On departure..

In two weeks, two worlds fell apart. Worlds that belonged to me, worlds I was an architect of. Worlds that tumbled my sanity and woke my dreams. Like all happiness , all meadows of sadness are personal, self-motivated and not to be touched. One creates pages of fiction and laurels of mystery with insomnia, without realizing how engulfing its claws are, how stagnant it becomes you and re-paints your eyes wide open. An objectivist hung on pathos, as a mode of escapade can crush sweet lemons for bitter ones, without qualms of conscience or regret. Each millisecond now would be a chronic weight on my frail existence. The apt synonym would be 'adios'.

Arabian wrinkles

Light unwrinkles my weariness
And eases the discomfort
Brewed in mojito, shredded into sockets of night
Thoughts gush in of an arabian holiday
In a different globe, veiled by tides
Of a sea embedded , fenced and staked
And as the light alights into the night
Dimming your shoulder, the glow worms in your smile
Thousand other wishes and valedictions
Die silently, beneath the waste canvas
Immiscible as oil of tears
In a lake of eroded logic.

The Stolen Caterpillar

Then came a day in the year of unremembered skies
You drew me a stranger; discernible semicolon
In a sea of cynic symbolism
Starstruck, stole your caterpillar.
Three weeks ; Ones of recluse and hiding
Butterfly flew one day
Away into the bleak sunshine
Her beautiful wet wings cared little
For cocoons she weaved
Feathers of time alight in my imagination
In my morbid denial to pass up cocoons
For all the cracked shells, enchanted flutterings,
On the palette of your indifference.

Song of stagnancy

I have forgotten words

The feeling when they eject off my vocal cords
The strange harmonic interplay with larynx
Oblivious of them all, but I imagine yours
In midst of my daylong slumber and numbness
How you would abuse my stagnancy 
Losing sublimity to a lonesome jazzy octavrium
Replacing it with another bass interlude
Akin to our hidden exchange of subdued misery
Two weeks and twenty three hours
I waited, to be baptized again
Seems like a lifetime of alienation
The little black book of your poems
Makes me a corpse of decadent wanderlust
Don't know why I colored it black
Any other color would fail to light the morbid hours
Of intoxication, of white december 
Streaming through the untreaded strait
In an arbitrary noxious way.

The Second coming

Let me trade the second coming
With your invisibility
And a mirror of fragrance
For the red lonely rose that blossomed
Only to wilt and droop again
- Requiem to its burdensome beauty
Stony eyes of the outcast
Can't quite requite
Social breed, the bleeding present
A snapped kite - dropping dead
Upon my marbled ancient twinklings 
Leaving no scars on his dear pentagon
Me,
A vertex
Of stunned silence and wrath
A misfit in the wheel 
Curse to the rhyme of tomorrow
Lies in jest
Crucified to infidelity

Last Rain in Santa Cruz

For the first time in six months
I heard you; Like the Bombay Summer
Your humid words made me uncomfortable
Wanted to move aside, pass a little humor or two
You despised humor, ones that masked my infidelity
Now you detest the pages of 'Inferno'
The elephant stands still
Glaring in the corner of grey
Blowing like a mundane SriLankan elegy
Divorced to be locomotive again
Or an agnostic lover of dark;
I still read 'Paradiso'
Shamelessly as once I did in Vijaywada -
I was fifty miles away from Binghamton
When I looked over downtown Ithaca
A microphase of colorful shadows
It lended me a respite from guilt
Lets take a walk along Parisienne walkways
Perhaps for the last time
Thick as a brick we will bid adieu
In the simplest of gestures
Trading rusts and wrinkles.

Two Minutes

A sluggish phase of two minutes
While wandering through the Mediterranean sundance
The fleeting loom of my watch
Deceived the pattern
Just when the cradle of uncertainties
Could redeem time
Incite few ceaseless wrinkles
That time failed to blend

Lost in translation?





What gained in life, what lost
At crossroads we meet, at crossroads we part
Grasses entwine , leaves dry
But no grouses left
Despite deceit at every step
Upon my histories I gaze
My chest of memories I ruffle
In soliloquy..

