Poetry disguised as prose

1. Fog
Notes in thinking
A.J.Rao

2. 1
Mrs.Moore and the wasp and I
Pretty little thing, said Mrs.Moore who was alone with it in her room
and its brown buzz was plainsong.
This one flew in my room yesterday. I feared the poor thing might
sting and stop being poetry for ever.
(referring to Mrs.Moore’s encounter with the wasp in E.M.Forster’s
A Passage to India)
Post Script
After I had done a poem about the wasp, its mud house surfaced on
my desk. My veneered computer table might have been mistaken
for tree wood.
The mud house ,tightly glued to the table’s laminate ,had to be
scraped off. But the way tiny future wasps inside squiggled, there
seemed no end of wasp poems.

3. 2
Space
Here is a space looking to be filled while this world is cut off for now
.A few headlights are found on a transit road ,a refugee washed
ashore on beach, baby who kissed beach head down.
My space will be filled by the poem what it all means for a
space to unfill , a death on the future side of a pancreas, a
memory dead from a laughing face .
We make poems of space we lose.

4. 3
From my balcony
The sun climbs a neighbor’s coconut , time for a long dialogue of
walk .Everything is so clear and so well cut.A neighbor ‘s tiny
moonlight flowers had done a night’s duty of fragrance.They are
withered smiles on the road.
The parijata tree had shed its flowers on the earth , their feet up in
the air.The feet are so red , so fallen to the sky.
Sister cuckoo is shrieking for her rain in Ashoka tree, with no
idea of a sky hosting no clouds from Arabian sea.Her shrieks
are a despair of farmers who hang cotton dreams on trees.

5. 4
Book shelf
My bookshelf has turned old and gray, a steel – glass self of
see-through age holding my old books to read nothing,just a smile,
a memory of old smells,while silver fish swim in their spines .
If I put it up for sale in used market,from sleep’s darkness I will
wake up to find a black hole in room without its soft gray
assurance of thinginess, smelling like mom’s belly in darkness.

6. 5
Smile
We say selfies are serious business at 66 and a beyond , son of
Shiva. You stretch your space sine die beyond your elbow and
stick.You are playing to a dark audience.
Be aware, average man is around just two years older than this
age.Not much to smile about or under an undyed
mouch,however ffunny.Average man just laughs in mirror.He
finds his comic self hung there,a poet’s tattered coat upon a
stick.(Yeats)

7. 6
Stone
Walking behind was death’s shadow, a hit with no run, a knock on a
head,a shadow that had no original being.A hospital monitor is now
television to brain ticking in tubes to her body.
She who had mothered our new year was a friend amidst
exquisite stones and she is now a stone behind bone froze in
time like the stone maidens that danced for ever on temple
walls.

8. 7
Birthday
We are primarily tuned to a new birthday of a child of long
years,seeking its growth to a world of awareness, strings not pulled
horizons not yet explored, walls not climbed, he that is inured to the
loneliness of night.
The child’s own melancholy had returned sweaty in fear and flight ,a
panic in attack years ago,when a grand mom of stories went away
casually to the outer darkness of fears and the mind went in search
of a body lost.
We now have our newer stories to recount.Our stories shall be
without old melancholy with newer grand moms still in the
making their stories with new hopes yet formulating.

9. 8
Vanish
Mom’s guru had vanished behind a custom warehouse,her mantra
left in mom’s ears above waters.Disciple has since entered soul of
mango tree whose leaves are fluttering like birds in mild wind.
Wind must be fluttering mantra left behind in my mother’s ears
now operating below the waters.

10. 9
Brown car
In short knickerbockers I would run away from the court wall’s
darkness.The car came from dust of darkness.It would soon attain
light to highway.
The car brought my people from dad.They were strangers against
my mom,who wore a familiar dust on her face and my knicker legs
wore small dust.
Dad was dream from my small sleep.But they were real folks of dad
dream.They were flesh then but now in dust.Dad had turned to dust
long long ago.
I keep counting my folks to their dust ,the brown car that had
brought them from out of highway’s nocturnal dust in dream,
readying to join all this dust.

11. 10
Sixty in infinity
We write poems when our women turn sixty, like how we write them
about small -big things ,the thread that passes binding us to an
infinity- little things that make their poetry and mine on the edges of
the night.
Sixty is a milestone in the vastness of infinity that stretches
before me and them.

12. 11
Prose from poems
We will stop to write poems when no longer close-ended.We will
then switch to prose as we will turn old and gray in a wispy beard,
eyes hoary somewhat of a brokenglass.
Broken glass is a watery view a form that distorts the world
turns it to an unending prose ,a poet’s openending estuary into
the high seas of oblivion.

13. 12
Rath Yatra
It would rain on this chariot day and gods went out yearly
riding.Their wood is the nature of things the very jungle from where
we had come,from our ancestors.
Their chariot will roll on our lives the way towards ancient
dreams.We love to die under its wheels we had lovingly made all of
rain from jungle wood recently dead.We shall some day burn as
wood,our ashes lighted by their smiles.

14. 13
Pure View
The pure view envelops the light within weaving darkness around
core of being.Leaf around leaf promises a deep flower nestled in
contrast, a fierce independence untrammeled by a reality check of
color.
The color is moss green away from pink.Pink is leaf around leaf,
petal after petal.The pink reinforces a forced moss-green of leaves
mimicking tiny ground leaves of slippery earth surfaces , rained
walls.
Men are daubed in pink, women in russet.Sun turns blushing
red, a bleeding shame.The trees soar leaf after leaf, to a blue
sky.The sky turns pure view, cloud after cloud.Pure view is
nature brazenly imitating art.
( Taking pictures from Nokia Pure View 41 MP camera phone is
pure joy , an act of willing suspension of disbelief)

15. 14
Making faces
Our alphabet is trying to fix a face beyond reality of a common
seeing, a knowledge that is a state of blur.
This boy in yellow knowlege robes makes faces at our cumulated
folly as we are giving alphabet to baby.
His pantomimic face riles our folly the way he distorts reality of
baby,the way he debunks all knowledge.
(At a ceremony of giving alphabet to the baby at the temple of
Saraswati, the Goddess of Learning at Varagal)

16. 15
A stroke of luck
A sweet , not enough married, woman now majorly spinsterish all by
herself has now her lips sealed to any nature.
What stroke of luck,we say, her life and limb are not stitched to
bathroom and bed.Trust her luck to keep her hands free.
We old men still have our hands free and while we are at it our
poems flow and by a stroke of luck we have lips free.

