365

2008-01-19T13:16:00.000+05:30

Your smile

When you smile,
Time forgets its stead beat
To stand in an admiring stead,
Joy descends on a barren land
Holding the flowers of Hope & Faith,
And Beauty blossoms to such elusive forms
That Desire makes an empty catch.

12/1/2008

2008-01-19T13:00:00.000+05:30

A vision – Interrupted.

An Adonis awakens

Desire quenched
In the embrace of a lusty lover…

Now that was your idealism
To think of him
As …

“A youthful soul
Enchanted by the musings
Of an ageless wisdom”

Oh, do cut this crap
This phony table talk

…

The morning sunlight

To replenish,
That stock of
Spent desires…

Now that was your idealism
To think of that
As…
“A blessing
To youth, beauty and wisdom
For a union divine”
Oh, do cut this crap
This phony table talk.

11/1/2008

2008-01-13T20:10:00.001+05:30

Poetry Reading

As expected,
The only one who has turned out
At the poetry reading,
Is a dilettante poet,
Who presumes he can galvanize
Well bred hearts
With affected words,

There is no one for audience though
In this supposed social potpourri,
- For culturally ignited minds,
Than just the pantry
Clearing up the remains,
Of forgotten biscuits and cakes
Vestiges of another cultural exchange,

Where are they the poets?
Suppose their wives had reminded them
That there was much house work to be got done,
Better things to do with ones breath
Than waste it reading idle thoughts,

Where is the audience?
Those determined few,
Suppose their friends had reminded them
To make better use of their time,
Study stocks, invest and make returns
Than waste it over bankrupt thoughts,

And all of this was for such good reason
That even the Gods saw no injustice here,
And had the dilettante poet come alone
- A lesson for his presumption.

10/1/2008

2008-01-13T19:11:00.001+05:30

The Hour fantasies a meeting with the Minute and hopes to be together again.

After our interlude at 12,
With you and me
And Miss Second,
- To trigger the gong bell
We parted…

We made headlines for that stock today,
“Such a propitious listing
At a premium of sixty
An irrational exuberance”
Is what the papers said…

Since then,
I have been
Urging Miss Second
With Sisyphean tales,
That make futility
Resonate with such meanings,
To keep her at her rounds
And bring us together again.

8/1/2008.

2008-01-13T18:35:00.000+05:30

Sunlight envy

Sunlight that
Skims across your face,
As you imagine,
The colors
You would sprinkle,
A truce of togetherness
With chaotic forms,
Fed on the memories
Of a million frustrated desires,

That sunlight
Must wonder in anxiety,
Why must you be so giving?
To be yet again
A walking tombstone
Of another wasted desire?
When you could so easily
Have it affirm a loyalty
To gently age with you
Just skimming the surface of desire.

7/1/2008.

2008-01-06T18:34:00.001+05:30

Desire

So, now that,
That thing,
That had you,
Impatient and desiring,
Is yours,
Where are you now?

The chase over,
The hunt hunted,
And devoured,

Surely
Must fulfill you,
And return you
To an eternal sleep
Of blissful contentment,

Or
Can it
Never be so?
You - never unwanting?

Or
Nor can you,
Nor your hunt,
Ever plumb,
The depths,
Of that abyss
Of desire
Inside of you.

6/1/2008

2008-01-05T23:29:00.000+05:30

Tomfoolery of a Pedant and the Maiden's Repartee

“Would it have been better?
If we were just two thoughts
Suspended in some thought sphere
Communicating without need
For sight or touch
We would feel no distance then
We would not need
Visuals – that sight needs to feed upon
Touch – that form needs to feed upon
Disenchanted with both sight and form
With only the intellect
We communicate
Until it too dissolves
In some exuberance of Love”

To all that she smile and tells him
“You are so full of nonsense, my dear
To think you can love like that
When all you have ever cared about
Are just my embraces and kisses”
5/1/2008

2008-01-04T21:10:00.001+05:30

Happiness

To that piece of wisdom you smile upon me:

“To be happy
And enjoy life
No matter
How things be”

I am first a little guilty
Of all my endless cribs
That never seems to end,

Then a little solemn
To the truth in that piece of wisdom,

Until bored of both
Guilt and Solemnity,

I resolve a jump
And do a little jig
To a song the FM plays,

Which has me out of breath,

And also terribly out of tune
To all thoughts of
What happiness is?

Perhaps happiness
Is contained in everything else,
Except in the thought
How happy am I?

