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.

Our thoughts are pure without any body
Or clothes hiding one, in the trees or sky
Or by wall peg to hang its tale thereby.
Our body is cloth cast off and away.

No tail hangs by this body perfect pure.
Its meaning burns as food in intestine
Its light envelops trees and hills for sure
But in the end, is just sloughed off skin.

Beyond hills of clouds we wear another
To hide nakedness of skin from our thoughts
There we emerge from all-knowing mother,
Entangled in philosophical knots.

Our body is earth of dust seeking sky
Looking for soul that leaves it high and dry.

Belong some where, a place or thought
Otherwise you stand out, all eyes on you-
None with you or your music or the wind.
In the night those tiny parijat flowers
Actually belong to the dark neighbour
Of the red and yellow house with a woman
Hanging out of the white parapet like cloth.
Their fragrance does not belong nor she.
The parijat belongs to the wind and death.
She of the parijat house parapet belongs
To the evening and the blue sky of rain.

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.

That was a red-banded paper
Itching to reclaim original state
Of un-sweet bagasse and bamboo
With surely no musical possibility.
Lonely were our drooping eyelids
Behind the vacuous leg’l scroll.
Some faded white trousers stated
Black legal existence nd’ bow tie.

Our sleep-together of fearsome nights
Leapt out of the window cat-silent
Into the sterilized portals of wordy law.
Our mummified before was not this.
Our after-thoughts slowly cauterized us
As we waited for the black decision.

Tail wagging


His tails wagging is no barking
Balking at wind, at passing car
Just body friends of wet sniffing
Two pant legs to be followed
Only to be shaken off in a vile
Basement of dark shadows
And sleeping cars in their veils.


Pant legs have no steel in them
And a  soft bite is afraid of  pain
By four ****** just below navel
Here love ferments but festers.


Lame dogs


Plenty of action is in the street
A dog leg is gone  to child's pleasure
By  a boy's stone at its whelping
But three legged dogs still bark
At passing  cars, their shadows.


You cannot straighten his tail**


His tail is like  a crescent moon
Its flies like  stars buzzing around
Or like a scythe the  farmer uses
To bring  his crop under control
And cannot be straightened ever
Like a crescent moon or a scythe.

We began with doubts in the dark night-
Everything that came under the sky of night-
The noiseless stars -that were just flickers
In the crisp air of a deep night and crickets
That creaked from dark and thorny bushes.
We thought of sultry bears that came down
From the hills for ripe sugarcane in fields
On windy nights when we were sleeping
On the river bank, with a long stick safely
Sleeping beside us on a springy string cot.
The dogs sculpted their own long protests
At the howling wind and  bush rat’s scrawl .
There in the sketchy bushes of darkness
The lizards slept fitfully wary of night snakes.
Outside, the fireflies tantalized the country.
Our doubts persisted through the night ,
Going on unabated in sleep and dreams.
At the ****'s crow they dissolved in sleep.

We sat in the afternoon in the shadows of
Ancient trees paying homage to the lady
Who had died, of excess of life over death.
We were treated to a feast in her honour
It was her wish we should be so treated.
She was sharing surplus life here with us.

Where was the promised river bank where we
Would Invoke her spirit amid deep-throated
Sanskrit chants and smoking holy fires?

There is no river bank here but ancient red walled
Storied structures .Here well-fed priests call down
The spirits of our dead by sonorous chants.

All the while she smiles beatifically, in the hall,
From her two-dimensional existence in a photo.
The excess life she had died of seems still spilling.

(Cancer is uncontrolled division and growth of cells meaning
unwanted increase in life activity and consequent breakdown
of life  support system)

I still hear the world in my ears.
I hear the whoosh of the west wind,
The noise of the empty word
And clatter of senses rubbing
Against the body of the wind
As if they are my very bones
That move lazily in my knee.
As I walk in my defunct dreams
I do not need the hearing aid.

The hum in the head does not say
Anything except deceased cells, fear
In the hair follicles, dust in the mind.
There is of course a song, then a picture
Loud and brave, beauty and history-
I hang my thoughts on the computer thing
The images there are larger than my life
And every one’s life and river and water
Mountains and people dead and Sanskrit
Chants addressed to the dead, my people,
Who are no longer my people, except
Through the connectivity of a dark priest.
There are clay-pots of bones and boats
In the holy rivers and priest chantings.
We have thought of transience and rain
Rivers overflowing on the highways
Dismal failures and temporary successes .
Then finally some beauty-talk in art
And literature, deep thoughts, mystery
And everything coming to an end
As though there was no beginning.
Yet the colors went on all the while
And they smelled nice like incense.