I have lived for time unknown
In a world of a few billion years
Life, my endless story
Limited to finiteness
Yet I was promised eternity
Yet it is enough for me
To every knock until the last
I shall open my doors
In soliloquy...

Life and death in incessant cycles
Life is but a gypsy halt
Here today, where to tomorrow?
I fly with no destinations
Who knows where the day will dawn
Darkness spans infinity
Testing the life force
Weary wings disperse
Our paths cross
In soliloquy....


Translated from Hindi -- "Kya khoya kya paya " written by Atal Bihari Vajpayee






"Akashe jyotsna.."


Sky suffused in moonlight
Floral path basked in leopard hues
My heart, a deer in the silence of the night
Knows not where its heading
My body, veiled in the silvery shadows of the leaves
Sees no deer around
And farther I go
Moon appears like a sickle, in its bent semblance 
Devouring the last deer-grain of the wheat meadows
And then, 
Slowly slowly, sinks in the horizon
Into the darkness of slumber
In the eyes of hundred souls


~Translated from bangla,
source : "nee parththa" , from "Hey raam"










Rainy September Night



I remember Tollygaunge
A rainy september night,
Alone in my prejudice
Sluggish in the drenched kurta
No one around, just a dark september night
And depraved me
He promised, and I hoped
the night to be darker
And his lonesome arm clutching me
The vanity that attracted me
The wrath that stole my reality
And I diffused
Sans awakening, a desire
Only to be clutched , held again
To taste again, his nictotine stained lips
The eyes that spoke of dreams
And other nine million lies
Lies that I adored more than truth
Bereft I walked, amid the rainy september night


~Arinjita

Psychedelia



A littered haze of eiderdown
Maiden sea of limpid green
Screaming into the open sky
A tender sound of blue
scattering the far away speck of gray
Frantic as jazz the waves deform
Mellow sea unbreaks quiescence
And,
Summer drips down from sky


Unrequited

It was raining again
Rain that deludes solitude
Solitude that imposes a grinning self-assurance
The void's rheology that grasps again
And on such a night
I miss your floral scarf
And the imaginary brush of your hair
On my delightful eyelids, that would not shut
For the vision and touch of such purity
Solitude is restiveness i must submit to
But the flurries of thought of your nearness
The sting of time, the cloud of eiderdown
Where alien sickness pervades
And words , like randomness keep on pouring
Till the candle burns out, the last vestige of warmth

The November letter

The first letter of Spring,
First hint of magnolia on a summer so blue
A far fetched flight across the lime drenched noon
Fell, like a red leaf of Fall
So did the fragrance of her nailpolish
Flew from the olive hued letter
Every fresh morning, draped in white
Every little tread , flurry of anxiety
Seeks shelter, may be in forlorn scribbles
Away from the glance of the universe
Thread of mortality gleams still
The first drench of monsoon
Warm tears that fell on my shoulders
But never so warm again, only
More distant than reality can fathom

Fleeting


We can go anywhere,
From the dingy suburbia
To the jostling city
May be nowhere, just you and me
Till the smoke runs out
Beyond whispers and million laughters
We will start from zero, under a starlit night
Pass the neon lights, holding hands
Painting the town, lost in the windshield
Scuffling, shuffling , breathing and sighing
Your meek fingertips, lonesome insanity
Talking about revolution , minutes
May be not with words, but with silence
Stealing the mystical dews of the night

Return

May be I will return on a windy night
Amongst the green meadows, smelling the wheat and corn
May be not as a man, but in the guise of a lark
Dressed in mists, dissolved in the fog
As the tears of the idiot wind.

Appeal

It glittered around half past ten. Still cold , numb fingers needed some warmth-delicate and less promising. Images keep coming, sans source, just cluttering the brain, making it more lonesome than usual. Tried to interpret them, and in that effort extrapolated it to some scattered day in future. Unusually colored it was, I could hear a faint laughter, could see an unvanquished smile, the world was slowly brightening up. A world I seemed to have less knowledge of. A little speck of dust struck my eyes, floated in the humor, as if it was its home. And it swum, oblivious of its terminal fate. The eye became more viscous, and visions fainter. It felt like pain, could have only guessed it, being totally unaware of what pain is. Perhaps just a word ,coined to address a class of desperation poets feel in their parallel universe. Well, mine seemed more real, and less cosmic. Didn't want to redeem myself of that unnamed feeling, and its humble intercourse. Without any semblance of subordination the matrix engulfed the life that was still running. The warmth imploded in my veins, the hand felt a soft touch, perhaps more enigmatic than the decadent vision....