4/1/2008

2008-01-03T18:51:00.001+05:30

About a coin

(A cameo)

The coin you chose to dispense with
In that moment of generous pride,
Having found gleeful acceptance
On a cold dry crust
Of a dirty, uncared, unwashed palm
Is now being dispensed choicelessly,
Into smooth, gentle, perfumed hands
That mechanically slots it into partitioned chambers
And hurriedly hands back a loaf
Now being devoured by
Three children and a mother,
Who bored of asking themselves and others around
Of what business they have to do in this world
And having found no sufficient answer yet,
Have for the moment chosen to forget that question

And consume their thoughts on whats before.

3/1/2007

2008-01-03T07:49:00.000+05:30

Time retarded

for N

You would like to think
Of us as being time retarded,
As withered stumps of time,
Like a wrinkled face
With half an eye or
A worn out shoe
With its pair lost
What can be done?
Nothing at all.
Seek consolation for inaction?
We have even exhausted the pleasures there
Seek redemption with action?
Our knees are too weak to stand a conviction
What could be done?
Nothing at all
You would like to think
Of us as being time retarded
As withered stumps of time
To which I would say
I could not agree more with you my dear.

2/1/2008

2008-01-03T07:45:00.000+05:30

I

The Rag Pickers song.

We, the rag pickers
Have gathered here today -
At this deserted stand
On this wintry New Year’s Day,
And out of the heap of rubbish
We carry so faithfully in our sacks
We have sorted the choicest paper,
And made a little mound
Over which we have sprinkled
With some mumbo jumbo
A little kerosene,
Which our gem of a picker
“Rag-hu” found in a bottle
Lying outside the department store
Of Mr. hmmm… Miser. hmmm…
Of Mr. Miser whatever…
(What do we care for names today?
For daily associations on this day
When the years change)

We the ragpickers
We are glad
We attract attention today,
Even from those important men
In their important suits
And their more important cars,
They smile at us,
Perhaps we remind them of their less important days
Those happier days, those days spent
In the gentle winter sunshine,
Nurturing immodest dreams over modest tea.

Here come the men from work
With their weary faces and shivering limbs,
What better convenience than
To huddle around us
And stare at these blazing flames,
With a little resisting – supposing a trial by fire,
Or a little surrender – supposing a nurturing,
Even the policeman on duty has joined us
For we gladly miss his absence today,
And all we do and all we really wanted to do
Is circle around these ever dying flames,
Shouting a little merriment,
And wishing a happy new year ahead
Before the rubbish that feeds these flames is ash
And ashen is our faces again
As we go about picking your rags
On days in the New Year ahead.

II

The waiting

A cow
Stands attention
At a bus stand
On a wintry morning
Its eyes fixated ahead
Oblivious to any sound
Like a pilgrim
Meditating
On his journey ahead.

1/1/2008

2007-11-03T12:15:00.000+05:30

Afterthoughts on an Apology

How stupid of me,
To think that in just two minutes,
With two phrases,
Digitally wrapped
And wirelessly transmitted,
I would have earned merit enough
To be enveloped by you in your sadness,
That brooding loving canopy of tenderness...

I should have known
That your emotions are not for sale
To any confused apology or regret,
What you needed then

In that hour you choseto get stirred
Was a dare devil,
Not a shy monk
Reveling in idle thoughts,
I should have known that too…

Now you say “thank you” in an unmeaning way,
You just returned my compliments
In the best way you could.

2007-09-10T20:48:00.000+05:30

The Modest Men

We, who never nursed another’s pain,
We cannot talk on Love,
We, who never stood guard in defense,
We cannot talk on Cause,
We, who never dared question the obvious,
We cannot talk on Freedom,
We, who never got charmed by a magic
We cannot talk on Mystery,
We, who never kept tune to a present,
We cannot talk on Living,
We, who never felt the moment flicker,
We cannot talk on Dying.

These all words we know nothing of,
At best our own easy meanings,
A hollow sufficiency.

So let’s leave them behind,
And instead talk on the blue skies above,
The clouds in a huddle,
A bird’s flight,
The sunbeams at play
A child imagine,
The breeze unwind
And us,
Happy to Be.

10/9/2007

2007-09-09T17:11:00.000+05:30

“I heard the old, old men say
‘Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away’”

- W. B. Yeats

One By One We Drop Away

We stand here
Hands in our pockets,
Witnesses to Death,
One by one we drop away,
Whose turn its next we know
But of what use is such knowledge,
We have no devises left with us,
We are impotent,
The best we can do
(To remind him
That it’s his turn next)
Is also the worst we can do,
So we do nothing,
We say nothing,
Stay rooted in a funeral charm,
Another spectacle to witness,
Another ritual to perform,
One by one we drop away.