This yellow saree she wore
Just once in her life had wrapped
A coy twenty-year-old bride
Tentatively setting her dainty foot
Into the hesitant bridal home .

Somewhere in the backwoods
Several industrious silkworms
Had spun miles of salivary yarn
In the foliage of the mulberry tree
To make this golden yellow saree .

The rustle of her silk drowned
The wails of the boiling cocoons
The worms died that beauty would live
In their plaintive cries lay bridal hopes .

My mother, the bride of yesteryears,
Is now as non-existent as the worms
That had ceased to exist spinning
The smooth silk for her bridal finery .

Her bridal fragrance lives on among
The delicate folds of these gossamer silks
That the worms had died weaving.
Death is so fragrant , so memorable.

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.

We had left  early morning for sight of the phallus stone
Dragging our feet through the stones of ice mountains
Our horses plodded on with us some times and without,
Our behinds   aching with their  bony backs in contact.
Old men sat hunched up in two feet long wooden boxes
On young men's shoulders , latter feet dragging stones
The boxes felt like our old men's journey of no return
To  a stone phallus to be bathed in tears in the snow hills
Where they will join a mountain stream and flow as river
To return to  plains and land in the seas of their villages.

The mountains were cruel and beautiful to our tired feet
The horses zigzagged their way up with their droppings
Filling the cold  air with a warm smell mixed with bodies
Their tails swished unending imaginary flies in  behinds
As they were lost to their green dreams of the mountains.

Old men paddled  all the way up in their wooden boxes
Crouched as in their mother's stomachs,with eyes shut
From their lips came muttering sounds like buzzing bees
That filled the empty silence of the hills in the morning.
It felt  as if  it was  a return to where they had started out
Where this  thing had begun, the sea of their first floating.

The morning sounds came to us running
Amid standing silences of tall coconuts .
There was no gentle breeze in their shadows.
A dark girl flowed on the park walking track
As if she was night gliding towards dawn.
Walking thoughts were loosely strung images.
My park walk became a sand of shore where
I gathered several sea-shells of fine images.
Back at home they stayed briefly as thoughts,
As semantic thoughts, a poetry of left words.

In early morning birds are yet to wake,
Their wings flutter in noises from trees.
Crows in some trees blurt out from
The disturbed sleep of a few of them.
It is now the ambient dark of morning.
One hears a motor sound that comes
Piercing from sleep-weary basement
For the water to flow in our bathrooms.
This sort of darkness touches heart
In a tender expectant way of rising sun.
Sleep feels restless on creaking beds
Of people for whom morning is night.

Steeped in poetry, it is just that day’s death
And dreams of finely bound poetry volumes
That defined morning over soft keystrokes.
One tries to explore poetry and death together.
In the end death is poetry, when it is not real
In the hospitals and lonely parks in left cities.
Death is fine poetry as after-fact and bellyache.

Later, in morning walk there will be spring in the air
With the leaves flying on a breeze on the dusty road.
That is when I seek the poetry of thought words .

The sounds had come in before dawn
From a glimmer over buildings, spread
Hiding some distinctive cuckoo throats
Trying to break free, from future and  rain.
There was breeze , mostly from darkness
That seems to have come from  the vapors
Of a few ghosts of clouds in a tainted sky.

As the hours grew large to sounds of fury
I am turned to a Brecht's stone fisherman
Holding this stone up a banner of triumph
To less fortunate hours of no fish or  stone.

(Reference is to Brecht's  poem about old Stone Fisherman
who displays his prized catch of a stone each time his net
comes up with another stone to the less fortunate ones)

The body lay there in the room
With flies and people buzzing.
The pale face looked indifferent.
Tomorrow it will go down
Into the bowels of the earth.

Yesterday night he was busy
Searching for a quick-fix solution
To his life’s problems in the
Froth of the golden yellow brew.

The body had a fatal hunger
Just like the woman in its life.
Scoops of dust settled on the coffin;
It had no complaints about life.

(The death of our Security officer ,Stephen )

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.