17. 16
Those are pearls
Rilke’s father had no moustache .The brows touch and in the eyes a
dream.By a poet who looked for dreams in vintage photograph
creatures.
Like Ariel spirit who sang for you to disappear and be gone for ever
singing of pearls that were eyes of dreams that made his pearls five
thousand rupees for a string in the pearl bazar of four towers,far
from oyster hosting oceans.
We are looking for dream fathers without a moustache, their
brows not touching, as knit in thoughts from a far off space,
soft to touch like pearls solidified from dreams found in old
photograph creatures.

18. 17
The rich wood of Adrienne
The poet’s wood is not all that dead .Poet is recently but wood
remains .But its map is gone from 2012 on.
Wood is tree dead but just once dead and can’t surely die again and
again.Wood shall not die ,only map by poet as she would type her
world in map.
A world is gone but the wood stays because it is dead and
dreamwood. A dream dreamed can’t die in wood.Old maps are
still out there frayed and folded, maps she once walked.
( a homage to poet Adrienne Rich on her passing)

19. 18
Forgottenness
Speaking we do, to forget and erase,the hotel eats a food for our
thought right up to the chandelier in bloom,a memory that is lost of
forgot moms.
Our years come back in the thought like Christmas snow, bearded
men in each year’s pretending differently,the festivity in hearts some
fine ice.
Let us now have a clink of ice back,drink to the health of the
deceased,spread flaked rice outside a hearse,as we freeze the
moment in a page of forgottenness torn from memory.

20. 19
Mango pickles
We have passed many mango seasons. We are still mango in tree
and cuckoo, the latter shouting for west hills rain.
We can pelt no stones at mangoes now but can eat stones off their
sweet pulp.Our eaten stones sprout tender leaves from stinking
garbage dumps ,homes to pigs.When they grow big they host
cuckoos ,their branches rub each other in love.
Our mom is now mango to the breeze.She can make no more
mango pickles but hosts mango tasting cuckoo music.

21. 20
Heat wave
The heat came all the way from hills touching the bushes with the
lizards in torpor , stomachs dazed like stone.The birds slept their
summertime siesta.
Waters everywhere wore warm heart,with love as waves to
overwhelm us and choke our bodies with tiny vapor sucked from
limited bogs and ponds.
The sea stopped growling at midnight and sending soft feelers
to an inland to fill its loveless vacuums to its sky and bring
down waves of rain from it.

22. 21
It is a bird
No one knew hud hud would come by the sea, from Northern
islands,a floating hoopoe,with a wing span that covered our black
mountains.
Our dolphin here turns up its nose against looming ships in
high seas.It is our black mountain with nose.It could not stop
the big black bird from entering our huts at midnight.
(Cyclone hud hud this year caused untold destruction to the port city
of Visakhapatnam and to numerous hamlets of local fishermen on
the Andhra coast)

23. 22
Contrails
We went outside ,so we kids could flap our fingers at the contrails
after jets that came smoothly flowing like water under feet,
surprising us behind trees.The birds took no notice nor their trees.
They were not a pilot’s smoking trails and the sound seemed
audibly missing like the lagged sounds of the thunder and we would
wait for it not to come because there was no fun in the sound when
there would be no light streaks.
They were the trails of silent sky-jets that stretched like
monkey god’s tails.They laid luminous paths and our eyes
shone with excitement in our finger nails ready for a little white
fluff to sky-drop to lodge behind them , like tiny pearls that
would enter our fingers fluttering at flamingos flying here on
yearly holiday from their frozen Siberian back homes.

24. 23
Mum is the word ( for mango)
We have passed many mango seasons. We are still mango in tree
and cuckoo, the latter shouting for west hills rain.We can pelt no
stones at mangoes now but can eat stones off their sweet pulp.Our
eaten stones sprout tender leaves from stinking garbages homes to
pigs. When they grow big they host cuckoos .Their branches will rub
each other in love.
Our mom is now mango to the breeze. She can make no more
mango pickles but hosts mango tasting cuckoo music.

25. 24
Girl turns woman
The closed window is struck by voices that come flying from the
basement,a choral celebration of womanhood.They will not break
my glass panes like street-side boys cricket but coagulate on them
like rain moths hitting to gain an entry to light , only to die on wings.
The voices flow from a jointly vibrating drum-skin like the
strident tom tom announcing a new girl-woman thing.They
strike like midnight jackal wails with joint complaints against
the moon.They sound you about a flower arrival in the grass
waiting to be discovered.

26. 25
Berry them
On the hills the berries would appear.Time for you kids to bleed
your palms.They were yesterday’s moon-flowers their milk spilling
like soft moonlight lightly sour but fragrance to memory.
Beware, terror thorns bleed for real.Let it be cold blood in your rat’s
teeth,not on your pudgy schoolboy fingers with the telltale
homework ink stains.
The sun may slip and fall off the edge, he who had filled all this
purple pride.Hurry to bleed pockets but not shins.

27. 26
Walk
I walk these streets in water maps ,rice powder designs , dogs lying
in knots , girls with sleep in eyes,tooothpastes dribbling in mouths
moms violently wake up to school.
I walk them and my metaphors fly as obscure words , as fears in
belly,connections discovered , decisions to be reversed on reaching
home.
Dogs in knots have now to get up walking slowly to the other corner
.They go back to sleep in new knots their dreams intact,sleep
resumed.
Shadows walk on hills to be lifted as soon as clouds pass and
eagle.The clouds then walk on our roofs and trees dancing to
autumn wind.

28. 27
Pure view
The pure view envelops the light within leaving darkness around
core of being.Leaf around leaf promises a deep flower nestled in
contrast, a fierce independence untrammeled by a reality check of
color.
The color is moss green away from pink. Pink is leaf around leaf,
petal after petal.The pink reinforces a forced moss-green of leaves
mimicking tiny ground leaves of slippery earth surfaces , rained
walls.
Men are daubed in pink, women in russet. Sun turns blushing
red, a bleeding shame.The trees soar leaf after leaf, to a blue
sky.The sky turns pure view, cloud after cloud.Pure view is
nature brazenly imitating art.
( Taking pictures from Nokia Pure View 41 MP camera phone is
pure joy , an act of willing suspension of disbelief)

29. 28
Fingers
With dad away on long leave uncle officiates in ceremonies.With
uncle away nephews wait for the big trip up and yonder.Now they
perform ceremonies expertly in waiting anterooms ,keep little fingers
in abeyance.
Where dad lives is freezing cold .Uncle fingers are froze there
too.Soon nephew fingers join them.So all fingers will jointly
freeze.

