Poetry

Poetry writes you well

Seasonally gifting shoelaces to tie,

Friendly,

The falsity of this twisted head.


In little pages poetry arrives

In lesser folds poetry folds

Into your youful towels.


Poetry gets scooped up

The smallest of your combs

Wipes off well in the pages

Where poetry rests.



How easy then, for poets

To become friends.

To A Cat

Now and then ,
between the finest unfolding of a day,
I meet the cat ;


In the shadow of the trees,
Flare of the sun,
Or the secretive parting of brown leaves.

Somewhere after succeeding a few fish bones
Then encumbered in the carcass of white soil
I find it absorbed in his self ,
With his heart ruminating
Like a bee.

Yet ,continually he scrapes his claws against the gulmohar tree
Pursuing the sun all day.

Now I see him,
Then it is lost somewhere.

In the softening evening sun, crimsoned he plays
Caressing his white paws
Fisting the night in tiny blobs
Then diffusing them all over this infinity.

Liquid Times

I




my significance was in clouds

In living relics of human footsteps

My significance

Embodied wholly in newly harvested crops

In the peeping endless meadows by the throughway sides, and

In playgrounds.

My significance was in

today.

My significance was only

In blood bathed hecatombs.



II



Across the multitudinous ,

the sun comes out



Littering on walls

Of schools shut.



Littering on

earth scraping ploughs.



Littering on the runaway kid's

Blood draped school uniform.



III



Strange evening settles down.

Softening sun spreads over meadows

Alights in the backyard,

Piercing the parted leaves.

Only a lone crow sits

By the mourning house.

Scared to caw.

Lest ,the wailing mother wakes up

Who now sleeps,

fatigued in mourning

Over the son she just lost.

The boytoy

Over me stranger, a sky of fillets in muse,
Dearest rain amuses its arrival
Mad girl comes unkempt, hers not bathed
Of what fearful muse, do you protrude your colorful fangs?

Over me dearest stranger, dressings in orange
Orange aunts that bought orange houses, their terraces
A sight for urchins, Ones who lost their nights over few baths and skirts
Physic unbidden, a cello which stares back unstirred.

Fisting their ages in pearled shakes , crisscrossed palms
Difficult that defects, never bowing their diseased heads
When all with eyes not parted, you come gently in colloquial
Diffusing all the iron and the leaden manhood
As the lone love, the begotten, the terminal caress permeating
Crisscrossed palms, firm fists, the celebration
Of a boyhood forgotten.
--

Love In Kennel

There she is, on that terrace again


the dog-dream of her bones rests here, alone and leaning

On this old tin porch chair

She never ever looks at the dog

But, always turns her face away

when glanced at.

I wonder how she ever finds out.



Dog-dreams cross her everyday

Beneath tree shadows, amid the blaze of sun, on the purple leaves

Then her last bone of meat is done,

Then the terminal snow smears on the white carcass

Then she absolves, then she absorbs

Her one little heart, humming like a medieval bee.

Her polished nails scratching the redwood

Where ivy breathes her panting, while she races on

behind the big fat asthmatic sun.

beside her

morning of besides

Once seen,

Then sightless for many.

Sun like a mustard, on this infant autumn evening

Crystallized white by her white paws

Acquitting the autumn of its foetus

Carelessly so , teasing in grasslands

Teasing sticky,

Teasing ugly,

Teasing vibrant

Teasing charades with her high heeled bright black shoes.

Then, fisting the night in blobs

Scattering all over the world

that only sleeps

in that falsity of her uterus.

Moss

I

you were numb on love


deadened ,

torpid sleep in my eyes

as the nights anesthetized my retina

Continually bickering,

howling,

at

this last rain -

swarming in tears.

remotely doors thud

all my thoughts

in falsity of love

knows you dearly.

 
 
 
II
 
 
Say well-healed , say opulent


if you other.

what are we scared of?



Shell out women on terraces

Shell out patchwork of shower

By the fountain-play, where

soaps slip out of clutch

marrying the rampant ale.



why must we take pains

to cross the bridge

over rambling water.

Cohere to my ranter.