9/9/2007

2007-09-08T13:01:00.000+05:30

On a Hot and Arid day

A little cloudburst

Sprinkles,

Soothes parched lips,

Kissed by ash afloat

A listless breeze

Carrying a funeral song

And searching for

Some concrete to cling,

It wraps around

An interviewed,

Who is occupied

Trying to remember

The hands he just shook and

The embrace he just felt

On a hot and arid day.

october 2006

2007-09-08T12:14:00.001+05:30

“LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets…”

- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T S Eliot

A Love Song

You and I on an October evening,

Follow those paths where

Work is relentless and people relentless too,

But “Thank god” we are not here today for them,

Indeed we have this day for ourselves today.

So we wish silence away, talking about the weather,

Those first words resounding from the hollowness within

Saying "It’s such a beautiful day today"

“Yes, indeed it’s so beautiful today”

And so we go into a bookshop with coffee tables,

Order two cappuccinos and devise means

To exercise the others tongue.

"So how have you been?"

(How have you been my friend?)

"I have been fine, thank you"

(Fine, exhausting my days in love)

And I quick to move the conversation toward a different light say,

“Look even the waiter smiles at us;

He thinks we look good together

He sees meaning in our togetherness.”

While a shaft of sunlight holds our attention,

To the dust , the still dust , the implacable dust

And you turn your attention to your hands,

That’s of that tender make,

I would have loved to fold it for a prayer

To the virgin who meditates,

But I also temptation on a bed of roses.

(I see loveliness there. Where? There. Where there?

Don’t you see nothing? Don’t you remember nothing,

“I can only remember those loving hands

That thrilled me. They are no longer there

Just limbs pushing each other around.”)

I am Godot come back,

Come back to relieve your wait,

With the meaning you have been looking for

Don’t you see your meaning?

Attired in an Armani suit.

A writer comes, a writer goes,

Talking about his latest works,

On matters of wisdom and the spirit
Amidst perfumed men and ladies

In the comfort of the air conditioning.

You shift uneasily,

Your eyes drop, you play with your phone

And tell me “You are a gentleman and such a good friend

What do I have but you?

But only its too late, too late to start again."

"No, I am not a gentleman

Nor was meant to be,

I have stumbled over the beggars bowl

And carry her curse with me,

Look, here is the badge of poverty she gave me".

I fall short

Of words,

Of people,

Of ceremony,

Of youth,

Of patience.

Now time is up,

Time is up,

We have to go,

Youll miss your soap operas

And ill miss my news at eight.

september 2006.

2007-09-08T12:05:00.000+05:30

Desire

Desire

Spirals inwards,

Like a hurricane,

Disturbs the calm

Of modest seas,

Gives it

Speech and reach

Of waves,

You ride upon

In a tumultous pleasure,

To know both

The agony of hell

And the bliss of heaven.

8/9/2007

2007-09-07T20:18:00.002+05:30

“An aged man is a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick”
- W.B.Yeats

The Old Man’s Song

My body rejects this will to move,
And seeks comforts of the dead,
I coax him with this crutch -
My wife had used before
And then motion, to recreate those walks,
With a song in my heart

Around the cemetry of my youth.
A young man jogs past me,
Does he pity me?
Do I envy him?
But those questions dissolve,
In this piece of wisdom I invent
“My inch is your yard
Like your yard is God’s million miles perhaps
And your life an indivisible fraction of His second”
And I carry on…
But my yesterday’s pain is stubborn

It refuses to sleep and awakens,
To remind me what I am now,
A walking corpse,
A diminished life force,
In an undiminished ego.
So here I sit on a park bench gazing,
At everyday sights and sounds,
There is no energy in me to meditate,
(Ah, meditation, that was
A youthful infatuation
An exotic chase
A one sided affair
With nothing to show)
Till the thought of,
Tea and the morning papers
And talks with my friend
On how the world
Has gone terribly wrong,
Takes me away from here
To the reticent comforts of my house.

