This is a lie, in that,
it is likened with the first thought -
blindfold for a day and daydream.
Sridala Swami caught a boy
who didn't wake up, odd hour
to let phosphene thoughts flow,
confused, like drunken drive on,
a footpath. This is likened to
a poem written wide awake,
could I ever really not see?
This has happened before -
The grass bristles ricocheting finger strokes,
pampered, like mother seeking refuge,
in the smiles mimicry of forgotten childhood emanates,
eyed closed, given in to the gut stretch fever
after retching and vomiting like a cartoon character.
One can't talk to grass otherwise.
In the purple faint of school assembly
hands reaching out to a thud
a concert crowd ready to catch
but delayed reflexes in play.
I felt the hands of strangers,
finger prints etched with water sprinkles
on my face, singing "Wake Up!"
One can't listen to hands otherwise.
Running on an unknown bridge
eyes blinded by sweat and tears
of shock sadness and watch dogs' stares,
of separation, disgust and anger over words
and intentions behind other's mistakes,
eyes closed under an idol unnoticed
a beggar's hand over the head in prayer
One can't sense an unseen person otherwise.
Inside out folding of your mind
impressions washed out, dried
on the wires of gratitude
unequivocal, irrevocable and unsolicited
in the summer sun,
feeling like a toilet flushed after years
I wonder if angels long for it too.
One can't hear silence within, so loudly otherwise.
Jan 11, 2018
Jan 11, 2018 at 4:11 PM UTC
It feels like the effort of scree's fiction against gravity,
the rocks on the mountain slopes,
doing everything they can to not erode down
When you aren't a person of your word
gravity plunges everything on the road downhill,
The cars passing by
your confidence to ride through the trails
It's amazing, that we always have a choice
to choose to act on something or not
heeding to the acts of God, memory lanes,
rising above the pressure of your lowers
to make you keep sitting down all day,
devour chips, seemingly infinite time,
movies and entertaining videos,
and on fine days, getting stuck
to the text an author put their time into
years ago.
These days the heap of regrets
is enough to act as morning alarm
lest everything falls into being undone.
Nov 29, 2017
Nov 29, 2017 at 1:27 PM UTC
After reading/listening to Rochelle D'Silva's "There Will Come A Time"
I woke up to a dream,
which we call reality,
eyes wide open, senses intact,
But who can really differentiate?
I opened my wisecracking eyes
to a photograph of father
grinning so wide, I mistook him
for an uncle I thought I’d forgot.
Prints of the past are like
yesterday’s prints of stale newspapers,
you don’t hold onto newspapers for the news
you hold on them to clean car windshields
and protect shelves from grime,
for chat-pati namkeen and peanut containers,
and then you thrown them away,
which probably get recycled;
but the prints of the past stick, no?
You cringe at the things you said
to the right person at the wrong time and in the wrong place
or five other permutations of the three.
You close your eyes hard
and frown while remembering the times
that you slipped your tongue mispronouncing
words which are in your second language,
or said things that you thought were funny,
but no one laughed.
Prints of the past are like laptop kept on for days,
just because you’d opened some tabs days ago,
contents of which might be unnecessary now,
but your mind’s stubborn to read them all.
***
Poets love the past,
it’s the foundation for words,
pain and agony, and also love,
probably forgotten in those browser tabs.
Without eyes looking out far or behind
without a past and a future,
we might feel hemmed between two walls
closing towards each other at the speed
of retracing your steps back towards
where you’re now, in the present.
What now?
When prints of the past and e-zines of the future
come to seize the end or even the journey for that matter,
when you find yourself extricated from the
vicious cycles of love and lust and and pain and hope,
when any ideas or thoughts seize to entice you,
you resort to memories that don’t make you shiver,
a delicious rub against a sack cloth to relieve an itch.
The crash of the milk bottle racks on early morning errands,
the shutting down of back doors of the bread vans,
or something out of time, something that is funny
and embarrassing that you can’t broach about it.
How seeing someone snorting back the mucus and then gulping it,
makes you nauseous but when you have cold,
you do it yourself, because the handkerchief is far,
and you'd rather not use your hand, "Eew!"
Or memories of an old friend, which is a song
by Angus and Julia stones, but also a song
of blissful senility, it’s been so long,
that you don’t remember her face,
but you still remember what it felt like
to play outside, hand in hand, panting.
Home is where the heart is, heart is remembering.
Or instead, you look at things with a blank slate,
where there’s nothing to left to think about,
you shut your eyes, get lost, probably get found.
By someone on the roadside, staring at you with concern,
perhaps that person is you.
Repeat the vicious cycle of cob webs -
love and lust and pain and agony, hope and thought,
intermittently, and then find words to write about it,
before you can’t anymore, again.
Sep 29, 2017
Sep 29, 2017 at 6:35 AM UTC
I feel the vastness of the hand
like I move my hands to and from the sun
or the moon to fit it right across the diameter
when it lands on your back and I start
moving up and down, to find
that you can’t be controlled like the sun
and the moon can be, from a distance,
that when I will scroll down to your beloved circle
you’ll be a rebel’s soul, parrying quietly
When my tongue will be a mast
in the throbbing waves of your inside
pointing towards the sky, it’ll
fight the battles of the seas,
with the purpose to make peace with it.