Slain furtively, and witness

the sly darkness

caressing the murky dying sun

nobody anywhere to frown



you were in dusk plentiful

glued to unperturbed flow

times we dont deny of.

lets walk back

to homely birds -

tell me some.

my applause tucked

along million pages fleeting.

wind comes splintering

Whirling them beyond

the walls of fountain



beside me

morning of besides

somebody's ghungroos

that somebody left.

playmate

To you that i write
your senses i did not
glassy , leered into post-suicidal rain
droplets merely bounce off
my days

there need not be wonted discourse
to you that i do not ask
old and ancient feminine pride
you of moth-eaten libraries
i merely do not rest there

much as silent provoked
you of misty solicitude
this eerie silence i refuse
that it will not let me be
the tiger that never found me

what of flesh in men foretold
in women wriggling against party walls
what of scraping trash off my cities
duino elegies, psychedelia, teenage wasteland
what of him - your vaginal repose
self pity loved many
this time, me.

Autumn ale

These poetic repertoires
                          In drowning
Our ears felt,
         Tiny white sea-lice
                          Sharing our ears
Eavesdrops  -
           Dipped in autumn ale
                                 Weightless we stay.

Somewhere I have lived..

Somewhere I have lived
A life of wanderings, before
I knew the wind,
the tumultuous surge of knowing.

Somewhere I have thought
neither you, nor I
Rattling in between;
serving as dispersion.

Of mad poets:
writing,
listening madly,
conquering none. 

somewhere I have only whispered
nothings.
Somewhere we began to grow,
our brains neutralized
to texts, texts permitted not
to question for sometime

We rarely tied down.
As the teardrops on a muslin
Carefully hidden somewhere
finest, where we practiced losing.

We ate cities for joys consuming,
for I probed For you.
You were the ribs, ribs of ink dripping
Jocundly patterned on sheets of elsewheres

Because somewhere
we wanted it this way.

Dusk

She is made in clouds, her everything wondrous in clouds marveled

Cloudless paltry Arjun lights a dusk in the meadows.

Spreading what is permeable , transcending boundaries.

My mouth jitters , with blues , with crimson evasive.

Meek fingertips play its first with grasses
Dew stained grassroots strokes virginal fingers.

Everything else a burning carpet.

She was taken in cloudy carpets
In different colors, by different men.

Chronicle of colors vanquished
In consciousness, in her oblivion.

Arjun, meadow possessed , lights a lonely dusk.

Elegy of nineteen

Strange as I think of you now, like I don't remember anything

Deity as you once were, from the unreal to the real - your transcendence

Marched past the policing age, the bilingual virginal solitude granted

Bodyless, dayless eternity where you walked down once

Few hundred years ago, in my timeless string of comas.

Strange when your unwilling lips touched mine, in a lack-love pact

Tanned as you died then, halo of hollow inevitability.

No, I don't remember anything, but the ghetto of Amidah hymns

Brain-tricked rising of the absolute from the absolute that absolutes

Absolves, unvanquished trident. When you had a mouth - and I had none.

My eyes fixed to you, unnoticeable feminine absolute, wholly your Amidah remains

Storming like a radiant phantom, textless , in a language of genesis.

Rinsed with no rain, no Bombay, no rice - stones remain in briefs.

Threshold of Joy - II

She doesn't like my poetry - that's true
In fact she reads to me, excerpt of her friends'
To them I utter thousand metonyms of tribute
She doesn't think of me as a poet too, but
My thoughts smelling in her, wrote an entire poem.
When her friends raise glasses of delight
Waves of joy splashes her face.
I do not want anything, but a sight of that joy.
Wherever she stays happy
With whoever that makes her so, let her be.
Let her joy burn the face of God in elation
Let her anonymous joy - break in light from all directions
She doesn't love my words - but in this life
Of hell-bent disharmony
She is my lone drop of love, she is my -
Joy. One lake full of joy.

Expiry

Long quiet sundays drift.
Writing to reach you,
Since I do not know
Otherwise.

Corpse

Night wipes the smell of warm sun

From its wings; as the footfall of rain

Lies Evening. I do not know if Evening

Still lies here. Evening has lain here for long.

For long I missed myself

For long I missed myself
I became my skin, my ruined sense of humor
The man you did not kiss
The man you thought you slept with
While the entire you slept with something else

For long I stood between coming and going
I knocked on several doors,
They opened hale and hearty
While my rotten fingers cuddled
The plea of something shut.

