Curtained

Sometimes, while am talking to you,
Silence begins to hum
In my ears like a bee lost,
Like a radio-station gone cranky,
Zero, it screeches
For a long long while.

I think I do not hear you.
I see your lips in motion,
I judge you
Right there,
The intensity of your liquid
Thoughts
Beating against difficult shores.

I say it to you then,
Like many befores
And the numerous
Afterwards,
That come and go,
Shuttling across promises
Of autumnal today
And monsoony tomorrows.

The Eucalyptus is on fire.
I smell its ruins
Somewhere.
At traffic signals
They still carry bare news.

Life is just that Silence
Melting against the walls of the mind,
Where unsaid words
Breed raw menace.

Winter II

She has been teaching
Herself to ignore
Her numb finger
And the number
Tip of the
Predominant Nose
That decides what
Stays in life

More importantly,
What Goes.

Sans these,
Baby knew
She could love Winter.
Or, Winter too
She would

Shoo.

Yes, baby shooo-es.

Migraines. Real bad ones.
Made of her
Choicest nightmares
Throbbed her temples.
Puke.
Baby wanted to puke.
Or perhaps,
Baby wanted babies

I suppose.

It was there
In her
Throat.
What babies come out
Of Baby's throat?


Baby has seen babies
Born on TV, lovers met,
Cold fingertips, warm nose
A round baby appeared
Baby saw
Baby choked.

What throbs her temples
Makes poor baby bloat?

Ah, this lovely lovely Sun
Perfect for killing lovers
Real old ones
That could be buried
Under dry leaves
Of lovelier Gulmohar trees.

This Winter,
She will kill those
On her
Fingertips,
Kiss the Sun,
Forgive the snow
Kick the wind
Piercing her nose.
She shrieks! She chokes!
A baby cries

A baby woke!

To A Friend Who Reads.

No colour in your
Soul
Hides from me.

The length of
A night
Blanched in
Altercations
Is longer
Than all the days
We have lived
And known
Together.

And when words travel
From your home
After unsure rains,
They form a
Dawn brighter.

Infinitely so.

Pick up the pen,
That hides behind
Those heavy curtains,
Rummage your pockets
And
Build your own
Cob-webs.
To breathe, cry,
Pray like
A poet,
The coincidence
Of living like
A Maugham,
A Rimbaud, A Baudelaire.

To place Life on
Your nerves
And drink its
Pulse
Like a soul melting
Into yours.
To feel love
In infinity of words
In tomorrows.

There is horizon
Still,
Stretched on your bed
Where your heart
Beats,
In memory of all
That went past
Of all
That wants to be.

Whimper

You were obsessed with mirrors.
Clearly.
And that yearning for finales
And dainty combs.
Laughter must arrive with cadence,
Moments with inverted commas.
Never letting your hair down
To brush his
Shriveled shoulders.

Clearly, he had no soul.

You never met a face
That had a heart
Attached somewhere,
Not even in the heels
That clicked around you.
Now smell the dust.
Clearly, they say,
Literally, they clap.

You sang, you proclaimed
History was your making
The Future too
Packed on your table
In quaint boxes
Dumb, deceiving,

Altogether wooden
Not ours.

And then
On the last day
That lay italicized and
Bold on your plate,
That writing,
Your writing
Peeled from ancient walls,
Passed you by,

Sigh,who shall tell you,
Who will ever tell you?

The bathos of the swan-song
Had fallen on deaf ears,
Mirrors, neat mirrors,
No soul in them,

That was the end
Plain, pure,

Not a whimper in the closet,
Bold decay,
Absolute un-fear.

Our Universe.

I woke up today
To set the universe in motion
With my pen.
The chain of my nascent
Thoughts promised
To light up
Your world, my world
My fish-bowl, your kitchen
Their homes, galleries,
Portraits and
Some flower-pots.
So I write.
Just so
That. This.
And other thats
And other this.
Many this and many thats
That might reach you,
And touch
Your cracked
Halo.
Wake up
My word tells you
And pass venom
From hand to hand
We shall drink
The last of the last
Suppers.
And raise a toast
To our fragile
Nerves.
I shall bake breads,
You shall prick flesh
And together
At sun-rise
The universe will
Move, then die.
My pen is
Fire,
Your heart
Will melt
Your heart at
Our Last Supper.

Of Jokes

A sad lumpy frog
Of the lazy well
That drinks not
Dies not.
Not today
Not yesterday
Not tomorrow.
Tomorrow leaves
Will travel to me
With news of
Another world
Hazy.
My eyes
With muddy sorrows
Tell me
Stories of
Protests, Bombs,
Economies, Armies.
Come leaves to
The well,
may be
I will shed
Warm tears
In cold waters
Blow bubbles in
Memory of you
You ignorant
Who glanced and went away.
Away, away you went
To the other world
Of bombs,
Armies, Million creatures
Devouring,
I sigh in the well,
With your shadows
Still mocking
My grief,
In muddy puddles heavier
Than your
Loudest Guns.

Blah.

The Monsoon-night pricks
With its false winds
That whistle more loudly
At nightfall.

Yes I asked it to come
With brittle rains.
And I asked you.

Steeped in a darker sigh.