7/9/2007

2007-09-06T20:02:00.000+05:30

Footfalls

Your footfalls recede,
To some place or time
I cannot hope to know or be,
Only this pointer,
The sound of silence
Tells me this absence is real.
I wonder where and what
Must you be?
Perhaps in noble servitude,
An axis rooted, to the centre
Of a spin around which
Infinite lives revolve,
Or perhaps in selfish freedom,
On a flight to dissolve
Your sense of being
Into an immensity
You cannot hold,
Or perhaps you are this,
My dying memory of you,
When caught in a dialogue
On self and non-self,
Your understanding failed
And you chose to escape the shame
By drowning in the river of Lethe.

6/9/2007

2007-09-05T20:50:00.000+05:30

Emotional Decadence

You slip into a song,
Then slide into its emotion,
This your burrowing place
To indulge, a stage on which
Your own fall you script,
Then act, and then celebrate.
A jealous Narcissus
Is all thought besides a stream,
Blaming it for severity,
For just reflecting his own image
To fall in love with.

5/9/2007

2007-08-23T23:19:00.000+05:30

Death

Death is an absence,
And yet not the absence
That makes the jailer,
Search frantically for
The prisoner who has escaped,
It’s less dramatic,
More irrelevant,
Less important,
It’s more like a forgotten thought,
You forgot to say when you were
Interrupted while in conversation,
With your half asleep friend
On a lazy Sunday afternoon.

23/8/2007

2007-08-23T21:46:00.001+05:30

Emotional junk

You reach for the cadence of a fading song,
Your last resort to hold an emotion,
You just knew and fell in love with,
Some sweet decadence to sit with
Through another idle day,
An emotional drink that fizzes like a coke,
Satiates you, if not delight
This indulgent brooding will do.

23/8/2007

2007-08-22T20:50:00.000+05:30

Cloudburst

Above a congregation,
Grimaces discussing
“The meaning of life”,
You take the form of a cloud
That explodes,
As if to silence the empty prattle,

Metaphysics wetted in your kisses,
Makes a comic sight,
An embarrassed abstraction giving into,
The fullness of a form,
Too tempting to resist,

He who was once a logician,
Famed at sizing arguments,
Moistens, then softens
And then ripens to such incoherence,
You would look him in the eye and say
“You’re just another of my fools”.

22/8/2007

2007-08-22T20:47:00.000+05:30

Over a Dinner for Two

A jaded present awash
To the waves of a smile,
Refreshes, reclines
To take the form of some cheer,
The chirp of the sparrow
Twittering happily
At the prospect of another day.

He is a picture of an un-peaceful quiet,
His words that failed to negotiate a bend,
Slipped around the cliff of a question,
Now it lies splattered with muteness
To that death question “Do you really love me?”

The air resonates with the violence
Of a shot in the distance,
It’s shaken but not stirred,
It has depth enough
To bury it,
It has expanse enough
To dissolve it.

The choicest shark meat on the menu,
Makes her think of the those eels
She saw disappear into a shark
Their strangulation, their digestion
And their faecesification,
To that death question “Do you really love me?”
21/8/2007

2007-08-22T20:46:00.000+05:30

Rendezvous

We are at it again
Sitting on cushioned chairs,
Wasting our breath with words
We would gladly exchange for peanuts on another day,

We throw words at each other,
But not like the child who throws
The marbles he has lost in disgust,
Not even quite like the lizard
Who forks out its tongue at the passing fly,
What do we know of being desperate?
Fate has spared us, unworthy us,

We begin to taunt and tease each other,
A cacophony tempting enough for Mr. Boredom
In his ironed suit to say “Decorum please”,

We having exhausted those devices now,
Look at each other with timorous eyes
Reflecting our empty faces,

We sidestep from our glances to look up
At the afternoon sun,
That can’t quite collapse to freedom,
From its daily “to do” rounds over “to go” places
Infested with “to be” men.

20/8/2007

2007-08-22T20:39:00.000+05:30

On a Saturday…

The bucket of clothes you left a week back,

Soaked in detergent of white powder

Has entangled itself in such dubious knots,

It leaves a black bed and a stink, you would not like

To carry with you to confession or to her,

Which makes you remember what you told her,

That it was all a mistake,

A familiar mistake beside the painting

Of the Fall of Man

With Adam, Eve and you the Serpent,

And all this while you have been thinking

What pizza you would order for dinner,

You have lost patience with vegetables

They peel so easily and boil so modestly,

They don’t quite deserve that effort you think,

You see the first wrinkles on your forehead

And remember a song line

“To enjoy the power and beauty of your youth”,

That you are now on a shopping spree for jeans

And T-shirts and stepping inside the latest salons,

So you flip out that phone and drop down list

And call out an old colleague of yours,

And say “Hey, its me here, long time, how have you been doing?

