To be re-born as our next mornings.
Our Gods are kings of bow and arrow
Their wives flanking them in blouses.
When we do not smell our lamps dying
We die like camphor with flames gone.
83

93. The road
May 31, 2011
In the road lies being, my essence.
The leafy banyans on both sides
Dictate the timbre of my words
Where they bristle at their edges,
In their leaf-ends mired in blue.
A miasma in body affects my time
And eye-sight of mind, in its purity.
Like the illusion in a flamingo land
Where a boat is tucked in the bottom
Of an afternoon bog when flamingos
Yawn in the sleep of distant lands.
At times a bearded traveler arrives
With no sheep, only ancient drums.
His sheep will not nibble at our leaves,
As time hangs heavy in the blue sky.
I take words out for their meaning,
And for examining mind’s contents.
The road for my journey has its end
Hanging in the loose sky, remaining
Wherever it is, with its feet bound
And extremely mired in memory.
84

94. Overwhelmed
May 29, 2011
I am overwhelmed by a golden morning
When it comes with the sounds of cattle,
In the distance, of dust from angular hoofs
Overwhelming mud-tracks up to the sky.
The cattle are overwhelmed by their time
By milk overflowing from their red udders
In thin jet-streams that will overwhelm us
In our faces behind morning’s hind legs.
The fleas overwhelm them in hind legs
Of a tail that seems the end of the world.
Sometimes I am overwhelmed by words
That flow smoother than milk streams
From a cow’s udders of a recent calving.
In the white halls, when I leave the world,
I shall be overwhelmed by its milky images
Clothed in no words, only derelict thoughts.
85

95. Caricatures
May 29, 2011
The caricatures in our mind are we that roll,
Roly-poly creatures, eating other people’s food
For our bloated forms, far removed from life.
The child is not father of man that is not man
But an aesthetic disjunct between life and art.
A child is life, father art, beguiling and artful.
Our larger than life bodies eat largely from
Larger than five-story steel carriage boxes.
Our hideous mane waves yes-no when asked,
A yo-yo, between seminal, unformed views.
We have our quick-thinking survival games.
We have to live after all in our larger tummy.
We shall ask our child to caricature our forms.
He alone understands the immensity of our lives.
(After watching a Hindi movie entitled “Stanley-ka-Dabba”)
86

96. The bullock’s geometry
May 28, 2011
The bullock looked up from its creaky grinding.
If only the grind-stone were square, less round
Or the hole were not a circle, but a straight line
That remained open-ended till the yonder hills
Or the stone would go on a tangent of the groove
And trundle on the high road to the green hills
Where such fine cud is waiting ,such cool shadows.
87

97. Shame
May 27, 2011
In a coma of sleeping, of ticking life of death,
You have your fantasies of two eventful days
Cut off from the world, like unwanted pages.
Between then and now are two forgettable days
Neatly cut off from its sheaf, its bound volume
Of eighty years of life’s pages, dog-eared of use.
But when you finally give account of yourself
You have to explain two stubs in the epilogue.
88