30. 29
The silver mountain
The silver mountain disclosed answers to a meditating saint in its
deep recess now sky blue with priests interceding for us on behalf
of a phallic stone god.
Then were no blue – red painted pillars enclosing people bathing
phallus gods with smooth gluey banana milk paste, just a saint and
his god in banyan trees sprouting from silver recesses for wind.
The saint would look for beauty in jungle and in silver mountains, on
his cross-legs blinded by a gold of sun , a child’s doubts ,a flicker in
the mind like a child’s smile.
We search beauty in blue stone pillars climbing kitschy colors
engulfing men.Their beauty flows in white gluey paste around
phallus gods in silver mountain.The mountain is no more silver
but blue with white clouds about it as gluey paste.
(On a visit to the Siddhulagutta temple in Hyderabad)

31. 30
Red dust
The mountains bled every time in the throats, for lucre stashed
below lungis tucked at waists ,our faces ugly in dusty greed.Money
would turn their blood to fine dust layering our roads.
Our trucks left their tire treads in fine dust layers on the roads all the
way to green sea, where ships went blue in containers for yellow
men of other shore.
The red dust covered the trees and roads and walking people
all the way to an invisible sky.Our earth is now a red planet at
the other shore of our space.
(Large scale iron ore mining for export has left our mountains totally
devastated in parts of South India)

32. 31
Mysteries
Whether it is pecking at the bathroom glass all the time or only
when I go there is my mystery.What is the mystery in the sparrow’s
mind about the bathroom visitors , their bodies wet in the knowledge
of a pecking sparrow? A sparrow tirelessly pecking at own reflection
is a mystery , set against futility of its effort.How the bird can be
stupid enough to peck against own reflection, ignoring past failures
is a mystery that overwhelms bathing bodies.
I cannot look in its eyes ,set too high and tiny, only sense a light
squirm in its body as I enter.Overwhelmed by no mystery it squirms
lightly which is the same each time I enter its space.
The quest for mysteries is mine, not sparrow’s.

33. 32
Sixty and infinity
After we write poems about a stool and a crow, love and its
remorse, we go on to Lord god with prayer, a blue god with butter in
mouth the very God who lifted mountain for cows against heaven’s
anger, who spread camphor and love to an antline of people in the
hills.
Why not write poems when women turn sixty, like how we write
them about small -big things ,the thread that passes binding us
to infinity, little things that make their poetry and mine on the
edges of a night. Sixty is milestone in the breathlessness of an
infinity that stretches before us.

34. 33
Simulacrum
In a rhythm, please speak up now with us as rain- moths are pulling
out their music from puffed up cheeks and painted hearts .The
cuckoo sings a rain song from a gnarl. Its rhythm will go on till
morning and sun.
Crack a burst sound from the almond shell of morning hid in kernel
on night’s branches the tip of a tongue testifying its early rising.The
adrenaline had wildly gone up the night.
Girls, hold your skirts and swirl like earth-ball to kick the blue
of the airy balloon to a yellow sun .The sun has tied his horses
to swirl around it .It will now be your fate to move in
simulacrum.
“The sun has tied Earth and other planets through attraction and
moves them around itself as if a trainer moves newly trained horses
around itself holding their reins.” Rigveda

35. 34
Buddha in our lake
Buddha has stood in the middle of our path away from our
cleverness and a swirling boat a felicity of word, a beauty of image,
a thing.In the green waters he had waited for us men to lift concrete
goodness and politician’s fame of an actor petrified in the histrionics
of time.
Buddha stands in his stone pleats in the lake. His dazzling
smile of a middle path beckons us from our own concrete
holes, to a golden dusk that glorifies the lake, with all its dirty
contents flowing from our shames in our concrete holes.
(we have a magnificent monolithic Buddha standing in the center of
our city’s lake,Hussainsagar)

36. 35
Chair
At our wedding, chair was a basket for carrying by uncles and
brothers.We sat prim on feet drawn up shyly.We were so queen in
indulgences.
Now we wear chair on our bottom for carry by uniformed airline
staff so we could fly in the flying womb just as we did in mom’s
first waters.We have enjoyed this chair always but stupid bum
had always vertigo.

37. 36
Branches
She has branched off our big branch our own child, drinking the
same sap and her leaves shall fall as if our own on an autumn
earth, from the branch.
My own blood relatives keep flowing along with hers streaming in
my flow.This baby is her branch but mine too in the branch,
branching off my own.
She is the same branch, as the man in the shirt-sleeves staring
in space unremittingly from my whitest wall from among dozen
heads stopping to say nothing, branching their own.

38. 37
Watchman
Watchman is ticking life. Watchman is drunk bird. His chicks eat his
breath.A watchman’s bird will go like all birds from nests in breath or
from breath.He is now room with bird. Without , he will be space like
bird without the nest.
Everyone’s room is mine.When my own bird goes he and I are
same space.

39. 38
Matchboxes
Women stand to fill their emptiness with fire-sticks , not sit down till
evening so they quickly run away in case of fire.Matchboxes are
empty like old houses in Norway of chopped wood’s smelling letters
of note written about by poets on papers of pulp ,like Norway
houses.
Match boxes are like tiny empty houses such that you roam about
freely in them to experience wind between their walls through
absence of furniture, for minds to wander away from them to the
hills to know where the wind has come from or where the fire
resides at stick-heads women run away from while standing.
( on a visit to the matchbox factories of Sivakasi)

40. 39
Taking a tail home
Bringing home was what I had thought instantly of a just opened sky
of birds froze in v formations ,on the east side buildings, where girl
is walking jauntily.
Sun water I shall mix with trees and girl and bird in the swamp
pecking at plastic bag flying in water hyacinth stuck to it helplessly
from actually flying away to other hyacinth-ed waters of lazing
ducks.
I thought of the stray dog wagging tail on the edge of the lake
at the rising sun but could not possibly take his tail
home.Pockets were too full with other things.

41. 40
Our Siberian friends
We went outside ,so we kids could flap our fingers at the contrails
after jets that came smoothly flowing like water under feet,
surprising us behind trees.The birds took no notice nor their trees.
They were not a pilot’s smoking trails and the sound seemed
audibly missing like the lagged sounds of the thunder and we would
wait for it not to come because there was no fun in the sound when
there would be no light streaks.They were the trails of silent sky-jets
that stretched like monkey god’s tails.They laid luminous paths and
our eyes shone with excitement.
Our finger nails were getting ready for a little white fluff to
sky-drop to lodge behind them , tiny pearls that would enter
our fingers fluttering at flamingos flying in on yearly holiday
from their frozen Siberian back homes.We were disappointed
that our Siberian friends had not yet arrived.

