…But I fail to grasp…
I really do.

And I fail to write too
about the colossal confusion
in my mind's realm.

To be free must always create glee.

And freedom, consequently,
must incontestably be
the loftiest of all bounty.

✽

…But then they say:

Do not run away from your instincts
…of survival, love, anger, ***…
for if these instincts were not of value,
nature would not have given them to you.

And I muse: Is it true?
Is it?

this incomprehensible link between being free
and the ineluctable visceral slavery?

Won't it rather be that no sooner than you begin to try
to attach (or detach) value to this view or the flip-side

freedom…would indubitably fly

…away?

And then they say that one must surrender.
And thus I agonizingly wonder:

when the mind doesn't wish to unwind
…to let go…
and you bully it to do so

you still cannot be set free

for it is only they who say:
Whatever you resist
shall persist.

✽

And I fail to grasp, I really do,
the cryptic intent of this concentrated glue
of chaotic desire and cardinal instinct
inherently inbuilt
by nature's very own inscrutable mechanism
in (wo)man's puppet-like plight

and then making salvation

the sole noble right
of a free spirit.

✽

An afterthought mulishly survives:

Why?

She was a beautiful girl
with intense eyes
and long black hair.

We would sit
on the windy cliff
till the Sun
went over the hill,
and
she would sing to me
and talk to me
about life;
that promised to be ours.

Then,
the evening would take
deeper, softer shades
and we would go
our own separate ways
waiting......
for the next day's meeting.

Today,
as I write about
those lively days,
I can still
feel the gaze
of dreamy,
eager eyes
of that beautiful girl
whose life and dreams
oozed away quietly
through the hole
in her heart.

I was a bit startled by the sudden pop-up.

With an exclamation sign, it speechlessly cried:
"Do you want to archive your old items now?"
Before clicking 'Yes' I could not suppress
the desire to casually scrutinize some of the files
from erstwhile.

It was then that I found that sepia-toned photo
from a long time ago.
I clicked the button and the picture began to open
like a suspense presentation.

And lo!!! the screen was soon exuberant
with the boyish delight
of a face that was raw and digitized.

I was besieged by a certain memory of a bygone memory.
The face;
resembled me and seemed pure and unsullied
...sans any imprints of time.

I was exhilarated
as I had not hurriedly superannuated
that amber shaded, nascent and jaded
photo-file.

After all, It was me of my teens!!!

Lost in reverie, I hit: "Save as JPEG"
but the computer reparteed: "Can not save. Read-only"
And then: "Do you want to save with a different name?"

As I clicked 'No', I seemed to know that it was
as futile to save the file, as it is to try to replicate
that ‘flower-in-a-bloom’ smile
...again.

Somehow, it seemed inappropriate to keep a counterfeit
of what was then authentic.
So, I took a while to carefully feel the rays of innocence
exuding from the screen and then exhaled,
clicked 'close' and ...let it go.

An uprooted tree lies ebbing in the street.
The one who pledged everyone with a refuge
is herself in exigent need.

People come, see the fallen one.

Not a soul seems to be concerned.
Zero, zilch, nada, none.

They don't remember
those cloistered, sizzling infernos of June
those solitary, shivering nights of witchy new moons

and those

sodden, sultry volleys of pouring monsoons

when they, like sprayed bedbugs, ran helter-skelter
with the beast of disarray at their sorry heels -
snarling callously at all their jet-set culture,
structure and order

and

when all and sundry went slapdash
…haphazard

that stalwart of timber
gave them reassuring shelter.

…no fine print, no strings…

❉


Today, when in the aftermath of storm and rain
her generous framework lays mortally drained
there is no one who would even stop
to look for a while
let alone bestow a precious drop
of life.

❉

In this progressive society –
dynamic, forward-looking, revolutionary –

each enterprising personality
is interred beneath umpteen layers of conceit
and on the assay of fulfilment
estimates the value of the being.