98. Murmurs
May 27, 2011
Often we hear a crowd’s soft murmurs
Like a wind that arrives in the pipal leaves
Through the hills, from the sea down there.
On some days, at midnight, they sound
Like the howl of a midnight wolf at the moon
Like a plaintive cry from an atavistic past.
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99. Coherence
May 25, 2011
We soon realized we had to be coherent
With what we spoke in the night air,
Shining words dropped in the thicket,
Fireflies that flickered on hill bushes.
Our words have to cohere with history
Our bodies and of our gone ancestors.
We have to think in essential assonance
In nature of things, under a nothing- sky,
Tiny insects that bore witness to our deeds
Their hum of filigreed wings in night air
Twigs that fell on our silence in the wood
The birds that spoke on a dark morning
In the grays of a golden dawn spawning.
We are not singing. But to our thoughts
There is a scheme, an unsought cadence
To our actions, alliteration of beginnings
In five iambs of meters, some blank verse
Wrapped in scintillating speech rhythms.
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100. .
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101. Doubts
May 24, 2011
On a clear walking day, a gentle breeze trailed us softly
Like a scruffy dog that sniffed our pant-leg in the slums
And took us for genuine friends all the way to our home.
We would shut our doors on it , afraid in our deep lungs.
We had doubts about its friendship under a winter sky
For the wetness of feelings, its moist love for our bodies.
But we had no doubts about the white anti-histamine pill
We would surely take to secure our throats against its love.
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102. Metal
May 24, 2011
Our lips pressed on the window bars smelled iron.
We heard bells that rang and rang in the far temple
In brass domes that had fevered tongues in them.
God’s tasty food went behind the red silk curtains
As camphor flames illumined His black granite body.
Many strung flowers went in a thread for His beauty.
A pigtailed man sent words up and up to the sky
In a canopy that had hideous demons on the side.
God’s water smelled of shining copper and flowers.
His food tasted delicious, of jaggery and cardamom.
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103. Power of attorney
May 24, 2011
His deed is black in the dark of a hotel suite
His words are white and violated her body.
Here is a white moneybag with power to hurl
Khaki food packets from whirring helicopters
To black bodies of hunger and fly-ridden disease
A white body with much power of greenbacks.
What is the big deal, ask white countrymen
A man-woman thing, the story of a lowly clerk
Willingly submitting her body to a higher use?
Black bodies can always be used by white ones
As those bodies deem fit, for white pleasure.
Their forebears had taken a power of attorney
That authorized all such uses of black bodies
By white bodies at all times and in all climes.
(The Chief of the IMF has been arrested on charges of assaulting a
hotel maid)
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104. The button rose
May 22, 2011
It is a moment’s rose
Just a button in leaves
In a hole of memory.
A button rose in a hole.
Button it up, will you.
It rose in a stair-space
Of shuffling feet of time,
An idea of button-smell
Like a new cloth smell.
Before it reaches God
As incense not offered
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105. As oil-lamp not lighted
Button it up, will you?
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106. The dreamer
May 22, 2011
We are dreaming of the dreamer
Of whose dreams we are figments.
When the dreamer opens eyes after,
We vanish in fragments, snowflakes
Those that fly about in lazy thoughts.
Silk, flowing garments fall smoothly
To heaven’s music as broken clouds.
The tree’s shadows are transient till noon.
At noon they slowly vanish in the tree.
They were the tree’s dreams at dawn.
The boulder-hills flow into each other
Their paths quickly vanish in bushes,
At the end of the world, near the sun.
They are the sun’s dreams at dawn.
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107. The clouds
May 22, 2011
We went on from being lazy, inert crocodiles
To broken white clouds that moved in our minds
Amid poetry’s bird-calls in the morning window.
It was poetry again we tried in nature and men
As red anger could not be worked out in nature.
You know we have become friends, by a chance,
With fellow-creatures like busy red ants in a line.
They have lived as easy as ever, with vulnerabilities
And tiny helplessness they are not worried about.
The sky-clouds are helpless , crazily driven in there
Impelled to rain plains, beyond the red mountains.
The plains exist there in their broken watery minds
In the thoughtlessness of a few tatters in the blue.
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108. Highway
May 19, 2011
The black asphalt goes broke in the sky
Amid gray trees that vanish in a dense fog.
Tea steams in mud cups, near a shack;
A few fry-oil smells assault hungry noses.
Man sends leisurely smoke swirls in the air.
Urchins swarm around acrid old tire fires
Their palms held up to warm to their heat.
A rickety bus kicks up dust in the distance.
Right, said the old conductor to his skin bag
Full of new currency notes and ticket stubs.
The cleaner-boy stood on the foot-board,
His tattered shirt flying like a windy flag.
A man motions to slow down near the village.
The man speaks steam into the winter air
Of stale village politics, of women at home
Of crops failing to suck vapor from the air
Of babies that are yellow- wealth goddesses.
Giant trees disappear into the red earth.
Their bodies are now and then sprawled
Across the roads of progress, their leaves
Easy food for the passing herds of goats
That will give white milk in the villages
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109. And warm red flesh to hungry stomachs
In the afternoon the bare hills breathe fire
Their trees stolen by greedy contractors
They now stand naked to the sun, exposed
At night their thorny shrubs are set on fire
Leaving black stubble on their bleak faces.
Giant trucks rumble on the potholed road
With Tata and Okay on their painted behinds
Their stomachs are pregnant with overloads
Those with an evil eye shall have black faces
As their drivers stop for a bath in the canal.
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110. History
May 19, 2011
At this point we are largely concerned with the history
Of our unmaking, not of what unmade us but of what
We have unmade, in life’s freedoms, follies and foibles
Which is, of course, the same thing as a private record
Of our unmaking, some reverse engineering of bodies
And pattern readings of free minds stuck in mere bodies
The way our stomachs grumbled to hide comedy of age
