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.

Waning...

Uninspired
The dog buried in ancient sand
Across the road.
Waiting for an audience to perish.
Each moment yawns,
Each hunger lives,
Drawn out
With broken claws.

Amidst noises in the head
Some on the streets.
Turning slowly into a wrinkled speck
And then a Lump, Love, History.
Today bows out
The Uninspired dog,
And Tomorrow they shall,
Play Cat and Mouse.

Over Tea & Coffee

With flushed cheeks and stirred minds, we moved to our next cup. Warm lemon water in heavy mugs. Tea-bags and sugar bags lying beside silently...all awaiting nemesis. The big cup of Aztec already gulped,  our talk had now grown more direct, her company more life-like. I could see those hands move like a juggler's.

I answered her the way I mostly do while "opening up". Those very lines, with all the nonchalance, all the sanity. Again and again. Like a writer remembering his oft-quoted quotes, long after he has overcome the conviction that had gone into their making. Smart and sharp. Even intelligent. And generously aloof. Self-critical, sans self-pity.

Almost as a habit, I tried reading the effect my wise words were having on her, wishing she would feel the strength of my carefully-framed convictions. She smiled with twinkled eyes. Like older women usually do, having discovered the hollow in the souls of their younger companions. In a single moment I felt, she had metamorphosed into another. With a passionate adjustment of her veil she set herself up. And before I could decide whether she was agitated, offended or effervescent, words came tumbling out in that strangely powerful english...the way they had never before:

"You do not know my dear! All this talk, all this writing, this experience, your and all you see of others, become zero. You will think, "oh my god, what was I doing all my life? Before this? Where did I waste my breath and did not come to him sooner?" All this years without affection will look a waste. You will be transformed. Love has strange powers. And then you say to yourself- "I was such a fool!""

She took out a picture and sighed, remembering the one month and one week of marriage she had lived, before coming to India for seven years. His Kurdish poems by her side, the desire to translate them for the world, and the resolve of being together someday again. She had called it Love.

I sat there quietly, seeking the darkness of the streets outside...the brew had begun to melt the heart, freeze the mind.

In Pursuit...

The motto is to fake motivation. The idea is to sound profound. Even when bitterness seeps into the air all around. Even when you inhale nitrogen dioxide all the time and stand in queues to use washrooms. 
Autowallahs are the new bosses, temple-priests the untiring, unbeatable, good old, very old, villains.


And then to seek poetry, to pursue sheer words all life. 
"Arre oye saala beep beep beep and beep beep beep..." sayeth one bus-conductor to another, hanging from the rattled wooden vehicle in a clogged streets. Clogged streets, worse than clogged drains. But, you MUST MUST MUST seek poetry I say! Pure poetry.


To write without cynicism, to write without spite, to write with deep commitment, to write with honesty and warmth. Lets write and mock the breed of the Romantics, or lets etch realistically and defeat Zola. All that the soul needs is to pretend. Pretend Art.


Love too. And shove perhaps. And hug and smug. And then a simple mug.
What else? People. More and more, tumbling in and out of Life like a can of worms badly shut. Talk, stop, listen but do not touch them.


The Sun is shouting from somewhere in the Sky, slapping more rays on our heads. Get up and run the race. The merry-go-round awaits the beggar-kids, the woman sitting near the rail tracks and the young girl repairing her shoes again and again and again with her two-penny.


Happy New Year we shall sing in a few days!
Happy happy it must be.
And I shall write Poetry.

Hollow

Let mists settle.
Settle old scores.

A zillion particles screech all around me
Tonight.
Their happiness bursts into contagious brown flames
Eating up my night sky.

Neon lights,
Fake lights,
Vaporous and dumb
My abode of knotted
desires.
Where are you?

This alien land of
Rude joy
Plucks out my peace.
Always.
This distance of a thousand miles
Scourges my mind
Incessantly.

And while the mists settle
Old Scores.
I fade away
Across the burning universe
Wistful
Eating White
Coldly.

On a morning...

Behind the temple spire
Birds flew.
Chased by the early Sun
The Birds flew.
The City was still yawning,
Misty naked lanes,
The moon pale blue.

The immense drunk river
Faded boats and old crows,
Grim gods and
Bathing pujaris
He knew them
She knew.

February Sun on
Their heads
In their fists
The icy breeze
The earthen cups
The molten tea,
The nervous vapours
They knew.

Lame rickshaws
Her playful dupatta
His lanes and his smile
Their nascent dawn
Bleary-eyed
The Ganges gulped
before they knew.

Atoms

I stare at You

Mute

For words pleasant

Unpleasant

Believing they would

Live in my skin

Forever.

Like the air full of your 

Smell

The atoms of your presence

After you've left.

City You...

Yes I know. Novelty puts me at unease. And you do not need to tell me that. I am  not those ready to ride, chirpy souls. I am not madly nomadic. I am me.

Give me time. And I shall open up to the scent of the new atmosphere. I will love the aromas of your city and I shall miss its sky and its distinct sound.

I have begun to feel love for this place. Pure love that comes with pure faith and intimacy. Without the romance of false hopes and  the noise of loud interlocutors. I have moved away from days that saw me searching for familiarity. Days when I compared lanes and markets to those back home in Calcutta. I am awake now. To the grey charms and lazy nothings of these wide frank roads. To the bitter pangs of the May sun, to the chills of November showers, to the fogs of September. 

There are rocks awaiting all over. Boulders waiting acknowledgment and glory. The fading silhouettes of royal arches, the curves of wise domes. The smell of grandeur travelling with food, the trails of memory stuck to reckless, dreamy, auto-rides.

I shall miss you. I shall find reasons to be with you all over again.

Nostalgia already at my doorstep. And its not even time yet to bid Adieu!