When all my "Selves"
Sit together
They make unbearable noises
Before the mirror.

So I blow out the candle
I quit the night

Come to me tomorrow.
Tonight, I have waves to ride.

Shredded poems,
A stain upon the wall,
A stubborn failure
Sit together in my old closet.

Then the old book
Pickled,
Opens like a familiar road.
The Isle of Misery
Is borne.
The sovereign queen dressed in mockery,
Reigns over
The hungry Selves.


I blow out the candle.
I quit the night.

Come to me tomorrow,
Tonight, I have shadows to fight.

Smog

Before Promises was Solitude

After Promises came Death

Minus Salvation.

I felt the smog

Descend my

Being

And remembered

Old poems.

Dickinson,

Eliot.

Ordered for a Memory.

And a shot of Cappuccino

In that purple predictable

Coffee Shop.

Without You

I add this.

Yes, I add.

Melancholy now do visit me.

I ramble, I sing.

Come memory.

Do.

And this death of 

All recollections.

This silence of old voices.

Bleak.

Like Death I tell you.

After the Death.

I waited.

Brown, damp, unsure

In an Old Book.

With a new Silence.

I was born

Decision-making

Biting the dust all day,
Weaving his breath
Each way,
The Spider wonders
If it wishes to
Crawl
On feeble limbs
Enmeshed..

To unweave,
Fold up those threads

Come, let us have death.

Pose-Repose

The simplicity of all sorrows
Belittles expression.

I hang you in my closet
Like a dress too grand
For life's many afternoons
For those boring, repeated
Confessions.

Listen to the flesh
Thirsty for more
And more
Flesh,
Till absurd music
Kills you with love
Robs you of death.

Listen to these multiple swan songs,
That break at the break of dawn.

Life laughs aloud
At the dreams
Tucked in my head,
And Philosophy sweats profusely,
Hidden
Under your bed.

April

There is a chance of mangoes ripening this April.
A chance his heart might break into patterns
Of gray cold bricks spread on a tram-track.
Do not call them fissures.
He does not like the word.

He is allergic to pungent emotions
Bad odours,
Bad English.
Bad girls he might like though
This night, this April.

There is a chance of the blood burning
Like never before.
Sick at the drabness of leaves
Not whistling, not obeying
This April.
How must he live?
With little flesh and no admiration?
Like a melody turned sour in
A cracked throat on a sad evening.

All his chance
All my hope,
Boiling in dirty vessels
All this fiery April.

So take him to misty lanes
Of dark affections, darker roles.
Take me to damp museums
Of shredded robes
And feeble swords.

Dissections...

Finally all my days have become the same.

There are no more coincidences. Nothing is a surprise. This might be a sign of belated wisdom. I am hopeful. Or, overall boredom. I am cynical.

I do not remember a time when I did not seek pros with cons. Even before I heard of their combined powers from elders, parents, friends, teachers, random soothsayers, aunts, cab-drivers, men, more men, pimple-struck teenagers. Everybody. Almost.

Remember, I did not need sermons. I was born with enough noises in my head. And over years they have only multiplied and how! My 'how' is not an empty 'how'. The voices have multiplied overwhelmingly, so that now, I smile too much. Often dumbly. I smile at the parliament-like hullabaloo within my small head. I smile when people talk to me, and I do not follow much of their words.

Crack a joke and I will judge your humor. Judge it against mine. I will bestow my laughter judiciously. In the interim, I shall smile.

Pie-chart was my favorite idea of a graph. I often make it inside my head and come up with three sections- writing, movies, jabber. Often while hungry, my mental pie-chart takes on the form of a healthy pizza. An aloo-paratha, an enormous chocolate cake, and blah and blah depending on my appetite and craving.

Do not throw words at me till they have enough weight. Especially when my ears are on fire. I might throw pretty heavy ones back leading to much injury and bandage.

Finally, all my poems are identical. Till I sleep at the idea of reading them. Mundane and somber, like memoirs of things cliched and insignificant. Full of oranges, evenings, browns, embers, past, lost, you name it! You could!

Dead-ends are lessons. They tell you that you cannot run anymore.

Nothing Comes of Nothing.

I remember I wrote to you
Everyday in the Autumn.
I remember writing in Spring too
In Summer, Sadness,
Laughter, Languidness
Through the brown, sadder Rains.
I remember I wrote
Every Season
Everyday.

Nothing can come of nothing
King Lear roared in my ears
In old voices
In humid classrooms.
I wrote to you
Every way
Lest I be Hamlet.
Hamlet with the sweat on his brow,
Sigh, the monsoony Calcutta evenings.

I remember you had spoken,
Lighting up the fleeting
October purple
The dazed city sky
Hopeful of another dawn.
I remember Plath
And I remember Camus.
The scent of arguments on those walks
I remember your clear eyes.

I wrote, I wrote madly.
I spoke till our voices were tired
And lives choked.
I remember I wrote the end
The year-ends and silver evenings
Laden with failures,
Burnt like never before.

Nothing came of nothing.
Parmenides had proved,
Old Lear had told.
I remember the emptiness of all diaries,
The shrill cry of winter wind
Moaning.
I remember Ophelia drowning in those pages,
I remember I kept writing,
The sole writer of it all.