And our temples throbbed to a little love and some folly
To run away from an overwhelming blandness of reality,
Truths that overwhelmed souls like brittle autumn leaves
That came in thousands and buried them in their color.
It is a history of hypotheses, of had we been this and this.
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111. Torpor
May 18, 2011
Torpor is what we all begin with on some days
When the pain of thinking percolates in the body
With not even blue blood dancing in the wrist
As when you stare , behind white enveloping sheets ,
At others in their slowly enveloping whiteness.
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112. Mirrors
May 18, 2011
Our eyes are our own long- standing mirrors.
There we preen our feathers and see through our daze.
But our history brings lugubrious tears to them.
Our eye-line defines our being and plots our soul
In the vast promontory of a luminous night sky.
Our faces are but extensions of their soft wetness.
Our eyelids have dramas unfolding behind them
As if there is a world out there hid in a silver back.
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113. Voices of innocence
May 16, 2011
Their words are spurious but most of innocent power,
Of silky-white voices from soft wet drooling mouths
From the corners of lips, shadows of unsaid meaning.
But shadows fall on voices to make beauty- rhythms
Like morning birds bleary-eyed from night’s tree-sleep
And voices that gurgle, from repeated toothless laughter
Voices that crawl effortlessly with no defeat of hurt
And no scraping on knee-caps of floor-dust and sand
Above all voices that imperially take others for granted
Those others who exist merely to attend to their comfort
And their annoyances shall quickly bring about redress.
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114. The tunnel
May 16, 2011
Disjointed images crawled, in the mind’s wanderings,
Recalling roadside snacks eaten near an old monument
When the light was at its best and life’s misty shadows.
A tunnel took shape ,again and again ,in musty pages
And in other thinned out memories of a short story
Of a certain Maxim Gorky who saw what happened
In life when they dug the earthy mountain from both
Sides of the mountain and they had not yet come to meet
In the bowels of the mountain to say hello to other.
He that dug the mountain is dead, his yellow hand
Now jutting out of the white snow, waving in the cold
As if it has conquered the mountain in its deep heart.
When you meet, come tell me on my grave, it had said.
Such things happened in literature, a maxim of Gorky.
Such things happen in life too due to a design mistake
Come and tell me over my grave, says the poor engineer
Who has been fined one rupee for the design mistake
And he then dies of a one rupee shame on white face
There is not even his tragedy, but poetry of the unreal
A farce that will leave us terribly crimson, in late hours
An absurdity that will make Maxim Gorky turn in grave.
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115. (Reference is to the short story “Tunnel” by Maxim Gorky and to an
unrelated real life incident of an engineer named Barog in British
India who had committed suicide out of the shame of a one-rupee
fine imposed upon him when the tunnel designed by him near
Shimla turned out to be a disaster with the diggings from both sides
of the mountain not aligned with each other)
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116. Suffering in poetry
May 14, 2011
When in poetry, we willingly embrace suffering
As we do at home, in the music of the television soap
Where bongo drums sound as if someone is dead
And there is suffering in belly, in dry eye-whites.
Poetry happens at mid- night, in a whir of the fan
In a shred of white cloud, in a spiked leaf-end,
Where it must fall before season, in eyelids closed
And staring at the sky operating above the basement.
Poetry has to celebrate suffering under the navel.
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117. Temporary
May 13, 2011
What is temporary in time is but a swallowing
Of a little chunk of time by a cavernous hole
A crater-hole formed by the collision of eternity
With our fleshly existence, in itself a tiny hole
Formed by a chance collision in inner space.
We are temporary existences, tents in the desert
Erected for the night before moving the next day
Their spaces quickly eaten up by an endless desert.
The spaces of our people have all been eaten up
By the deserts of time, temporary space-times
That have all vanished in space leaving no trace,
Except a beer-can, a tooth-paste tube, a rag doll
That would now exist in their temporary spaces
Only to be swallowed by the desert in the night .
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118. The parapet
May 12, 2011
The moon climbed the sky in shreds of white clouds.
The coconut tree dealt softly with our parapet wall.
We saw bunches of coconuts sitting heavily in its bosom.
Water sloshed in their shells shaking in the gentle wind
Like in a baby’s head we shook with our both hands
With tongue-clucking in mouth for the water sound
And as the baby gurgled, we laughed in waters of love.
At night the moon was badly caught in its branches
And for a while we thought it was devouring it slowly
Until we would see it back in the sky with a silver ring
That would mean monsoon clouds later in the night.
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119. Misconstrual
May 11, 2011
We then deliberated to impose a meaning on our world
Afraid there was a setback in the matter of perfection.
Deliberated misconstrual should enable better meaning.
But in the end all that remained words, much semantics.
Spherical perfection is a needless appendage we carried
Through our lives, to our lonely years and dark nights
When the worn smell of age, face-scowls of cussedness
Would make even our misconstrual bereft of meaning.
Well, we have lived our empty years and got nothing for it
Not even once could we put a construction on its meaning.
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120. The window
May 09, 2011
You open the window only to smell wet dew
On brown ant-earth covering a decayed bark.
You better let in a bit of air-conditioned wind
So you have time to forget the dew on tree-rot
The day’s shuffling of feet, the smells of decay.
You know she will not live long, now talking
Of pumping of water in an unreal background
To thriving banana trees near the well hanging
With banana bunches with ripe yellow in them.
I see ants creeping on her bark, on shuffling feet.
I see an unreal rot in the sky, a poet’s thought
Where poetry rots in an unreal green of the sky.
I see a large conspiracy of rot in sky and earth.
Behind our backs tiny creatures of decay work
At night to bring about our rot in small pellets
Of brown earth completely covering our barks.
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121. 112