She stared at the roof beam,
The wood that was once a tree.
A tailless lizard came from
Behind the beam to look
At her for the umpteenth time.


Kitta kitta , said the lizard
She who had become 'it' stared
Unremittingly at the beam
That was once a forest tree.
The beam looked at the lizard.
The continuum flowed endl’ssly .

We liked her much and ethereal self.
She carried her transience about her
As though it was a long flowing toga.
For her transience was a settled matter
Of evolution ,in Darwin and burlesque,
Just a comedy of sorts, full of sarcasm.
Surely the world was made in her kitchen.
Apparently he could not make a fine job.
Actually when she laughed it was at him.
Not that she was afraid of him, except
In the spirit-smell of a buttocks- injection
When she had a creepy feeling in her belly.
Things seemed to happen by a strange logic
A beyond-logic one failed to nail down.
Everything got mixed , things and words
Stewed in an orange light, an unreality-
Being light up there, the force of gravity low.
Above all this woman thing was God-like-
The mother of all, who suffered for children
Who have once lived in her puffed- up belly
And for strange men she met in the corridor.

In Randy Pausch’s last lecture there is space
Left briefly to be occupied en bloc-
The space that will exist, lacking, always,
In substance like quarry in a hillock.


You imagine a quarry filled with dark space
Stand on the rim of the hole that exists
In presence of time and absence of space.
Follow the last lecture to clear its mists.


You don’t get into his circle really
Of an inspiring cancer death suffering
The circle of dark humour surreally
But as a tangent on its outer ring.


Stand on the rim and into the dark lean
Strain  eyes to see own reflection keen.

At two this midnight the little dark one
Became a poem, her all-knowing smile
The first stanza and her baby bird- glance
Became the next one as she pranced there
On the floor up and down like pendulum
Swinging in the free air, a full fall of force,
A pout of sarcasm from tiny baby lips.

I at midnight wanted to round it off
With a cool third stanza, of epigram
A last line well said, to the deep night.
But she wouldn’t let me, the little one
That squirmed in my hands like a worm
Full of bones that pushed against mine
In my withered palms and finger bones.
It is life which pushed against my death.
As the night creeps I once again go into
My epigrammatic mode of the old poet
With the bally irony thing barely broached.


The curl on my lips that briefly occurred
Vanished without trace in my confusion
As my eye followed her moving in circles.
I thought I had seen the curl on her lips.

The winter’s risen sun blazes from that
Wall-less hole of an unfinished house.
The laborer’s wall-less house on the road
Is not a house but a merely thought word.
A house exists without walls but with roof.
Only it has to rise from the earth, to the sky.

The igloo rises without apparent walls
But warm and white, on those icy wastes.
Houses exist without roof but with walls
But there is the sky-roof that sends down rain.
Such as the God of phallus lives without roof
So that the sky’s rain falls on Him always.

Like houses that exist without built walls,
Poetry is built without words but with felt words.
A girl of large eyes is floating to th’ sun ,
As ponytail and bag fight for space on h’r back.
Those were felt words on her schoolgirl back.

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.

There, in God’s country, the benign ruler
Had promptly burst out of the earth’s bowels.
A sea of coconuts smothered, sultrily,
The most unwilling moss-painted houses
The banyan raised its feet high enough
For hundreds of creepy monsoon-creatures.
The journey  began in silver slanting rain
Waiting for streaks of pure white sunshine
To crawl through upright areca nut barks.
As the telephone wires went up and down
A floating bird quickly froze in the sky.
First the coconut fronds ran to the hills
Then the chilly plants , go red in the face
Inside, they of the uncertain *** beat the wind
Out of their joined palms in forced cadence.
The floor-mopping boy under our large feet
Looked with money-wetness in his brown eyes.
The train went spluttering for lack of puff
While gravel stones hit its forbidden parts.

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.

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.

Words hit you like many swarming
Flies on a sticky summer afternoon.
Words fester under your very skin
Like wounds refusing to be healed.
They enter your eyes like dust specs
Filling them with lugubrious tears.
You gather them like small sea-shells
To empty the pocket and throw away
When you reach home from the beach.
Words grate like steel furniture being
Dragged on a dusty floor in the noon.
Words fill your tummy with nausea
Like the guts of a chasing dog run over
By a speeding truck on the highway.
Words  turn into a handful of dust.