For whatever it is worth...
_____

Once upon a time
I came upon a flute;
chic, delicate and fine -
fashioned impeccably
from exceptionally fine wood
hauled discreetly
from the flourishing forest
of fumbling youth.

‘twas just one of its kind.

A surrogate to which
you would never truly find.

One scale at a time
one throb at a rhyme;
its notes ripened into
mesmeric, beatific rhymes.

✽

The day was Wednesday
and December was the month.
My fingers had gone all numb.

Aquiver...

I held the flute nimbly -
the dew on my vernal lips
caressing it gently,
when the clasp came undone
and the comely flute
split in two
or maybe five or seven.

The tally is incidental
but the occasion,
for sure,
was nineteen eighty seven.

A proxy I could never find.
‘twas just one of its kind.

✽

Just this verse remains
like a tease that dwells
amidst lost reminders
of contiguous yonder.

Many times,
You have said vociferously;

......for all success
and in all failure,
faith is the key.

And many times,
I have tried to reason
against the equation
of ritual and religion.

But,
in the fashion world
of materialist-spiritualism,
where majority conforms to modern tradition,
I have often found it convenient
to ignore the dictates of reason
and still more convenient
to believe in the corollary;

......faith is the key.

Therefore,
I have mostly believed,
......in your faith
and in your prayers
......for me.

The neighborhood sleeps robustly…charmingly.

✽

I sit quietly
utterly breathlessly.

Listening sadly to the inveterate, rasping wheeze
and pensively perceiving the impelling, piercing eagerness

of my dismal, labored breath.

Constrained to stay put, there is little I can do
but to repeatedly browse through
a raft of 'get-well' messages
which have consistently traversed
across your sedulous time-tables

surmounting the bustling maze
of the capricious world-wide-web.

I think of you and your caressing ways -
Your determined thriving to bolster me
through my trance-like medicated days;

planting a flimsy little flicker
to my dead-pan face.

✽

This bantam lightweight note intends to modestly denote:

♔ my incalculable gratefulness for your unqualified wishes

and

♔ sportive acquiescence to my maiden experience
of loving your love

quixotic and so cogently beyond
the most adept shot of the Cupid's arrow.

There are
standard connotations
of ubiquitous love:
...******,
...religious,
...platonic
and now electronic!

They
usually take us away
from the home base
and we are lost
in the mores
of colourful
or colourless
(but elusive nevertheless)
illusions...
of gods,...
of heroes
or simply pictures of people
we have met on the internet.

We do not understand it
for if we did
we would cease to seek.

...that the seeker might be the sought
and that no wars need be fought
for that which can be
calmly identified on the inside -
- is something we repetitively miss
and while we all magically have it,
it is in and through the other
that we ignorantly solicit
our abiding congenital bliss.

...and then there are these flowers:
flush with fragility and coloring.

What if I could be them...
utterly mortal, yet dazzling?

What if I could bloom
with nothing to prove?

How would it be
to be like them;
perched on the tree
on a shimmering morning
so faultlessly sunny,
with the breeze...
caressing, ladylike...silky?

Can I be them?

What are the credentials
for homecoming?
or is it
a comprehensive lack of them?

There are times when you feel like
reaching out..............full length,
to grasp -
the ultimate;
something, which you will not like
to dispense away with
no matter who leaves or alights.

Somewhere, from where you will never waver
again -
an Equilibrium.

But most of the times, the best you can do
is to swish your hand and latch on to;
thin, slippery, lukewarm air, vanishing as a wraith
into a starless, roiled chasm......
and you are viciously abandoned
amidst the pungent whiffs
of the random metropolis.

Every night I lean against the rusted gate
of this modest rented apartment
and give a fish eye to the stillborn night.

I see a lean column of smoke from a smokeshaft
...obscure...far off;
reaching out......for the stars
cruelly dispersed by grimy draft.

I see the flickering, pale beam;
the solitary, asocial gleam
of the municipal  lamp;
reaching out meekly....towards me,
getting devoured in a frenzy
by the soft, persistent charge
of the relentless molecules of dark.