I wish for those first few sights
With repulsions unknown
With possibilities doubted
The first evening of my growing old
The dusk of your falsity.

When shall we go to the florist? - I'm no longer awake
When shall my face rest
On the lap I can no longer complete
Will you forbid me then -
If I come with no apologies?

Monsoon

I

Flowers reek of copper
Trees are glass. Monsoon
Tips my fingers.

II

Around rural shelves
Rivers sleep timid.
Frogs leap, untimely

III

Homely rain eventuates
You and I pluck petals
We drink no more.

Abani

The block sleeps in bolted doors
I only hear nightly knockings
"Abani, are you home?"

It rains here twelve months
Here clouds graze like a cow
Green grasses turn aside
Clawing doors tight,
"Abani, are you home?"

With a heart partly alloyed
I sleep in a pain, far-tripping.
Suddenly I hear the nightly knocking
"Abani, are you home?"

Illusion

I aged across many shelters. I'm illusion.
I'm an illusion tonight, this night of black fever.
Light rattles in traces, in grim paths , beneath tree windows
Then falls, coying through errors, gripping airy shelters.

I heard darkness in mornings.
Dawn meant gray misty dawn.
I have touched dead bodies,
Gently asked them to wake up.
I'm but illusion. I'm not him.

My love surmounts the waters in that river
Love's old corpse discovered in that far-away lake.
Wind raged suddenly. Trees silent to the night
Even they swayed to the rattles
Cornerless they fell, they fell upon black olives.

Crossing many shelters, transcending storms
This dawn brought me to a grayer dawn.
How can I save my easiness
On such a furnished stormy night?

Independence Day

Like beauty, I'm wearied everyday
Strolling past subways from batteries to despair
Some cities to bring me advocates, some solicitude
They march over each other, hymning their favourite
Socialism over the fifth Carlsberg, rent over the first.
People dance colored, topless over economy
Frail youth ends up in emergency wards,
Sticking their tongue out, tricolored in glory.
Stretching their skins over past bones,
Selling supernatural darkness in dingy pubs,
Gucci goes to rooms where seths come and go
Frail youth whiles , ends up naked in traffic lights.
I begin my classroom career amid such ranting
Whispering facts, pretense, looking for a grip
My love she goes to Gucci rooms, my friends to
Nerve wracked bleak of city halls, selling themselves.
One by one they all fade before me, I pack them
In boxes - labeling, sealing in sordid tapes
I send them roses, I speak them in humor
They buy me too, while I vibrate in alcohol
Permeating through time unknown
Trapped in retro mothers of crosscountries.

No rice, stones remain.

Years expire, annually born clouds give rain, thunderstorms -
Secrecies of the drowned increase, lotus leaves die silently
In ponds. Roots, coiled and slender pitifully shelter in lives
Yet no canopy, no shelter - none on men of one-spoon rice.

Men endear gunpowder, they smell it like incense

Ministers blow trumpets , war horses gallop in skylights
Cops go brooming , goodbyes and farewells in their gunshots-
An empty cowshed is more loved than one playful cow.

Omniscient palaces unlock the unresolved -
With utmost ease, only man goes scot-free
He is not yet a stone. But if you, throw stones
At him - make sure you injure him, let him hiss,
Lest nations laugh, when the stones of glory
Of a nation wrought in glory break apart.
No canopy - none - no rice - what use is stone
What glory in festivals - in you?

Calcutta - a sort of homecoming

These city walls strut their mutable boundaries
Convenient youngsters enslave to undertakers of west, but then calcutta
You happen to wearied souls, retracing curves not so rectilinear
Childless, fatherless ignorant youth thrive on macdonalds
Sentimental gibberish hang, between their balls and promised cocks..
Where are we going tonight, calcutta? Straddling between poetic delusions
Of rhymed supermarkets, drenched plasticity of silver screens.
I love you still, in wine or in poetry or in vices
I can only be drunk, hate the negro streets and love you still.

This sky..that sky

This sky breaks apart now and then
That sky feasts in clouds elated
Boat untied, that sky waits
Ma , I'm a sky full of stars.

This one foggy noon ( মেঘলা দুপুরে )

Rain and wind in frantic drops,
Day like musk hide in hope.
Morning, when I wake in you,
Evening, as I sleep sunless in you.