And you can hear her cough and sneeze at the same time

And say “Hey, am a bit busy now,

How about if I call after some time”,

And that colleague of yours never called up,

And you have tired yourself of sitting and watching passerby’s

And thinking about all the possibilities,

Till the most modest of them

“You being hungry” disturbs you,

And you are soon feeding yourself on burgers and ice tea,

You would love to have someone to listen to you today,

You think you have metamorphosed, you are no Mr Purfrock,

You are an engaging, smart, spirited young man who dares to eat a peach,

Till you bump into a local policeman on duty,

And he collars you to show the face of the chicken you are,

“Next time ill crack it,” you say to yourself,

And resolve to make a start again,

A clean table and clean sheets of paper,

Until the second question on the prep book

Confounds you and you know you are just kidding yourself,

The weekend you have waited all this week

To make a start is here but all you have to show

On Saturday evening, is you in bed with the FM on

Your table littered with page three news

And on the bottle of the half drunk coke a fly is perched,

You walk into tomorrows thinking about tomorrow,

You think you quite missed her giggle that day,

You are in retrospection now “What If indeed

Everything you had ever been looking for

Was contained in that giggle of hers that day?”

You have walked here as summoned

For your redemption, and like the timid customer,

Who cleared his dues on notice; you severed all your ties

While you still fear notice for notional and opportunity costs,

You quite forgot your karma playing catch up,

A crowd of amused faces have gathered besides a drain,

A man that’s fallen inside it emerges drenched in stench,

“Couldn’t he find a better place to die”, a man tells you,

“He must be having his problems”, you tell him,

“But that doesn’t mean he make a show of it here”, another tells you,
Which all makes you play out in your mind

Those last lines of that novel by Camus,

That novel you had read once but now forgotten except some fancy lines,

Like the one you are trying to remember now but don’t quite remember

Until you Google search it as:

“For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate”
august 2007

2007-08-22T20:37:00.000+05:30

Witchy Nights

The currents of pain
On the dead man’s sleeve
Have begun to ebb,
They have no business to be there,
They must find their calling
To the face of some newer moons.

She is showing him
A horizon less sunset,
The sun sinking
Into a hungry sea,
Its fire quenched;
It vapours into the saffron
Of a monks robe.

Indigestion has him in pain today,
He should not have eaten that junk,
Her delight meets his grimace,
He explains, she sympathizes and
Then she throws her potion of words
On the new moons face,
Which flees fearing unkind blemishes,
And He watches the tides in the distance ebb,
And feels the currents of his pain recede.

august 2007

2007-08-22T20:34:00.000+05:30

“STAND on the highest pavement of the stair—

Lean on a garden urn—

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—”

from La Figlia che Piange by T.S.Eliot

Weaving

The golden veils

You weave in your hair,

From sunlight- sunbeams,

Soft and gentle

Of some dying suns,

The harbingers of death will take with them

To shroud the dying suns.

august 2007

2007-08-21T22:48:00.000+05:30

Hide and Seek

Remember when we were children,

We loved to play hide and seek

And you were more industrious than the burrowing mice,

You sought places in the depths of the earth;

I would sometimes wonder if you were

Being called by forgotten faces,

Could you smell so well their scent in digested bones?

Now blood, vessels and tissues of the promising worm

That wriggles in the bowels of the earth,

Searching or imagining or desiring a forgotten sight;

For I could never find you

Until I gave up and called out your name,

That sounded so shrill as if it were a whistle to the absent,

Might it have pierced the slumbers of the dead

And blotted blank dreams with jets of blue or black?

For the winter branches on the tree shivered

And a crow perched upon it

Made a dive for the worm that surfaced,

Then you appeared with a mischievous glee

And I ran across to you

To hear from you the places you had been,

And we both looked across and thought we saw

An eyesight wriggle in the eyes of the crow

Until a merciless catapult shot

From the neighbouring boys

Had it grounded and we saw in shame

They sing joyous songs over their prize

Of a roast perhaps,
To, did they know were ancestral scents?

august 2007

2007-08-21T22:37:00.000+05:30

A Lot Unlike Love

I have nothing to give you

But a dry, sterile vacuum,

Touch like

The kiss of gallows,

On a dead mans lips,

A formal show of affection

To the one he has devoured,

Words like

The cleric’s clever answer,

To questions that no one

Really cares about,

But it’s “important” to ask and answer.

august 2007