✽

And loneliness becomes admissible....
.....again

You asked:
"How you came to your dead end?"

How did I?
Perhaps too much of chasing butterflies,
or maybe running barefoot in hot, avid pursuit
of those looping, berserk kites

adrift like airborne serpents

in delirious evening skies.

Then there were those chimeric rainbows -
sedately fantastic illusions of dream jobs,
and loving homes with ambrosial glows.

They all eventually led to the same prosaic end,
for, any-which-way, all roads wound up
at appropriately conventional
and consequently beaten bend.

Till the chase went on, it was the same old story -
All fulfilled ambition promptly subject to
increasingly falling marginal utility.

After all of it was said and done,
every little crown lost and won,
the agony of the question still remained
no last words arose,
to which to exclaim and say Yay!

Life had me in its hook. See:?
while this is what it meant to be free: !

✽

Fossilized in my den, I stared wistfully
at life's irrevocable loose ends
and this is how my friend
I arrived at my proverbial dead ends.

Like those magnificently lonesome trophies -
      once hard fought for
      with all our might and capacity
      and then left to rot on the rocks;
      abysmally, in perpetuity -
all laurels and triumphs get jaded and weary
dominions faded and supremacy sickly.

Every hard earned victory
      once immaculate and pristine
succumbs to frivolous, lame apathy.

The slick sheen gathers blemish
in barren whispers of ungracious hearts
      silently, firmly, surely
for once at the apogee
desire - the very impulse to aspire - furtively departs.
It is present during the ascent
but when the apex is won
the zest is swiftly defunct
subverting the very fuel to be peppy -
leaving us all bled, spent, petty.

There is simply no mystery or intrigue anymore
as passion fizzles out and gives up the ghost.

The lustre peels and withers
      forsaken, listless, tattered.

No wonder then
that it is baffling to be thankful
for something so ostensibly chipper
...yet dreary, hackneyed, ephemeral
under those glowing amber covers.

❉

Pursuit, on the contrary
is thrilling -
      buoyant, snappy, ****.
Powered by desire
      all consuming and fiery
it spurs us on
but then fretting comes easy
with every little mis-step
or importunate want.

We grieve in sleep as well
dreaming and planning
about what we lack
instead of wakefully celebrating
our sublime bounty
and prized treasure stack.

❉

Despairingly lost in notional worlds
we then innocently rue:
Why life is not distributed normally?
Why the negative skew?
Why is gratitude more arduous
than it is to accuse?
Or why winning seems spurious
and losing so disproportionately true?

Know then that desire is the architect -
      creating and perpetuating
      us and our countless worlds -
A crackerjack industry
of solutions, hopes and warranties
with inevitably concealed and crafty
toxic downstream corollaries
that make success seem pale and phlegmatic
      somewhat misty, a little tepid
while failure looms conspicuously
snarling viciously in fervid agony.

The majestic days of Czars and Sultans
with their immaculate royalty

and those of Barons and Khans
brimming with stainless primacy

have long since gone.

All their embellished repositories
of capital, jewelry and gallant armies
stand looted, ravaged and plundered.

The struggling proletariat of those times
with their humdrum lives, rife with strife
have also bitten the dust

      expired, forgotten, crumbled

since days beyond recall.

Now we, the successors and heirlooms
live on with kindred joys and glooms

as communities, creeds and nationalities

recklessly defending close-held foxy illusions
of defunct oneness or mythical deities.

The more tolerant among us even feel dignity
in misplaced, romantic nationalism(s)
and mostly off-the-mark, drifting democracies.

❋

But this time or that
summate a few more gimmicks or subtract,
all we have gifted ourselves
are some arbitrary lines on the map

slashing the earth to pieces
then claiming its wiggly, volcanic geographies
as slices of ever-dodging Elysium
enshrined in fragile master-bluffs
of precarious, cut-throat politics.

Have you ever been amazed,
when a gentle wave
from the sea
softly kisses your feet
and breaks
an unfinished day-dream?