42. 41
Fog in the throat
At times there is death’s browning,an experience of the fog in throat
,a chemical stirred by a stray dog smelling our death in casual walk.
The dog is sniffing his own death barking head off on our intrusion
at a death walking in on two legs, trying to fight a fog in his throat.
(Reference is to Robert Browning’s poem Prospice)

43. 42
Radio child
As everyone knows ,everyone has inside cliches and closely
working with them, in beauty routine.Every child knows to keep
company with the old.Those are little things one has kept in old
drawers.
Every tea cup is inside cliche, qualifies for poem.Especially if there
is no tea,drunk before poem.Green leaves are no dregs forming
strange birds.Dregs are Darjeeling tea residues left after train.Train
is what reaches the edge into a sky of tea.
Dregs are left if a retard climbs lover’s deathbed ,a lover who
was a sweet tossing shoes in the air,in a romance like last
night’s withered jasmines left as dregs on beauty hair’s
smelling on pillow.Sweets are cliches in teeth,smell clarified
butter.But shoes in air are strange birds since classified and
found in the fossil society’s rare bird archives.
(Referring to a Bollywood film titled Barfi)

44. 43
Panic
As we had approached it we fell headlong into its oncoming, fitful
sweaty barrenness a blankness staring from our eyes, crazily
tongue-tied like the evil man in a dark cloak with hell- hair on the
ears, covering sound.There was no option about music that came.
These were words in Charukesi of our God who stretched end to
end in the deepest sky.We stood breathless as his feet measured
all the three worlds , under a palm umbrella one foot on our head,
his wooden slippers making no clicking difference to sweaty silence.
Our panic held a bunch of iron keys in fists.Our breath went
out of our body as the keys opened inward sadness, a body
held captive as he measured infinity starting from our head.

45. 44
Bird chick
The bird could be aloft and fluttering its wing but for design defect
forming and falls and putters under cupboard crying from its inner
anguish to God,inner anguish about others ineptitude, for which it
putters about in half wing.
No point in fears about possible cats,possible smiling cats of
the dark night.We are lucky locked in dreaming sleep.God is
locked in his sleep in milk ocean.Night cat is, at all , tail-eating
renewal ,an ouroboros of God-nature’s re-visit, a deja vu thing
as we sleep our night.

46. 45
Ceremony
We all went into a tedious little ceremony of lost innocence, in our
rainbows of wisdom.A man issued his words that touched souls ,
softly spoke 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 a 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 a lap, with fingers in a bed of rice
grains that filled stomachs as though it was a food that fueled
wisdom.He wrote his first letters as 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 a 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
long and arduous journey in education)

47. 46
Flecks
The roof seemed to sit lightly on its light with the sun above and a
looming rain.The roof thatch took light in soft mouth spitting a few
flecks of light to the floor.
The creeper spread itself on the scaffold in backyard, turning a
green gentle sky as moon flowers waited to turn pumpkins.Flecks of
moon danced to a light breeze.
The wedding tent fought against the hot sun as a clarinet blew
out its puffs of mouth.Flecks of a hot sun tickled the groom’s
back causing bridal flurry ,while her own dress sported flecks
stitched on a silken texture.

48. 47
Wild tune
If it is wild tune, it is a poem ,says Frost,rather frostily of waves of
snowed hills.Frosty breath goes of mountains falling.Tea breath that
was cloud is here water.
Water is earth and mud about stone god .Stone god is helpless
about violent wife.Violent wife is piece of mother deranged because
of progress dams in her bosom.
Her tune goes wild and somewhat eerie in the nights about
dead people waiting for their fires to be lit after copters
come.Copters bring the wood for the wild tune.Stone god dad
is waiting for his death ash.
(A busy pilgrimage until the flashfloods, Kedarnath today has turned
into a virtual ghost town …..There’s an eerie silence at Phata
village, broken each time a chopper lands or takes off. Three
pundits are performing the last rites near the river Mandakini :
Times of India report

49. 48
Jewel thiefs
We are concerned with your story telling about events, other goings
on in place. They do not exist in a plane of their own. The figures
are not two-dimensional ,hung by a thread ,triangularly to the wall.
Their eyes protrude from sockets and lips,the eyes , one to the
north and the other screwed to the western pillar, in a squint as if
dislodging a sun ray from the skylight.In short they lack flesh and
some bones and they loom large like noon shadows,dark and
menacing, in the high afternoon.
They can scare the shit out of your eyeballs when you are not
careful of their coming.They zoom past, on their soundless bikes
and rip your alabaster necks from behind.Your gold will stop
glittering for their highs and you will remember your grandmother.

50. 49
River legends
That time we saw the river rising quickly, past our sleeps and
drowning our everything including sleeping cots and then we heard
cries of people climbing to roofs for a bit of a sky.
Legend had it of a young old man squatting hunched up in the attic
up above the swirling waters as if he was reading from history
books narrating a story down the ages.He was history mad,water
averse.Actually he loved pillow too much being bald banker off the
rockers.
We were not bald but a training banker and too young to be off the
rockers. But what lovely rain to drown under ,what a pale sky to be
afraid about.The sky was father we feared most.He would spank
ears with his rain to instill nature fear in bank minds.
Legend had it of mom now in a sky, my source river that rose
in flowing dam to turn a legend as bodies flowed.The legend
turned ashes in a river.

51. 50
Smorgasboard
Picture your day , a lifetime story when written up ,fully and finally .It
is an old man’s story, not to be a mix of colors, weirdly textured,a
palette of words, a brushstroke of uninitiated, an antic landlord.
Woman is doe-eyed, picture-like looking for her man perfect type a
perfect type story, as eating out from your hand, a Saturday
persona of long spun stories of grandma.
Grandmas are dead from paintings of exhaustion of laughter in
prime.Stories flow under naughty moons.Grandmas were laughing
at moon stuck in the night’s coconut palms.
Days go on like lives likely to stop,their eyes still retaining bits of
sky.Dream planes crash on sex snakes,their lips drooling on
soft pillows, fear ruling the juices under shirts while world
spins out the window.

52. 51
Forgetting
Forgetting is a lot of things about my mom including me and I
forgetting a body from her.
Forgetting is in mind’s body. Its protein particles are river dried
up in the source hills.Forgetting is erasing a mom from
protein’s free flowing.

53. 52
The world
And the world appears in the moment and disappears as a handful
of earth, in its lips-smacking flavours and slurps, some sounds
later,a truly trite silence.Silence matters to nobody or to God.
We keep yapping about golden silence. Silver version is average
Adam’s apple going up and down ,in indecent haste, a
woman-induced effort in a garden of mischievous serpents.
Actually world never happened except in a night’s sleep, as
somebody’s dream in the cloth-cradle ,as a bundle of sleep,as
electric fan whirred above ,to breeze the bawling bundle to sleep off
dreams.

54. 53
Hail
While I was still holding a stomach ,the hail banged right on the
plastic roof its luminous pearls lost to posterity.Grandsons have
them on tongues.
Stories shall be told on deathbed.Our extended tongues tasted
none of the icicles except as they are projected to future grandsons
in time’s vague womb.
Do not hold a stomach for thunder .That is when a hail falls on
a plastic.Stories do not make perfect storm.Hold a tongue up to
sky to catch it.