বৃষ্টি পরে আকাশের দু বিন্দুতে
দিনের অপেক্ষা ছায়ায় নিশ্চল
সকাল যখন, জেগে আমি তোমাতে
বিকেলে, সূর্যহীন আমি ঘুমন্ত তোমাতে.

Drunkard

Get him more drunk,
Lest this human hindered world
Turns too tipsy
For him to stand.

Still so young he blooms, Lord
Make him older then -
Lest this human hindered world
Fails to carry him with ease.

Words of rain and wind.

Mellow day in green
I owe this to you.

Rain-drenched dawn
When I saw your face.

Light of infancy eluding my face
Girl, I like you.

Beside sun-drenched morning, lingers sky
Steer your eyes toward me --

If I so ogle, let
My eyes make a river.

A river which by moonlit nights
Turns into a deer.

Let silence only know
Whisperings of deer.

Wherein silence cradled -
Along wandering currents.

Fault with the ripples? - No !
Lay your palm in the air.

An airy game? You must be kidding.
Let me watch, from this earth of mine.

All clarity in earth? -- Perhaps!
Come closer then.

Closer? -- I deem not!
Far, farther to rivers and seas.

Sea is but salty
Not inclined - even to touch.

You can touch the river --
But, if it turns dry?

Dry bed - all sandy.
Pour water ,touch the wet sand.

Thrust of that pouring
Will drown the entire neighborhood.

Crossing this neighbourhood you meet the village
I went once, randomly wandering.

Around shelves of the village
Rivers slept serene.

Beneath the river lies
A bed of sand and gold.

Will you die drowning
In your quest for gold?

Alright, let the forces drown me
I will float sooner.

Where to drift floating?
Wings - I will get.

Will name them parting grasses -
Golden grasses.

And I'll whisper, "Listen,
Be more gentle.

There will be newer winds
There will be going near -

You. Much easier -
And more easier it will be.

Then, will you love me? Say --
When will you love me? "

The More loving one

Your voice, your eyes
..your hands, your lips..
Our silences, our words..
Light that goes..
..light that returns
A single smile between us
In quest of knowledge
I watched night create day..
..while we seemed unchanged.
O beloved of all,
Beloved of one alone -
Your mouth silently promised
To be happy.
Away, says hate;
Closer, says love.
A caress leads us from
Our infancy.
Increasingly I see
the human form
..as a lover's dialogue.
The heart has but one mouth
Everything by chance
All words without thought
Sentiments adrift
Men roam the city
A glance, a word
Because I love you, everything moves
We must advance to live,
Aim straight ahead toward those you love
I went towards you
Endlessly toward the light
If you smile, it enfolds me
All the better.
The rays of your arms,
Pierce the mist.

I remain surrendered

I remain surrendered unto darkness
Beneath eyelids that never parted
Light lingers lonely and sly within
Secretive abyss of darkness.
Limitless blue of the sea plays
With a day abundant in sun-drenched winds
Young boys and girls merely dance in muse.

Eyes shut now, paying homage to the dark
Memories like gems seduce my mind
Many treasures remain immutable on my palm.
Beneath eyelids that never parted
Stars lit up, flashing now and then
In a dense dungeon of granite darkness.
Every moment of the lost desert
Bathes in the pool. While the forest
Canopies the barren meadow in its shadow.

And I remain surrendered.
Beneath eyelids submerged in dark,
Lonely light continues to linger.

Journal

Evening

All the songs i see in your eyes
All the luminosity i hear in your words
Just merely in dollops of pride
Spread light on this evening.

This evening knows you were here
That you're to dawn, this evening knows not.
As if in the blues of valediction
You and I know each other.

Dusk

Dusk lingers merely in its dark mind
And the night rarely gets you
As my mortal body does.
Blood red - wiped off the sky,
The darkness in my blood.
Night knows the blood - the blood donor -
The meaning of her mysterious life,
Amongst many little whispers of sleep.

Ten days that shook the world

I got my first letter, a boy of fourteen
An eighth grade student, older like a year
The girl as if sheltered to my empty stomach
Like writa, a hunger impassable, but rice.
Not the baked bread crumbs, not fish, neither hominid.
Encumbered to the throat of an enormous flower - I remained
My head sprang out, seeking endlessly all and sundry hours.