By the time
you look down,
it has already receded
back to its ocean;
taking back
the healing tranquility
it had brought
with it.

You can neither
hold it back,
nor can you become
a part of the ocean;
if you wish to be
and to dream
anymore.

All you can do
is to wait
for another wave
to splash you
with the taste
of the sea.

You were a tree.

Not too short but not surpassingly lanky.
The foliage wasn’t thick either
and yet not scrimpy enough
to make the tree look shorn or deciduous.

Ample light passed through the leaves.
The elements were temperate,
neither sultry, nor betraying a freeze.

It was neither day, nor night,
hard to tell the dark from bright.

There was a placid rustle
as the breeze politely shuffled
across the nubilous chaparral.

I stood there

knowing it is you
and the flowers from the tree were
profuse.

They kept falling on and around me.

At the foothills of vintage age
you feel perceptibly less somber
for there are only meager remains
of mostly forgotten days -
      little to smile, rue or cry for
and an amorphous
yet obligingly finite future -
      trifling to put together or fight for.

So dear Chandra:
here is a congratulation:
It must be awesome -
this imminent privilege of geriatrics
and this stolen bit of transient freedom;
      the real laissez-faire to yearn
      and to die for.
timorously cajoled
from time’s exacting, puritan dictum.

We track the oblique, sly fireflies
that keep popping fitfully by.

While life swarms invitingly by the side
we remain rabidly hustling
recklessly trailing
those brusque cracking stars
      ...shifty, deceptive, volatile
in onyx-bronze, raven nights

❋

We: the tenderfoot novice
bulldozed on many a graceless trip
half-cocked, peripheral, ******
and profoundly ill with pitiful

short-sight.

Afterwards, we will dolefully miss our unlived days
and stay vainly entrenched in unskillful, effete ways
to discard stiff hangovers and to naively refill
famished days-before-today

      with crackpot mirth and being oddly spry.

❋

Like an enduring remorse, life trickles aside
bequeathing wounds that refuse to cicatrize.
and now towards this passing eventide
there is no volte-face
no dice.

The only seminal content that ever arises:
is from existence itself.

All else is borrowed thought.

Trust me,
the sky will not be the same tomorrow.

Originality is one-off.

"Dim light please",
I softly wheeze,
as you seductively tease
the nape of my neck
and I sensuously shudder
in my fleshly hearth.

Playfully,
I break away
as my heart sways
in a hitherto unknown desire....
a desire;
that took its time coming
and which is now ablaze
in your eyes so scintillating
that it makes me skip
an already fluttery heart-beat.

You proceed gently
and speak softly
about my mischievous smile,
my expressive eyes,
the curve of my lip,
...... my shapely hip.......

You stroke my hair
with ardent flair
and I listen blithely
to your unfeigned oratory
about a man's intensity,
...his unbridled frenzy.

I hearken reverently
to your admission of piety
and pledge you my fidelity
as long as there is light
in my impractical, dreamy eyes.

As we submit
to the fiery delight
I finally see
beyond the crevice of duality;
into my integrated embodiment
of anatomy and sentiment;
...that I am
and always was
a unique, solitary singularity.

As you lie on the creaky hospital cot,
there is a lot that can be thought
by listening to the uneven, rapid wheeze
and by looking at the hitherto unseen pallor
of your otherwise ruddy cheeks......

Many (im)possibilities can be perceived;
that a father I may never be;
that my father may never be
the same with me;
that you may well have entered
the last lap
in your race for that ever elusive
qualifying tag;
that come what may, one day
you shall really be a non-entity
and there may be only me
to see you lying limp and lifeless
just as you now seem to be......

Perceptions may not be real.
The only reality, is a single soul searching query:
Does any materialist passion
or for that matter, a self-effacing spiritualism,
allow anyone to cause the demise of the one
still huddled up in that warm,
allegedly safe darkness of anonymity?

Isn't a human life, howsoever insignificant it be might,
too much a price to pay
for even the rarest gain...
in this provisional little world
of putty clay?