55. 54
Stroke
We do not like strokes in television watching, staring at a clock
fixation as if smiling for ever, a frozen smile, not moving shadow on
face ,flitting as if a white cloud passing on a hill and soft sunset hue
added for gold.Poets like to add gold everywhere.
Our stroke of luck does not happen all the time ,in the television or
out.This sort of a smile is just some ice,a frozen Arctic waste
on mom’s face,fixed for ever and there is no gold,a worn
sunset with no talk of dawn.

56. 55
Distances of time
With a distance of time ,what had looked white would turn vague
and gray by growing years, our wading in knee-deep muddy rain
waters in the streets by white walls missing in places,the men who
tucked white lungis in the waists,the coins that felt round to fingers
in pockets,the rivers dancing round heads of mountains.
The walls stretched interminably to a white sky hiding bush and
snakes in them gently rising,feet shuffling to rustling sounds of dry
leaves.The squirrels had built bridges for man-gods and earned
three dark stripes on their backs.Strange birds sang in the sky
deaths of lives.With more distance of time our eyes slowly fell
and the body hurried past closing our spaces.The distances
are now small, the skyline close.

57. 56
The pugilist nose
At the start of the walk the fly danced around a pugilist nose in clear
geography of a gray sky with no rain, only a promise.
It seems raining in the other sky. Will the clouds turn rain like flies?
In the sky is a swarm of doubts that will soon turn flies, flies buzzing
around a walking nose.
But now the sky is the other sky.And as I reach the end of the
walk the nose is fighting rain like flies.

58. 57
Homesick
Soon he would become homesick ,sick of a home away from a
home where coconuts danced all night.He would go to bed and not
get up.To a big bank of numbers and notes.
Small numbers crawl up to big ones where they swallow the small
ones,in a big sky of a billion numbers,where light is distance , not
sound.
You keep a day book of numbers but your red ledger is quickly
filled,their figures enter steel cupboards where they would live
for the night.You forget to take them out next day.
(upon the passing of a senior colleague in my bank)

59. 58
Ugh things
The butterfly was a crawling ugh thing on the road against my
woodland shoes of yesterday’s walking toward old man who
dragged a limp foot for exercise.
The black itchy creature of ugly disgust is one’s own fear of death, a
decrepit body trying to create its marvelous moments marking
beauty of tiny things, rainbows held aloft on grease bubbles on wet
days.
There is not much we can do about it,only project butterflies on
ugh things.

60. 59
Truth
Truth is what touches a fringe,a fact that dated back to
grandmothers eating their rice,one after the other, in Sanskrit.
Contradiction is a dead tongue spoke to bring down bodiless,
grandmother and grandmother, the rice eaters in their crows.
But that is what all our truth is.Truth is rice eating yearly crows that
understand only Sanskrit,that is the tongue of the dead.
We build bridges with the dead the way a bodiless truth works
.Truth is learning our colleagues no more eat rice off their
plates.

61. 60
Rain
For seven days and seven nights our rain would go on our thatch
that held our young crows captive.Their black was almost washed to
gray and the thatch looked a rice field sprouting last year’s left over
rice.
We have made up the rain stories.Our farmers were taken off
turbans and the light was not sunny yellow,only eerie ultra violet
rays touching the bellies that had no raging fires.
Like the girls we have made it all up.

62. 61
Next
We are in a hurry to know the next, curious to know.Our now asks
who is next.This woman is a light-bulb and her light is in a pocket
and shows through blouse.
Brother is a wind in trees gently passing old woods.He had a next
after years of his brother’s early next.(His bulb had quite a light now
softly passing trees.)
We are in a hurry to know the next, curious to know.The
woman is still her bulb with no next sign to light.She will be
happy to know the next, curious to know.

63. 62
Mirrors and sparrows
The way the mirrors stood we felt like recent sparrows pecking at
their bird selves to an infinity that goes on in such mirrors of history
.They had built the mirrors to selves off men’s wealth and work, but
soon wealth was over and in the zenana the women stayed huddled
in incompleteness of space.
The palace is like the queen’s,beyond the green of Atlantic.A king
guest offers its manna and palace stands in splendor,with banquet
for a hundred.
Now, a new hotel preened its feathers to men’s wealth.The nobles
in long mustaches stared down from roof wood like they were
old sparrows looking at their own infinity.
(On a visit to the Falaknuma palace in Hyderabad)

64. 63
Frittering away the moon
Four’ O clock, after mandatory piss ,not groping back to my bed I
pass through a good old poet’s shadow bumping into it on night’s
balcony where I go to check on clean moon.
The moon has just been siphoned off. The sky persists with its
remnants,hardly anyone’s idea of clean moon with the trees below
in numb homage,some crumbs for a rag-picking poet.
There was nothing laughable in this as a shadow’s sad steps
were heard. A moon can be frittered away in sleep.Happens if
we do not get up for piss.

65. 64
Stroke
When the stroke came she was watching television serial flowing in
climactic music in bass,a snarling of violins at the precise moment
as bad woman entered.What a stroke of luck she passed, we said
of grandma in television.
Grandma outside television smiled at man’s heroics, girl’s
sacrifices but her satisfied smile would stay pasted on her
face, not get up to go,much after hero has left his stage and
living room has fallen silent with echoes of his drama sounds.

66. 65
The box
One enters the box with spiked gate to make clockwise oval circles
of familiar world views, at times, with strange incursions of thoughts
asking why a certain black cat beside the rock and the sprinkler
exists in today’s accomplished view.
It is not the cat alone by the rock. Try changing it to anticlockwise to
see strangely preoccupied faces that seemed to be thinking much in
burping stomachs and acid.Squeals of old laughter greet morning
views of mist and rabbits- disappeared rabbits that had merely
jumped out of the box and gone. There was no grass left in the box.
We are making circular motions dutifully in our own square
boxes. We look up to see standing people in balconies of
red-and-blue houses bursting with morning men and lungis.
They should be back in their box soon.

67. 66
Stroke
In this mist are vague contours of people and shrouds of them
walking towards me and away like wind that wanders in mist or a
rain that comes in walking on the road ,as gusts of a wind, as
people and daughters about, people and mine from a womb and
white robed figures in long tails hanging from their necks.
My mind recognizes sovereignty of the foot, functioning on
own.The fly does not walk its texture nor does the song set it
tapping ,a ghost foot declaring rebellion,preferring to join them
in a mist, as if parts are wholes themselves.

68. 67
The village doctor
The man with a red dot looks down his eyes marginally to below the
skin, the subterfuge where stomach humors show. The hakim is
monkey man of a myth’s fame, making men swallow brown pellets
for quick cures for stomach’s skin and mind maladies that make
women shake like full-blown trees caught in a windstorm, their hair
disheveled.
A middleman helps us wade crowds of men.Men wait outside to
enter unreal iron cages,anterooms for an entry to the medicine
man.The man would then bend his ears sideways to muttered tales
about stomachs and devils and scrawl prescriptions in quick round
letters that wriggled like earthworms in a new furrow.The middleman
now takes us to growing rice,proud to show his rice dominions till
sky-high.
We see more men coming for women’s ghosts .