122. Wind
May 08, 2011
The wind brought the dead leaves of a new autumn
And duly rattled our windows, in gaps of their hinges
Through which eerie old ghosts shriek at midnights.
In the bare hills the wind seemed still in sunny shrubs
But the ancient caves echoed with the manacled wind
Of history, within walls that bore many marks of men
Who had brought their wind from the parched plains.
Migratory birds brought their wind from the far lands
A sticky wind that slowly settled on our drying puddles
As they made themselves comfortable in the new homes .
Our old tree ,failing to sprout leaves, pretended to sway
To the wind as if it still tickled its funny bones in the day
And made scary whoosh sounds in its leaves at night.
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123. Poetry without thinking
May 07, 2011
We begin it from beginnings, from a chaos
Of darkness where you had not even once
Suspected existences, all that flimsy matter.
In the dark night it would end up roundly
And as the east reddens it would begin again
And several beginnings form in amoeba –like
Existences and word-shapes of free volition
Their false feet, like lies to be spoken in the day,
Wiggle to make our existences daily poems.
We write without thinking, do not even write.
When we think, our writing stops at our lips.
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124. Sanchi
May 07, 2011
This is the time of the fallen leaf of our time
To turn over a new leaf, when there are only
Sharp needles of tree-stems, their bare arms
Supplicating to the sky to utter camera delight.
Beyond the undulating hills a fallen leaflessness
Pervades a monk-less silence, perfect in sky,
An ancient absence of silently scurrying monks
Of ochre robes in pursuit of white Buddha-peace.
Buddha sits there, broken in piece, his eyes
Fixed at the gnarled tree-back bursting with
Brown skin eruptions of painful knowledge.
(At the ruins of the ancient Sanchi Buddhist monastery situated 60
kilometers from Bhopal)
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