Another dull winter day painfully crawls away
       into garden-variety biography
          just a run-of-the-mill résumé
          filled with antecedents whilom
          and to top it up
          a corrosive impostor syndrome.

I lie quietly in the flickering, yellow light
of a jaundice-stricken forty-watt bulb
trying to think about something superb
which would somehow improve
the way things do (or do not) move
in my achromatic life.

Nothing worthwhile emerges.

Only some vague urges act out
from their stingy hideouts.

The clock pushes the evening further
into the dry, arid chill of the night so still.
I sigh and switch off my ghost-like
sleepy, vapid eyes
into the ancient time-line
of a vast, un-bridged solitude
in my quarantined, immotile life.

© Chandra S., 1995

With closed eyes, I inwardly spy on the enormously arbitrary stockpile.

Her picture drifts by, escorted by a brisk convoy of memory -
those strikingly timeworn matrices of hoary but lasting stories
from her youth, then from the wrong side of forty…
and now about the beginning of wrinkles on her rickety little fingers –
feeble and gentle.

There she is…smiling unconditionally at me, not concerned with my status or money,
or, for that matter, my other silly intimacies that keep waxing and waning like an isochronal scream.
With all her warmth and affection – unqualified and plenary
she waits at the doorway…across time…ever-ready to accept me
for whatever I was, am and may continue to become.

While I have ignorantly swerved this way and the other
erring, straying, scouring the world over, she has been invariably there -
my unabridged blessing, my true well-wisher.

My mother, any mother –
The best girl-friend ever.

I am fairly sure
that
you have given up too much
to procure;
what you considered the healing touch
of my thin fingers.

And I;
unbelievingly realize
that no matter how hard I try,
I may never be able to provide
all that you may have sacrificed
to get me by your side.

All I can do
is to continue
to yield to your point of view
and to share and care
for your dreams and schemes
about life.

But after all this time
it is unfortunate to find
that so much care
robs the deepest love
of its flair
till;
we begin to choke
in our own holes of loneliness
and without intention
your sacrifice
and my devotion
become inside-out versions
of each other......

She was a spectacular tree.
People called her the flame of the forest,
for she was obviously striking, vivid and classy.

I need not narrate the superlative majesty
of the flame – tree, for one time or the other
we have all been breath-taken by her peerless glamor.

What matchless artistry!

I am here to quickly share
my ruminative gloom for that lovely assembly
of flower, leaf and wood, which grandly stood
in a grove of possibilities, and possibilities can be
such a torment, such a calamity.

❋

For years galore, caterpillars of choices
had been steadily eating away at her core.
They came from different directions,
at different trajectories,
with varied objectives
and fluctuating proclivities.

Sometimes, they came rushing in as family,
and sometimes they came slowly,
a little formally, a bit watchfully,
somewhat officially.

At times they came in fiery fascination
and yet, ever so often, they were charged
with marauding indignation.

Many times they arrived as blazing ambition,
but more often than not, combusted the flamboyance
leaving behind an ashen illusion.

Oh.....those craving larvae
of oblique, wily opportunities.

❋

The foliage was feverishly guzzled
till photosynthesis was no more possible.
From my distant window from where I had once
watched her variegated flair,
I felt the Poinciana moan in simmering despair.

❋

With biting sensitivity, I still look on, a tad tearfully,
as she continues to tumble into conscious torpidity.

My words may slip and sway, as with each wilting leaf
after each withering floret, she progresses towards
an abject decay;
imploding methodically, and transposing gradually
from being the flame of the forest
to being a sprouting forest of flames.

Liberty is the highest decree.
Independence and opportunity -
the finest, paramount glee.

Certainly indeed!

But are we really
moving towards being free?
Or is it brazen entitlement
that we blatantly feed?

#

You ask of the next catastrophe.

Mass irresponsibility:
that is sadly what
it will be
...smh
That is sadly what it will be.