69. 68
The boy monks of Gangtok
In these hills they spoke mostly of frank-innocence, myrrh ,camphor,
a white smoke curling to heavens, a hollow echo in layers of hills
like rumble of the first thunder.Boys are not boys,not even men ,just
tiny gods scampering on hills in search of Big God,in sacrifice.A red
apparel is their sun god intensely burning in standing trees.
Innocence is at stake, in cricket and ludo,a game of dice and
chance, a flicker of smile, a wave of mirth surging in the hills
like a stream,freshness traded for Big Knowledge.

70. 69
Common poem
Between us two and common poem is tree with potential red
flowers.Take care ,you perpetual woman.You and I shall listen to
this tree, its bark ravaged by time like face letting the big petal drops
fall and tears from leaves,drop by drop.
Let me pour its red flowers in your palm.Take care , you
perpetual woman .Also you take care of boat in Ganga and its
gentle ripples on our shore.
(I watched this beautiful Bengali movie Bhalo Theko yesterday)

71. 70
Uncle is idea
Uncle is now idea, on green carpet and a house beside two
coconuts,as we see a fire rage in a kitchen and pigtails quiver with
fire chants.Last time, a year ago, he was thing on way to be mere
idea in my mind.The thing is now an abstract thing,an argument
away from a sarcasm.
Uncle is an idea together with dad and a mom of the far off mango
tree.The ideas vanish when I turn idea,an argument with neat
conclusion.

72. 71
Uncle
It was time to cease to be an uncle, a lecturing dad , a senti brother,
to he who stared from a photo, in grayscale rolled shirtsleeves
.Uncle would stare at the bottom of the starry sky. Later, nephew
would join him.
While uncle was at it ,in his life he had bitten his sarcastic lips about
the world and its maker and you nephew was peculiar.
Nephew now asks uncle to wait till he reaches a house bottom so
they will jointly stare a sky making fine sarcasm together.

73. 72
Protein
Forgetting is a lot of things like mom resigned to forget where she
was my other day.Forgetting is in body’s mind,in protein specs free
flowing.
Forgetting is a lot of things about my mom including me forgetting a
body from her.
Forgetting is in mind’s body ,its protein particles a river dried up in
the source hills.
Forgetting is erasing mom from a protein free flowing.

74. 73
Scenery
We continue to pit two tiny hillocks against the infinity of a sky
bending dangerously on the brown bushes with loud explosions in
their rear and a gray smoke in the elevation.We have a man and a
woman near,two faceless figures for a scenery.They have no faces
but cheekbones.
A rock gets angry with a loud bang with machines making it look
small in the bigness of the blue scenery.Woman bathes in
emptiness of rock.Rock falls into emptiness of morning as smaller
holes bath in bigger holes.Brown bushes bath in their shadows.
Holes have shadows in themselves.Shadows have no holes in a
scenery.There are tiny eruptions in shadows like lizards in holes
quickly catching tiny eruptions to eat their emptiness.
We are in a hurry to pit two tiny hills against the infinity of a
breathless sky before it eats them into its emptiness.

75. 74
Layers
There is the rattle of the machine and a vigorous thump on its
flanks, another noisy night thump to quiet the dusty cooling fan
inside C.P.U. letters separated by layers of dust.They fly away,
keep them together with full stops between the letters.
The water bottle is down with a neck hole semi-circular for sipping
like a semicircular moon in balcony with a night wind quietly
humming.The night watchman’s whistle bores a semi-circular hole
in the midnight.
Now is pressure on top of a prostate falling for a leak, like expected
cloud in monsoon any time coming but not, being satirical about a
swollen strawberry lightly woken from sleep for poetry.
A he he is about old man’s love life come to ceasura. A vigorous
thump administered yields no love results punctuation gone through
a window.
Poetry is still left in a night’s layers when peeled like tearful
onion rings nothing at the core,only an absence,a silence
between the layers of dust.

76. 75
Wild tune
This is a wild tune ,folks, from snow hills of woman grass heads,as
flute sings ruin on precipices over watching endless tea. Wild tune is
now a poem of personal ruin.If it is wild tune, it is a poem ,says
Frost, rather frostily of waves of snowed hills. Frosty breath goes of
mountains falling.Tea breath that was cloud is here water.
Water is earth and mud about stone god. Stone god is helpless
about violent wife.Violent wife is piece of mother deranged because
of progress dams in her bosom.Her tune goes wild and somewhat
eerie in the nights about dead people waiting for their fires to be lit
after copters come.Copters bring the wood for the wild tune.Stone
god dad is waiting for his death ash.
(A busy pilgrimage until the flashfloods, Kedarnath today has
turned into a virtual ghost town …..There’s an eerie silence at
Phata village, broken each time a chopper lands or takes off.
Three pundits are performing the last rites near the river
Mandakini : Times of India report)

77. 76
Truth in a Mumbai local train
Images do not mean much ,only idle fancy, a passing show sliding
away by a train,with hanging people as big busy blurs.The tracks
people mean only squatters off houses of tarpaulin sitting with
crows.
These dark birds squat on the tracks to hit a train’s bottom, wanting
to get at truth,a morning’s getting a sky’s orange worth.
Images do not get at truth ,only at blurs.They move slowly like
squeaking train fans as if to get at truth, unhindered by crowd.
But nobody ever got at truth in a local train.

78. 77
Stars by his last count
She has now come to keep the night in a state of rumble, a peace
unkept ,a remember of a day that stretched like days in no hurry of
denouement ,when nothing would finally happen.
Another lady went away of malignancy leaving a high and hiccuping
husband with a dancing throat in the kitchen in male egotism and
paternal rights.The lady has since embraced her fire leaving her
man entirely unembraced.
She ,whose eyes have long gone wild in her son’s sleep, is
looking for stars in the night at their last count by him.She has
forgot the count in the melee, of she who went away to
embrace fire leaving husband highly unembraced.

79. 78
The fall
This fat lady is of the fall in the dark Kolkata night of an uncle no
more in air.The fall could have been branch -arresting, if only there
were a tree between balcony and earth ma.
It is the telephone wires that did the arresting bit .The fall went
on,unfailing ,the way to mother earth on the pavement where a
mother earth smelled a garbage of old lettuces for dogs and boys to
scrounge at break of smoked dawn.
The falling lady goes on with her daily business, children’s
marriages, the duties of a grandma she owes to earth
ma.About bones life flowed,blood flowed to gravity but fall
goes on in body,the stuff of her dreams and in my own dreams,
an image of endless fall.