Covetous young boys in torn shorts would incite me
My prejudiced hunger watched them gobble in vanity
My body opened a million mouths of hunger, and I roamed
Around alleys far off , my mind a juvenile kingdom - framed
My body to ten different crystals, unvanquished in ten days
That immortality will become the little boy of fourteen
Unerring efflux of writa's aroma - ten days that shook my world.

Figurine


This noon of death I sleeved
Your figurine glittered, poured the all-acquired -
Slying veil of time, murky stellar dust
Depleted on a woman like you.
Tired feet stood on peripheries
Where the ephemeral few ignited
Their leases from their alienation
And heard distinct-discrete arias
Lurking unrest of time past , time you.
And amid such a feast of outsides
I saw immortality of raging sun.

The entangled blue of the sky, the star gestured galaxies
The still grasses of moondance - I indulge in entirely.
Even you're not the pause
Another terminal figure of abyss
Constantly melting to jostles , embracing
Ring of debris, dust and catharsis.

This familiar ephemeral noon , your figurine
Not submissive to the wrinkled tides
But time submits to you - you the death carrier
Silhouetted; today you are dead.

'You'

Concealed wakening you till today - yet today - come gliding.
Scurrying along rails, furtively kissing - costumes of rural mud.
I remember this sundown, the smell of this dark evening
The air of you that floated unbidden, uncertain
Curing thousand unvanquished pauses.
Prickly path of grass, tickling our bare feet
The wrinkled cotton of your skirt crisscrossing .
I've only heard the birds here sing, their names I never knew
And after dusk - scent of this earth rips memories
While the weeping air nests in date palms.
This dark evening, my feet wanders alone in the autumn grass
Few notes freeze in mind, timid birds curtain agility.
In entirety I meet, the phantom of you - marbled in yellow grasses
Trembling like fire, eerie-white as fresh bone.
You that whip me to comfort, you that I create in frozen rhapsodies
An easel to wakeful slumbers , smell that is yet to come.
Smell that wrenches away to foolish grins of flower pots
Smell that is a repose to sudden roars of smoke
And the smell that I lose to sidewalks of crowded many
Concealed wakening you till today - yet today - come gliding.

Reign over me

That you do not know, yet in unknowing
All of my songs surround you
When I will be scattered, tumbled in autumn storm
Will you then - like stray leaves on streets
Lie flat, marbled upon me ?
Torpid repose of slumber , cloudy and numb
Will then satiate you?
The inveterate dues that you owe to life
Will them then simply expire?
Nightly dews - smeared on my breast
Only merely , you desired the same?
A mere flavour of that night - can then reconcile you?
I will wither away - yet life incessant whirls on
Vagaries of that day shelter you timeless, yet
My songs - they all surround you.

Amid green meadows I lie - over green grasses
Sky sprinkled blue from skies to skies
Yet what we gather of ephemeral colors,
Touching and retouching, is but a mere wonder.
In that wonder, visions starve directionless.
Relics of eroded earth part the grasses
While by the shore - your feet meanders
Like a stranger to the tumultuous waves.
Walking endlessly , night to night, amid interstellar domes, galaxies.
Then your fragile skeletons go marching
In the abyss of human hearts -
Silently, muter than galaxies
Amid shadowless cemeteries, around solitary epitaphs.

The Gods converse once, gods of countries and directions
Ending mute, forgetting all that is said and thought.
Reign of fire, burning beneath their eyes
Quenched then, drowned, streamlining into oblivion.
New desires - they come, a new moment lingers
Old days of galaxies expire.
You remain warm in your sky
Skies outside freeze
Stars decay, new stars reign over me
Vagaries of that decay shelter you timeless, yet
My songs - they all surround you.

Thousand years merely play

Thousand years merely play,
Thousand years merely play like fireflies in darkness
World around culminates - to bare coffins
Moonlight sprinkles upon sand - Shadowy date palms fumble
Death humbled, like disintegrated columns
Pale , stagnant, mute and pyramidal.
Bodies reek of slumber, Life's transactions expire
"Remember?", asked he
I merely queried, "Banalata Sen?"