A crushed Shah Jahan said:
When you behold the memorial,
a sight so masterly, yet sorrowful;
you will inevitably admit
an aching little bisecting wish
that adorns your yearning lips....
parched,
barren,
effete......
And from the world's lid,
the luminaries too
would sob and drip.

#

He could well have been talking
about my beloved's words ;
......so utterly breathtaking
that a sigh poignantly quivers
in my dithering being.

Her words meander.
It is no wonder:
for all of us saunter
in thought and speech
one time or the other.

At times her words are poised and easy.....,
wonderfully jolly, sensationally starry:
They shimmer like the four minarets (1)
on the full moon night;
....brilliant......resplendent.

Then they taper from the dome
and stop halfway between the tomb
and the solemn reflecting pool:
They are calmer, sober,
and you know,
a little factual;
...what they call discriminating
intellectual, rational......

Soon the words leave charbagh (2)
and hit the red sandstone walls (3)
crenellated with flawless wisdom;
spotlessly beautiful
like the lifeless marble
that proudly commemorates
Mr. Shah Jahan's love
in grim, cold blooded grace.

We talk about
riders and scruples,
kith and kin,
restraints and constraints,
fidelity and modesty.......
....and I can not help
but to sadly agree
to the placid logic
in our impeccable scripts.

#

Logic is a wonderful remedy
for the radical and foolhardy
but for every cure,
there is a spin-off.
Deep somewhere,
a delicate,
two-cent sentiment
collapses into atrophy
and.......silently
another part of me
becomes a
meek monument
of disposable history.

----------

(1) The four minarets of the Taj Mahal

(2) The garden that starts from the end of the main gateway and ends near the squared base of the mausoleum is an integral part of the Taj Mahal structure.

(3) The building material used is brick-in-lime mortar veneered with red sandstone and marble and inlay work of precious/semi precious stones. The mosque and the guest house in the Taj Mahal complex are built of red sandstone in contrast to the marble tomb in the center.

Passion is carefree, often buoyant.....breezy,
and is absolved perpetually of prohibitory rationality.

Being logged in to it for a little over eternity,
this is exactly how I have felt:
intense, steamy
...maybe a bit frenzied.

Passion is also a sudden, swift salvo.
On many a fleeting occasion, ergo;
I have come perilously close
to suggesting my maudlin ardor
and poetically propose
an incredible romance,
which if you dismiss;
shall break my heart in two
and if not;
shall break a home or two.

It is like this therefore,
that I have come to feel
like an outlawed fugitive
and as if in the wink of an eye,
a million lonesome nights have passed,
sorely bruising and tearing me apart
between the hearth and the heart.

Tonight:
the first one after those million;
I am transcribing my thought
to tell you that I am hooked,
as though in a playback loop -
      a weary, age-old vinyl record;
      pitching forward, skipping backward
      in a pestering, irksome Xerox
      of scratches, static and blips;
      all in the same little sector
      where there was once music.

❉

Maybe that is why I surprisingly realize
the pain of passion, and slowly capsize
into a drifting, dry sleep

devoid of all dreams

of you.


© Chandra S., 2013

I

THE REMARK

She scornfully remarked,
"Ha, Ha, men?.....
They are dogs,
all of them"
and then went on
and said,
"Most of my friends are men"

II

THE QUESTIONS

It was a casual conversation
but left behind nagging questions:

One:
Is woman really liberated?
For if that were so,
she would be free to sow
the seeds for a malice-free life:
A life that is
marked by sobriety
and unshakable fraternity –
A distinguished burden which principally she
can carry gracefully
till we all reach Goshen.

Two:
Has man been always liberated?
You may or may not agree,
I just say what I see.

III

THE VICTIM

Among the countless atrocities
on the vast womankind,
a hoarse, feeble voice thus pines:

Look at him;
He has been trained to ****
and be unflinchingly killed.....

He is:
an oblivious slave to his condition,
.....a victim of unmindful persuasions
by apathetic social conventions....
crippled....plagued...
by inherited apparitions
of our grand forefathers.