To be continued

Any colour you Like

Choose any colour of confession
Or of the fury of the Indian summer
I have oil green , ethnic blue
cultural red, tribal orange
Cyan delight of Memphis blues
Fragmentary black crows of Nebraska
Paint as you will, or use them all
Make the sketch lonesome, flickering
Speak of tired horses, or of cosmic weariness
Of buckets of rain, of chimes of freedom
And the dancing child of white shadows
Walk away further, away from my vision
Let not my weariness be framed
In the bare grace truth of acrylic
But free my mortality, in your brushstrokes
And decline I must these colorful glories
Six hundred acres deep criticized fears

Unbereft orchards

We can borrow the cracking of the wind
And the those silent lilies, bare in the vast landscape
Obscured to calmness, hitchhiking to the empty sky
I smell home in your archaic gypsy suit,
And the magnolia blues of the childhood afternoons
Before the summer rain, you would read Rainer
And as the monsoon washed out the green meadows
Paranoia crept in your lines, in your desolate lillies
Whiskey drenched, my weathered arms reached out
Only to find you sting again.

Palo Cortado : The waltz


Under the cage of violet moon
That stir of time and eternity
Raising glasses on the Spanish night
The vibrant flamenco, feel of psaltery
The shining meek Cuban Cajon
And your liquid finesse , silent and starving.
Spiral black orchid of the Celtic night
Smooth, lascivious you waltzed
Transitory, caught in a net of kisses
My unease annihilated, as you glittered
And brushed your Napoli scarf
Smelling Fiori di capri, encumbered Carthusian delight
Starry child , incite the immutable poet
To a cascade of ricochet, delicate as Sherry..

Poetess IV : North Country and Bob Dylan


Thunder on the crooked highway
As you strolled , and the storm brewed across
Restless, lonesome vision of June
You feared the liquor roads, the green miles
And my tobacco firm, slain in the gutter
An empty ashtray , where you would once poke
With your slender fingers, stingy disapproval
And as the freewheeling poet sang in the radio
You would stumble, in merry
Rain would be falling, on my broken window panes
Seething down the ceiling, creeping along your skin
You and I never talked much,
But as the storm would die on the jingles and tangos
Your weariness flew across the empty North country roads
You preached conscience, depravity and love, that
The smoke rings of my vacant mind refused -
The cricket chirping alleys, lonely North country meadows
Not even a note, you left with the monsoon..

Poetess III : Merciless

Nothing but the dark room stared at me
And in that comfort, my spirit went somewhere
In that damned civilization, where you live
With imagination, without realms of past.
Crosslinked, immobile , chained
Encumbered to the infinite imageries
Tangled to Victorian decadence
Wrapped in the surge of poetry
And when it arrives to you
formless, on forgotten eves
You would write to me -
Unabated, fracturing the night
And my shapeless ego would crumble
Perished in that merciless infinity.

Poetess II : Oblivion

You still remember the leaping streams
The tremulous murmuring of leaves -
And bouquet of words that you wrote
Percolating through shadows
Like an easy summer breeze,
A sudden bustle in the lonely twig
Peeling the bare forest of its silence
And as the twilight came, I erased
My fruitless signatures , 'cause all my infinitesimal being
Was nothing but a crater of your riddles.

Poetess I : wilderness

For two years I walked the earth
As the chaos ridden years took you away
To some formless cloudy blood red sky
No phone, no words, no pets, no cigarettes.
Ultimate freedom.
I was no longer poisoned by the civilization you fled
The freedom in simple beauty was too good to pass up
For some unanswered questions and cadaverous wounds
Your only gifts are harsh blows,
And occasionally the waves to feel strong.
Now I don't know much about you,
but I do know that that's the way it is here
When the calm is setting in -
In the most ancient of human conditions,
Facing the blind death stone alone,
With nothing to help you but your hands
And your own flickering dreams

Learning to live


Images and words, remains as the spectrum of the musical genius of Dream Theater. Released in 1992, it transcends the then musical scene, bringing in unusual structure in rhythm and riffs. Rightly so, a chaos in motion, and like many other modern day worshipers of metal, I consider it as a seminal release in the progressive metal scene. Learning to live, the very last track in the album, is a true rainbow of the caliber of Labrie, Petrucci, Moore, Myung and Portnoy. Not something like the smash radio hit Pull me under, but its more of a diverse trend, a true transition into the mastery of 90's metal.

