Forgetting

The fear of many things
Of having forgotten alphabets
And names of dear ones

Treading back
Home
Towards its
Unnameable smell
And then, forgetting home

Forgetting to love
And kiss
To cry and pacify

Forgetting your
Smile and good deeds

Turning you into
Memory

And then,

Remembering.

The perfect poem seeps into your skin
Leaving that right mixture of salt love sun criticism
Like mother who strokes your hair
Just that way.
You know its strange touch
It's descent
It's nonsense and sense
Both poignant
Like a lover you cannot change

Profound.
Impressive
Well made.
Carelessly
Carefully
Unknowingly.

That kind of  teasing rhetoric
That kind of after taste
Like renewed friendships
Like love after multiple deaths.

Great poetry,
True poetry?
Some poetry?

You know it?
Like afterlife? Like soul?
Like victory?

That perfect poem of losing yourself
And finding it on a yellow page
Another day.
Ending awkwardly.

Like life. Like death.

Monsoons

Its the season of moody rainshowers that are here

To lash out at your long-dried jaundiced conscience

Season of peeling off of love

Of births of insects, grass, and babies

Of new madness, new skin,

New frailties, new lust, new deeds

Till your new lover, or is he old

Peels off your dreams from

Eyes now too moist 

Drunk on the moody rains.

In Passing....

When you stood at the door
Ceremoniously
Countering winds,
The Train had begun its race.

You stood
And it took you away
From it all.
You stood there
For long.

It wasn't raining on you
But elsewhere, a place
Far away, A place
You could only smell.

And Mangoes too
On giant trees
Belonged to anonymous
Backyards
Of an anonymous clan.

Children giggled at you,
At your sun-glasses
Habitually
Paying reverence
To the passing Train.

You wondered what
They had eaten
At home,
Those awkward bellies
And a gleaming face.

And the driver at the engine too

Where was his home?

Blessed.

At the signals
The crow-eyed woman
Visits me:
Beti, God will do you good.

Clink. The transaction is made.

Fading

In small, newspaper boats
My life travels to you

My hands and yours
Dragged on dirty tables
The unsure edges seeking
Shelter of your imaginary shores

Meanwhile

The newspaper
Screams reality of the
Day before.

I do not need you.
I do not.
I drink the smell of your
Skin often in my mind
I seek out your dark soul
And push Time.

Your breath, your words,
Those spurts of abrupt
Laughter
Nights and days and nights and days
And this life and the next
And all the gestures of love
Bursting out of nowhere
Stirring this faded Universe

Mock love, mock pain

The drama of little souls
Travelling in little paper boats.

Noises in the Head.

Silence is not
My cup of tea.

Inner Silence
That must have
Descended like
Cumulonimbus
Paratroopers
On blessed folks.
Promising nothing,
Yielding nothing,
Saying nothing.
Blank,
Deep,
Blue.

Silence,

I do not go to you
You never come to me.

Smug

The intoxicated Fragment
Giggling and
Babbling
With many
Nascent brothers

Irresponsible,
Ruthless
Unanswerable
Drunk on the
Belated,
Never here,
Never there
Never for
Tomorrows.

Fragmented
And smug.
Beating with
Anger, Pride,
Broken, Unspoken
A Fragment.

He breathes still.

Like this.

If I dive inside
My fish-bowl
Where Pablo swims
Towards the Atlantic
How will Pablo feel?

Pablo,
If you ever dive out
And write
All my papers
Especially, the one to the Journal
of Commonwealth Studies
I would feel happy.

Oh, this is Absurd,
This is clap-worthy.


This is Life,
This is Death
This is Poetry.

Finitude

To those paasages that do not listen to me anymore
And have become part of Your slave-empire
That bends and breaks hearts
Kills histories
And silences folklore
To those mysteries of land
That humble Being
Cut out posters of crammed ideologies
Ideologies Idols Idolescence?
To that daily Life
That you tell me is a gift
Wrapped in culture and anarchy
Trashed with jargon and
Stashed somewhere that is
Actually never really out there
To those many voices yelling from
Heavy books laden with
Promises that we can talk, we should talk
We should write, we should fight
Who is listening?
Who is out there waiting for you tonight?
To that comma that has been bidden adieu
In hopes of finality of period.

Periods of indefinite
Quest, knowledge, discovery, discourse
Intellect, Happiness, Unrest
Oh happy happy hours
That see all things happy die
No longer at ease
No longer my own
No longer yours
And now
To die
To die.

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.