He has been brutalized too
on his way from a wobbly boyhood
to a hard-bitten manhood.

IV

SYSTEMIC SCARS

One could write a manuscript.
Instead I cite a sparse list
about how
he has been systematically marred
by the oppressive
socio-economic-political farce:

......of the defense ministry,
or salvation through insurgency...

......of the drug cartel,
or the liquor-tobacco lobby...

......of the boss's fancy,
......of female friendly courts,
...even sports!!!
......of the spousal gripe.....
and most of all...
....through the stereotype hype.

V

DIS-EMPOWERMENT OF MAN

Is man really enfranchised?
I am a man and I vouch otherwise.
........

Bully the other boy
else...
just play with a toy
solitary.....a *****.

You are born with a member,
Now, my goodness,
prove to be better
than your female opposite number;
An impossible task,
for no gender
is exclusively first-class.

Prove your chivalry;
find a nice young lady
or carry some forbidden
infamous label.

Hide your malaise,
pretend to be at ease,
do not brood,
or be doomed
as a sentimental fool.

Always be okay alone
wherever you are
whatever you are...
sickly or strong.

Feel guilty.
After all, all social malady
is solely your responsibility.

You are just the "unfair ***"
...an ugly accumulation
of grossly vile testosterone,
no match for the noble progesterone.

My unfortunate friend, do you see…
That radical crowd....so elite?
That is the "fair-***",
not ye.....not ye.

Apart from a backbreaking childbirth,
most other dangerous or physically stressful work
is a man's traditional berth.

Even the macrocosm
has been a scrooge,
depriving him
from the possibility of motherhood;
...the sensational miracle of natural creation.

Is man really free...?

VI

THE SLOG DOG

But yes,
as my good friend said,
there still remains
a thin little thread
of fragmentary credence,
hanging like a dire dog-collar.

It says:
Man is a two-timing slog-dog;
unfaithful to many
but loyal to love,
wagging the tail
for his lovely suffragette dove.

She can heap
his eating bowl
with puppy-love chow
and he will be forever hers.

At one.forty-five, anti meridiem
I blink, half-sit-half-lie and squirm
in a cartel of intricate inquiry.

He must be hurting inordinately
to wish me death and calamity.

Who and where is he?
How and why does he?

Simple five-word questions
seeking conclusive resolutions
for well over a millennium.

Frazzled and woefully sapped
from this anarchic, chaotic task
I turn for the promising refuge
of my orderly book-rack.

❋

Over and over again,
I read the masterly treatise
and really try to take it as a guide.

❋

The book has foresight.

It says there is no death

which my friend has wittingly wished me
in his anguished wrath.

Life is eternal, infinite.

Only the spirit changes over
to some other wardrobe
or maybe transitions
to another dimension
purgatory or paradise.

❋

We never really die and likewise
the loved and the not so loved
also survive.

❋

But life often defies explanations
not to mention all expert expositions.

I feel sadly feeble and disillusioned
to see

an orphan having the nose
hard against the grindstone

a spouse lonely and forlorn
fighting it out all alone

a disconsolate father
devastated by the departure
of a youthful son......
or a blooming daughter.

a dashing soldier
who somberly carries the cadaver
....the cold inert clay of a dead comrade

a pining sibling.........
a friend irredeemably lost.........
the poor dead without
and ****** with the ***......
a zealot who lost the plot
or martyrs who bravely fought.....

❉

The book says they are all here
and we still find them nowhere
at least not as companions
in our worldly sojourn.

The author exhorts -
those who are gone still see us
feel us.

And I smile wryly, a little ruefully
at the still living, stranded passengers
in one too many crowded lanes
on this gross, physical plane
devoid of all succor even from a ghost

slippery yet subtle.

If only there was a real life Whoopi †
we all would be as lucky as the demure Demi
and Patrick Swayze would do the reel drill
in real time indubitably.

Alas!!!
celluloid existence is pure imagination
.....just neat fiction.

And the impeccable book.....
though elegant
seems utterly untrue.