You will wet my tongue mast and I yours
moving, thrusting, squishing between
the winds of my two fingers,
you and I will sighs the winds of storms
like they were trying to create
another earth only more, more.
“It’s throbbing more and more,” she said
Let it feel that it longs for a pacifier,
that would heighten its heartbeats first
perhaps even a minor undetected heart attack
burning like the bed sheet under us
lilt of our movements making air
from the fans incapable of extinguising
the fire that will only rest once
it has watered all the trees inside.
Aug 21, 2017
Aug 21, 2017 at 2:06 PM UTC
Perhaps it was too soon
but time will tell me that
it was the right time when
it got loose out of my pocket.
The agony of the lost ink pen
given to me by my grandfather
is not that it had a thick nib
that glided though sheets
of stories, gave track
to trains of thoughts.
The agony is that, I wanted
the pen to be the living proof
in his posterity, or mine
that he was a good man, and
only grabbed by the ills of habits
and inability to control one's mind
did he speak bad with others.
I had a hard time, gulping the loss
like the hardened blob of mucus
too difficult to shove down the throat
but too difficult to push it out.
But then I had no other option,
I could sulk in the moment for long,
or I could imagine that these poems,
are what would show him a good man,
despite his odds of the world against.
I'm the ink and the ink pen
and not what got lost.
For this body too is borrowed,
expenses not more than
what bought the ink pen.
Of course grandfather would
probably get angry if told.
So the agony of the lost ink pen
is that it got lost, but also found
by someone. May the person
find good use of it.
Jul 25, 2017
Jul 25, 2017 at 11:29 AM UTC
Tomorrow I may never die,
writhe in the loops of time
like catching cold endlessly
over so many lifetimes
But the place I sat,
eyes, a waterfall
of suddenly gratitude
towards existence
for its too trivial
for it to have any purpose
other than to exist.
Eyes fluttering spasms of throbs,
shedding some unknown impressions,
long held in the eye of the mind
suddenly vanishing in the air,
I was born anew in shifted time.
Jul 23, 2017
Jul 23, 2017 at 5:43 AM UTC
You failed
not waterproof
you allowed water
to fall into
feet bottom skin
Lucky we had
enough of you
we juggled you
in the leaky shoes
that were
no good either
Next time
you’ll be worn
inside trek shoes
so that
you wouldn’t have to
taste the marshy
stink of feet bottom
the premonition
of possible fever
Jun 23, 2017
Jun 23, 2017 at 7:57 AM UTC
I wish I could be a book
I could send myself to you
in envelops and postcards
over a laconic lifetime
rungs of ladder climbed
waded through like the push
of legs in the water, over sand
chewing on the words you sent.
We, are a family now,
some privileged in the boundaries
of grandiloquent bags and pouches,
some forgotten in the drawers
before relocations,
versions of a person’s state of mind
over time, we make history books
capturing people in the making
of an indistinct next moment
sometimes we carry our own praises
outsourced by the wits of our writers
like love they did find not in the other
but their own selves, blind still.
Does your reader pause too?
basks in the glory of an empty wall
staring at nothing in particular?
I wish we had will and means
to write ourselves on ourselves
so that we could reach other and do that.
Instead like our creators, we are
dilapidated ruins of yellow bodies,
left to live and die on dirt and air
once they are gone, aren’t you scared
of death?
Seeking Reply
Letter A
Jun 7, 2017
Jun 7, 2017 at 11:43 AM UTC
I was looking for a friend,
when you tapped my shoulder
from the back and
I was confused how to
respond back to a recognition
from a person
that was not mutual.
Last time this happened
I was in a hall
trying to remember something
about microprocessors
so that I could at least pass,
when the invigilator stood
on top of me,
just staring me, writing.
Cold sweat droplets
started racing on my face,
assumption: he was
from my department.
When he finally spoke
he asked which exam
was I writing, and in
absolute bewilderment
I forgot, the name
of the exam I was giving!
You girl with an accent,
I had watched your poems,
writing you on stage
like the broad nip ink pen
that road trips with blue ink.
I just forgot,
in the sun burst of your face,
standing in front of me,
as if you knew me
for eternity.
Jun 3, 2017
Jun 3, 2017 at 8:28 AM UTC
Amazing, curve of an arm,
wave of a hand speed breaking
over the stretch marks on lower back
feeling the lines like the habit
of taking corners of clothes and sheets
pressing in between the gaps
of two fingers, a pleasure
no one else ever even sees.
Wrap of an arm, making the back
and front the ancient interior China,
the arm, the great wall of China,
protecting from sadness
and occasional loneliness.
Curve of the legs fitting the other
like they were two rods under thermal stress.
The vastness of the *** comforting the lack
of it on most days, when my body hair
is as natural to you as blinking,
I miss how two bodies become void
In the shape of night’s silence, the arc
May 7, 2017
May 7, 2017 at 1:17 AM UTC