Myung's lyrics apparently touches upon the theme of catastrophe of HIV AIDS and similar epidemics, from an emotional standpoint. The opening lines of the song, is a direct paraphrase of lines from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. "There was no time for pain, no energy for anger. Sightlessness of hatred slips away." is directly lifted from "He had no time for pain, no energy for anger. Within a few weeks, it was over; the blinding stabs of hatred ceased and did not return." (p.211 of the Centennial Edition). Next few lines , "Walking through winter streets along, he stops and takes a breath, with confidence and self-control," are also similar to the next few sentences in the book.

It took me a while, to enter into the realms of this song. The length of this song, wasn't the major reason, but its unusual structure demands time from the listener to get accustomed to. And once it hits you inside, it seldom leaves. At times, its heavy, the next moment it turns spacey, makes one difficult to grip. Its subtle, bears the generic cynicism of the band. Starting at 4:45, Labrie stops singing, and the instrumentation takes over. At approximately 6:58, he begins singing wordlessly, building up to a very high note that coincides with the song's main climax. This note is the highest note of any Dream Theater song ever written, being the F# under soprano C. There are many solos in the album, the most striking being that of Petrucci's which starts kicking at 8:10, leading up to the monumental climax of the song. There are very few solos in the following years of Petrucci, that can level up to such splendour. Kevin Moore's notes were as impeccable as ever, and brings out his dimensions, as one treads from the jazzy classic notes of Wait for sleep to this number. Once you have heard the end solo, I'm sure you'll feel like skipping ahead through the song, into the magic of Petrucci.

Crest of a knave



Released in 1987, much to the disapproval of orthodox tull fanatics, the album went unabated to the memoirs, as an instance of camouflage. On a first listening, Martin Barre's riffs, as affluent as they always have been, bear the Dire Straits sound e.g. Brothers in arms. One of the main reasons to talk of this album is its adherence to synth, progressive metal sound, something that brings in the decadence of traditional raw progressive tull-ish genre. Cannot be deemed as something as classic as Heavy Horses, but as a subtle gift we get two classic numbers, that remained as epic signature tull creations, namely Budapest and Farm on the freeway. Needless to say, they relied heavily on the electric guitar of Barre, Anderson's heavy vocals and effective use of flute.

The album is a strange mix of anxiety over progress - "Steel Monkey" about a high-rise building constructor and "Farm On The Freeway" about a farmer having to sell his home as it stood on the route of a proposed highway - and the band's tour of Eastern Europe and a series of unsuccessful encounters with the local female population - "She Said She Was Dancer" and "Budapest", depicting a backstage encounter with a shy female stagedancer. There are some fairly heavy (for Tull) riffs on this album - "Steel Monkey" and "Raising Steam" in particular - but the album as a whole cannot be termed as heavy. Steel Monkey is more reminiscent of money for nothing.

The album was a critical and commercial success. Jethro Tull went on to win a 1989 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance, beating odds-on favorites Metallica with their album And Justice for All . Under their manager's advice, no one from the band turned up to the award ceremony, as they were told that they had no chance of winning. In response to the criticism they received over the award, the band took out an advert in a British music periodical with the line, "The flute is a (heavy) metal instrument!" In 2007, the win was named one of the 10 biggest upsets in Grammy history by Entertainment Weekly.


Being an ardent lover of Knopfler, I couldn't have overlooked the essential similarity with them in this album. I won't term it as a derivative of Straits, but its an independent creation by itself. Anderson's vocals lack the usual recklessness , but it projects the other side of the band. To me its indispensable , and generically speaking, its easily one of the best outcomes in 80's rock scene.