❋

I therefore can not take heart
from the prophesied fact
that the dead are not really dead

not ever, or at least not yet....

Yes, they may be right beside
but unless we cross over to the other side
or they someday decide to travel back in time

the living will always be somewhat dead somewhere
and the dead will always be somewhat alive somewhere

accidentally meeting.....
sometimes......

from across the great divide
in a nebulous twilight

but mostly waiting, waiting....
for the wait to end

and to be terminally united
either fully alive
or completely dead.


† Reference made to the 1990 film 'Ghost'. More information at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost(1990film)

It took years for the physicist
and the meta-physicist
to reluctantly agree.

They took opposing alleys:
One looked into matter
and arrived at its intrinsic energy.
The other looked at energy
and saw matter as incidental analogy;
just a random criss-cross
of cosmic puissance.

They made much ado
in arriving where my good old
three-band radio
catapulted me years ago.

Since my teens;
she had faithfully been
my worthy companion.
With sweet melodies,
thoughtful talks,
rousing commentaries....
she kept me company
through thick and thin.
For a scanty eternity,
she was the only tie with humanity
in my plain, flat life;
lonesome, sickly and solitary.

We knew each other closely;
fondly and dearly
and I would talk to her,
some would say foolishly,
and though strangely,
she always responded readily.

For years sixteen
that Philips machine
was with me
and I saw
into her inherent energy
that underlies every material entity.

#

When she died suddenly
without warning....abruptly,
I knew a friend had gone
but the essence lived on.

We had perfect camaraderie:
She was all intricacy;
body, battery and circuitry,
and the spark that came from me;
ah!!! my art of tuning adeptly.

Though I got newer models and makes,
the heart still beats with a dull ache
for the one who began as mortal matter
and bonded timelessly with my being;
...merged and mingled...
as an undying memory,
in what they call
my imperishable, impregnable spirit.

Unpredictable and often occasional
there are abrupt, viscous spells -

      asphyxiating, grim, austere -

when you incompetently beseech

rather
ineptly squeeze

the unmoored mind -

     vagrant, erratic, blind -

to somehow concoct a reasonable rhyme
in which you could artfully arrange -

     this-a-way-that-a-way -

unwarranted, disfigured, discolored

bunch of rogue thoughts.

But the mental friction does not sanction
the end to this sluggish, incongruous trend.

Towards the end, some patchy amends are all you can dispense

to a taunting and tipsy

blob

of trivial poetry.

I have tried to forget you
on numerous days
and in numerous ways.

But you say invariably,
"I am yours, sincerely".

And I search yet again
for the vestigial chains
that bind you and me.

I think of you;
and your fascinated face
peeps artlessly through
the haze of a former age:
Oh! those inaugural, elegant days.

I look up.....
expectantly, readily.......

A hesitant keenness surges......
timidly, momentarily,
then bleeds away briskly, desolately
..........mortally.

Just a few fossils abide:
Some frosty images
and evaporating voices,
......sobbing quietly
through the nasty silence
of the night

Dear Author:
I am posting
your 'the-then' thoughts
on this web-blog
since I do not know
where, in time
and in place
are you lost.

If,
someday,
you happen to stumble
upon this web-page,
send me a message
and I will quietly
remove this entry
in exchange
for a small fee:
The privileged readership
of your soul-stirring poetry.

❀

WE ALWAYS REMEMBER

You and I,
wherever we are
are fated to love.

No matter
whose poems are being read,
You and I,
or something of us
springs up in each one
in some way or
another.


Whatever doesn't ever
reach the lips
has reached the poems
...already...already.

There,
Do you blink?
as if to disillusion me.

You talk of bright worlds ;
unknown to me.

My side of the discourse
is limited to sighs and tears
and blushes,
and wiping off
the spreading Kaajal †
with my baby's mouth-napkin.

But you aren't even married yet.

And
by the next time we meet,
I will have painted my lips again.

You remind me
of what I couldn't be.


© The Nightingale

† Kohl