80. 79
Water
With two coconuts and wind to wave in ,there is angry God at the
other shore.Between us and him there is a wading,as if of oblivion,
of our never returning.
We are wading chest -high in waters and our heads below our
drowning act.These waters are our common wading,a thread
through our living and dying.
This is the very aqua inside the coconuts,waving in high wind, the
very waters,we had come from and we had waded,when we had
begun,our eyes still shut,to a blinding sun waiting at cave’s end.
(on a visit to Narsing Jeera temple in Bidar)

81. 80
White lies
White lies is what the man in the story tells his wife about their
non-existent sons in America,The story of four sons . Three of them
are in America earning their filthy dollars while the fourth one has
stayed back at home to look after the aged parents.
The sons in white America send white dollars to the parents to
enable their journey.What if one of them has a white wife who is
good enough to get him to buy a car for them and it is still a white
lie.
How nice,who knows what lies ahead!
White America, white wife,white lies.
The man spins his yarns in the train’s clackety,clackety to a wife
who knows in the depths of her heart it is these lies, these white lies
that make up their lives.
To the lone fellow-passenger who has own white lies to
speak.Everyone has his own white lies. His narratives fill the vast
silences of the night as the train slices through them.Their white
fluorescence illumines the darkness in his soul.
It is these white lies that dispel black existential questions for a
moment.Like the soft beam of the train’s headlight that brings
several dark bushes into transitory existence and then leaves
them to the oblivion of the night.

82. 81
( A Telugu short story entitled “Yatra Special” by Dr.Somaraju
Susheela)

83. 82
Paper boats
We recall a rather silly paper boat we made folded with a pyramid
rising right from the middle of it. Where would the villagers stand
and the boatman with his oars?
In the early days of boat making boats had these clumsy
pyramids,albeit with no pharaohs beneath.We had just learnt boat
making for our temporary rain puddles.There was no cold night’s
desert with a Sirius ruling from above.
Our grandchildren find it rather difficult to reconcile desert pyramids
with monsoon street puddles ,leaving little space for boatmen with
oars and standing villagers.
With quarter page of newspaper what could anybody have done if
rain had come to our streets with no prior intimation to us amid no
flood alerts on radio?

84. 83
Potato peeling
We had been peeling our days, me and mom, she hers, I mine.Her
potatoes were chips for a roof drying ,like her mangoes that went
drying for a year’s dinner.Mine were a flicker, a light now here, now
gone. I had peeled my days off the sun.Bits of a sun went drying for
my roof pickles.
When all the others were away at the Mass , the child and mom
peeled their respective potatoes. Plop fell their feelings in the
bucket. The others were wiping their tears.Her head bent towards
him the potatao peeling way.
My mom’s potatoes are no more. I am still peeling my sun off its
dusk.
(Referrring to the poem “When all the others were away at the
Mass” by Seamus Heaney)

85. 84
Mirrors
The way the mirrors stood we felt like recent sparrows pecking at
their bird selves,to an infinity that goes on in such mirrors of history
.They had built the mirrors to selves off men’s wealth and work, but
soon wealth was over and in the zenana women stayed huddled in
incompleteness of space.
The palace is like the queen’s, beyond the green of Atlantic.A king
guest offers its manna
And palace stands in splendor,with banquet for a hundred.Now, a
new hotel preened its feathers to men’s wealth.The nobles in long
mustaches stared down from roof wood like they were old sparrows
looking at their own infinity.
(On a visit to the Falaknuma palace in Hyderabad)

86. 85
The old woman
She was the old woman of our age as we hurtled towards our old
age,her crinkle too young for our age.Her body shook an entire
laughter,acting life like it was no real thing.
An old woman of our essential age,her body wrinkled as if it laughed
its guts out, emptying inner bags of its several childhood
laughters,spilling on the floor, rolling over as inside-splitting ,old hag
bodies that had gone and to go hereafter.
(At the ripe age of 102 , the veteran actress Zohra Sehgal passed
this year)

87. 86
White
A telephone call talked of an an old man with a white topee .His
small-time father ,who worked in a cement factory.The cement is no
longer.The white topee is no longer.
Memories linger of a city on the sea where the waves beat black
granite rocks.The white surf of an ocean which stretches to distant
Aden.There the ancestors had landed in a dhow to make
tradesmen’s money.
Tall white stone buildings which stood against the blue sea.At night
they wore the transparent veil of pale moonlight .On moonlit nights
perfumed society people stood against the ocean .Among the rocks
where the waves from the distant Gulf beat their city.
Dark people sold smuggled tape recorders with whirring tape-spools
.The whitewashed buildings had white peace in their upper bellies
.But in their under-bellies they had fishermen’s knives and red
revenge .
A frail old man from the city made white salt at the sea-shore and
spun white cotton on hand-wheels and made others wear white.

88. 87
Cold
The distinguished pink of your nose,a mild river that has sprung in
throat strikes head, stuffs it wth emptiness,like hollow sound of wind
in wheat.The hum is explained by blood rivers.Just check if platelets
are a profusion.Check if you are holding adieu session in the head,
where it is all happening.
Adieus need not be noisy all the time but just a hum of the cataract
nearby or pigeon’s gutar-gu in a window-sill, a soft sound stretching
time endlessly. Rivers flood kerchiefs like in monsoon,in tidy
streamlets through the nose bridge. We hope the heart hides no
murmurs in this holesome hum drowning world.

89. 88
Another mountain is dead
A little golden girl walked towards me from the hills with the morning
sun in her hair .
At the road’s corner I see a shirtless man on the scooter , with the
sacred thread that hovered on his hairless chest.He is our temple
man , our friendly intermediary between us and God.His words were
a mere drone in the temple loud speaker in the morning but surely
the power of his words before God exceeded the earth’s borders.He
has a belly round as God’s earth, with cosmic incantations in them
for calling down thirty million gods from the sky.It was his words and
flame and water that connected us to our monkey god.
Later in the day a lonely worker chipped away at the neighbor’s roof
.He was repairing a leaking roof that stood between the sky and my
neighbor when the sky poured torrents of rain on his head.The
sounds of his relentless hammer-beats echoed in the hollow
afternoon air.The sounds were interspersed by a yellow bird’s
tireless notes.The notes came from our dead standing tree which
was still hosting beautiful yellow birds ,while awaiting its final
execution by the municipal Axe.
In the afternoon ,one heard a loud explosion in the distance which
rattled our windows and set off bunches of cawing crows from the
sleeping trees.
Another mountain is dead in our neighborhood.

