Our home was soft corners, diaphanous shadows,
A ghost-home tamarind tree of dark midnights
That used to shed many tiny leaves and bird-twigs,
A well deep in darkness and shrieking night crickets,
A wet coconut rope slithering on its stone rim.

The water shivered on its perked up surface
At the dark touch of the dimpled metal pail.
The pail got pulled up quickly spilling water
To the banana which squealed with green joy.
The thorny fence wound its way in the moonlight
Quietly disappearing in the hillock without trace.

I ask that you be heard, tossed about and dreamed of.
It is your thoughts, my upset energies, and nightly turbulence.
Sleep provokes night and life and darkness prevailing in us.
When we wake up we are gone as our night precedes dawn
It is always the other way, bottom up and spaces spread.
At times we hear the police van’s shrieks, in night’s iron grill.

I ask that you be heard, tossed about and dreamed of.
It is not always the stick beating the road in rhythmic silence
And olive-green overcoat with flapped pockets and heavy boots
And six months old large-sized memories of a Himalayan home
With black-lined large dove’s eyes flitting among coal fires
Their smoke towering over the pines in snow-bound peaks.


I ask that you be heard, tossed about and dreamed of.
It is the turbulence we are speaking of, in the foggy sea we are
Or on the peaks where everything is bound in fuzzy snow
At the mountain passes where vehicles duly pass oiled by hot tea
Or in the mist-filled airports where aircrafts do not take off
Of politicians who decide mankind’s future in the apocalypse.


I ask that you be heard, tossed about and dreamed of.
It is my dreams as they were and the neighbor’s dreams
In the straw-roof, in the banyan trees with glints in their eyes
And much fine-powdered dust on their thick –coated leaves,
In lonely watchmen’s houses on the bleak stony spaces
And lonely watchmen keeping vigilant eyes on boulders
Strewn in brown spaces and scraggy bushes with strange lizards.


I ask that you be heard, tossed about and dreamed of.
It is the towering tombs and the trees that enveloped them
The children playing cricket in flying bats and stone stumps
Outside the vaults where kings and queens lay dead for ages
Their cold breath felt on the broken glass of Time’s windows.
I ask that you, I and women play a game of kabaddi in the trees
When it is still not dark enough in the minarets in the west
And children are still hitting ***** visible in the green of the trees.

We find bottomless holes
In our mentalized theories
Local logical postulations
Cause-and-effect sequences
Perceived chain reactions
And medical research findings.
All those are quintessentially
Protein specs floating freely
Our words float like protein
Fondly called lewy bodies
Colorless and unsubstantial
Dreams in shreds floating
As in amniotic fluid like then.

A certain woman of less virtue
Was not fit for our society
She embraced men in dark
In dreams and art and thought.
Fuzzy scenes of yesteryears
Floated into the present
Including ego and power games.

Let me know who is this professor-
The man who brought it all up.
Our language loses meaning.
We do not agree you are you.
Actually you cease to be a son
A brother ,a person ,a human
You are a hand or a stone
Just a broken splinter for a whole .
My part becomes a whole
A thing is a word, an idea,an event
A daughter-in-law is a hand
A son a stone in the wilderness.


There is sorrow swirling in the belly
The anguish of a human existence
The pain in the bloated stomach
These forced feet take you nowhere
Men came with tails in their necks
Forcing down tiny white universes
When they go into the nether world
There is only a swirl in the belly.

A nerd bitten by the charity bug,
Spoke of slum children’s education
And shining darkness in their eyes.
In the shanties ,the water flows
Like a shadow in cloudy daylight
And smells bad to the kind rich.
My check glistens in the dark
Like a meteorite on a dark night
In the next moment it vanishes
In the depths of hunger and belly.
Other men have fat bank accounts
But are spiritual for soul-hunger.
Poetry sounds crassly out of place-
One would wish the black sewer
Is not talked about in prose as well.

One enters the box of 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 their burping stomachs and acid.
Squeals of old laughter then 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.

This comedy thing plays out clearly
In the down of your throat, the way
You walk and talk in fits in yourself
Flies abuzz, your red scarf waving.
This morning we walked briskly
Explaining these things to ourselves
Our hands quickly went up in the air
Our throats cleared in anticipation
Nothing came save a guttural sound.
Since nobody laughed at our joke-
A two rupees joke on the cell- phone-
We sat deeply on the foundation,
As our legs dangled in empty space
Through the waving grass of the breeze
Showing bits of sunrise behind the hill.

At this moment we are trying poetry again
When the Gurkha guard paces up and down
Hitting the night with his rhythmic stick
As his shrill whistle pierces its silence and
A distant dog protests its snout at the dark sky.

We use it as a pain balm on our temples
Of low self-worth and high aggrandizement
When we refuse to take our glances away
From the short term low walls interrupting
Our blue skies with painter stroke birds frozen
Above the rocks that rose from sleeping shrubs.