90. 89
His moustache is jasmine
There is this old jasmine seller whose mustache has grown white as
jasmines .In the basket on his head a string of fragrant jasmines lay
curled like a cobra waiting to be charmed.He sells arm’s lengths of
strung jasmines,one length going for ten rupees.His white shirt and
white turban have gone brown with the dust of the streets like
yesterday’s wilted jasmines.
I pretend everything is fine and there is no ten year time frame for
my existence .The lady there says ,when she first came into the
new house there were a lot many things to do because at fifty years
of age there was no time frame fixed for her. Now at sixty the time
frame is clearly visible and so, there are not many things to do,says
she.
Birthdays are closing spaces between chunks of time,a
semi-colon in our life’s sentence.The old man who sells
jasmines seems to be pretending that there is no time frame for
his existence.Can I not pretend the time frame does not exist?

91. 90
Faery tale
It looks like you are through with the stock of fairy tales told in the
evening hour. As the night’s stars appear one by one to occupy their
positions in the hall,a soft breeze will stir in jasmine bush from
evening’s wetness of fresh leaves.As to the prince finally saving the
dame , everyone shall be duly happy at hall’s end.
The hall is empty with the stars coming one by one, as your breeze
gently stirs in the flower bush and the garden lizard looks at your
waiting for the next move.The lizard is your own word in the offing.
Your reasons are a grand abeyance show as the lizard is waiting for
the next move .And a prince moves ahead on horseback toward
everyone’s happiness of wedding.

92. 91
Rain in Bhopal
Evening rain glistens on the road as bread is bought and bananas
are turned over for ripeness and less ripeness.The rain is dancing
on the car roof .From the car the camera tries to catch the wet sun
on the leaves of the corner tree .Soon the wipers catch fever and
quickly we make our way in a sea of umbrellas.

93. 92
Weddings in summer
In the street there is an improvised tent with people sitting on hot
colored plastic chairs.
The tent burst with clarinet music played by a wedding band
.Weddings are just some clarinet music and some plastic chairs with
people in them. The bridegroom ,in a thick suit,comes out briefly
wearing a red vermilion on his forehead and a blotch of sweat under
his arm.
Marriage is sweat,blood and tears.
Marriages are hot ,sweaty and blood-red.
Marriages are tents full of clarinet music.
Marriages are incomprehensible Sanskrit chants.
Marriages are silk sarees rustling as though the spring wind is
already here.

94. 93
Seeing is for the asking
Seeing brims over our things ,storms our teacups, fills
anchorages,balconies for a night, sunlit spaces in tall trees ,corners
where a mom meets a shadow,a lizard on the wall. Seeing is yours
in my words.
Seeing is water not spilling from a child’s hands clasping the glass
with both his hands moving feet in slow measured motion or his
squatting on the floor drawing feet together to cry ,opening and
closing his feet like tentacles,in beach sand on their way back to the
sea.
Seeing is yours for my words. Old woman is emitting light ,a
camera’s laughing at death.Seeing is her skin’s wrinkled cloud
drained of a future rain.
Seeing is a word on this keyboard.

95. 94
Place
Place is its loose dust and red powder, all over the road with iron
,for shipping
to far lands in deadweight for money.Place is blood money, revenge
on hills.
Place weighs down ships by its redness and looseness of soil, a
rubble of body
granulated and pouring in bag chinks.
A shrub blinks at redness and is covered in eyes at the opposite hill,
entirely nude as hill competes in redness with sunset. Sun is not
place ,only time for bleeding.
Place is man-altered landscape of color when green changes to red,
red to gray. Water changes to land boiling for men to change their
dresses, to eat breakfast and fuck their women in shades of gray.

96. 95
Metaphors are many
I collect my images in the park ,put them in the empty canvas here
I people my canvas with images
A metaphor within a metaphor
Just not one image within another but onion-peels of several images
some of them bearing another image within themselves.
Canvas is one image .People the canvas with images is another
within this image and images themselves are metaphors for people !
The possibilities seem endless !
Other images
An old bald man realized the blue infinitude of the sky in his toes
Two girls flowed together on the jogging track their ponytails
swinging in sync.
The water flowed from the tube in the grass like sound
Keep alive witnessing the yogic death of a man on the grass
Beyond him, above the wall are the coconut’s standing silences
That was all my rich rakings for that day.

97. 96
Dirt
Not finding dirt we went on to find only chunks of butter that flitted
before eyes.Where is the dirt was then carefully asked ,to move
away from our dirt, in isolation behind the finger nails, where we all
go. Not finding dirt in the little god’s mouth its mother saw a whole
universe of dirt.
Dirt flowed from excess butter in veins from buffaloes calmly
chewing their cud over troughs of sticky rice husk porridge.Their
lower mandibles moved on to night.Below them was rain dirt feet
squished in.
Excuse me ,we talked of dirt against dust .As if there was difference
in biblical terms. Dry dirt can be dust we are a handful of.We
collected it under varnished fingernails after carefully filing them,
with tiny whites now visible from under them like old stars emerging
from a night sky festival. While we were still awake ,the nail whites
were softly flying birds from Siberia seen in the eastern sky over
houses and trees.They would drop down under our fingers as we
waved little fingers at their wings.They went back soon after their
nesting .

98. 97
Images
We have other images of ourselves hollow men, fleshed out of our
bones, poor nightly creatures of fluorescence roaming the empty
wastes of minds. We have our original men in rolled shirtsleeves
staring from ancient space, not yet knowing my coming, that meant
his own going from all space in time.There was space only for one
of us.
All our images are shadows from past that are cast on our space
even after real things are gone except in sleep.

99. 98
Skyline
With distance of time ,what had looked white turned gray by growing
years our wading in knee-deep muddy rain waters in the streets
along white walls missing in places ,the men who tucked white
lungis in the waists,the coins that felt round to fingers in pockets, the
rivers dancing round heads of mountains.Strange birds sang in the
sky deaths of lives.
With more distance of time our eyes slowly fell and the body
hurried past closing our spaces.The distances are now small,
the skyline close.

100. 99
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 and 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 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.

101. 100
Dying of excess life
It was as though I was not ready and it might slip away in an
unrecorded moment.
Life would slip away that evening. Because of excess life,
redundancy in cells. Dying of excess life. The lady would collect
frost in the cellar : her death would go on, till the next day when she
would embrace fire. In the meantime life would go on. The music
would go on in the street temples of the elephant-God linking her
death to our life.
We shall die, when our turn comes.Like her we may die of excess
life .Or of excess death

102. 101
The 70’s man
He floats around the park like a creature from another time ,another
space.He wears the 70’s clothes and listens ,as he floats in the
present space ,to the 70’s music which emerges out of his left
pocket and spreads like a rain -puddle around him
In the blue clouds and
over the waves of the wind
I hear the song you sing
He is the 70’s man who wears the 70’s side-burns and thinks like a
70’s man.Those were the days for them.Those are the days for him.