Your bare lonely hand

Darkness thickens in the sky
Smoky and mysterious, fraternal to the light.

She who loved me always
Whose face I'm yet to see,
Like that woman in oblivion
Falgun sky hides - in continual darkness.

And my thoughts linger on a certain city
Extinct in time - the gray palaces,
The majestic walls - ruminates the mind.

Along the coasts of Indian Ocean
Or the Mediterranean shores
Or, by the shingle of Indus
Which eclipsed today, but
Existed once - a city of gray dreams
A palace - coquettish , ornamented -
A french carpet, few Kashmiri shawls
My usurped heart, my dead eyes, my lost desires to dream
And you, woman -
All these once suffused that world.
There were many-a scarlet evenings
When frolicing pigeons stealthily came
Around countless teaks, shadowed in mehagony.


There came many a crimson noons
Many a crimson noons
And you!
Your face - the finesse that I do not behold for centuries,
I do not search.

Dark Falgun brings stories of that seashore
The solitary lines of sorrow, vagaries of domes and arches
The forgotten scent of pears
Numerous deer and lion parchments, graying in time.
Rainbow drenched glass windows
Colorful draperies akin to peacock feathers
Abyss of old rooms that separates us from other abysses
A faint glimpse , wonderings
Silence immortal , momentary musings!

Noon comes - its scarlet hues smeared
On the draperies, carpeted mozaic floors.
Wine - blood red in that ruby glass
And your bare lonely hand;

Your bare lonely hand.

-----x-------------

Translated.

~"Nogno nirjon haat" (Jibonananda Das)


P.S. Falgun - first month of spring.

I can go, but why will I?

I've resolved to turn around.

Muddled my hands in black of dirt,
While time flew unabated.
Never sketched you in my thoughts
As you really are.

Now as I step near the edge of the valley
At this bleak hour of midnight
Moon beckons, in her maiden calls .
Quietly I stand now,with my heavy eyes
Moonlighting by the Ganges,
And all I hear are cries
Reeking of funeral and finitude.

I can go,
To Anywhere, and in any direction.
But, why will I?
.

I will leave,
Perhaps, not just now.
Will carry you along
Won't depart alone, untimely.

translated from bangla
"jete pari kintu keno jabo? " - Shakti Chottopadhyay

It's meaningless. The second day after the first .

The third coming after the second.But,
What after that?
Two souls replacing one,
Neat and peachy giving way to the ugly. But,
What after that?
This face. That face. All and sundry faces equal.

You promised home. We built one.
What after that?
You promised affection, We faked one.
Then?
How far can the road take us- the road of promiscuity?
I sensed no suspicion from darkness
While, the heart of affection
Roars within and without.

No - nothing beyond this - nothing beyond this.
Then, what after that?
Head to toe, toe creeping to its altar
What awaits after?



Translated

"Na" . Shankha Ghosh

Youth

Time unerringly bestowed responsibilites
I would otherwise not shoulder
But surpass, not caring
Whiling away with the thought of thinking.

Time came and went, her tearless eyes
Never waited for me to respond.
I would wait a little more perhaps
Feeling the pause between laughing and fading.

Zillions of mighty thoughts caressed me
Before the dark stains turned gray
Some that unveiled wrath, while
Some remained nimble pythons of time.

Few I loved, who loved me even more
Lips met, lips fell apart in denial
Now its only the inert softness
That lingers between forgetting and denying.

Few I played with, chased kites till the sundown
Because tomorrow then was but a caterpillar
Of the chaos of tomorrows- that hinders nearness
Fault is not with them. They stayed, while I ran heedless.

I felt lonely too then, while I walked many deaths
Crossing from one death to another, powerlessly trembling
And here I am, pale , suspicious, unbeliever, cynic
Measuring minutes, desiring people I evade from.

No steam germinates in me, still your eyes
When they meet mine, are shrouded in mists.
In loving you I stopped time, I'm never awake
I never sleep, never die and am never born.

Falling apart.


I have fallen from the caskets of your rhyme
Before your lips touched mine.

The shying shimmering sun of poetry besmeared
To the black ditch of night.

Perhaps in the chilly untimely eve
Long after I unfold my fists to the bleak hush
We'll cross the tranquility of a rebellious spring
Jittering away from a white New York.

Wheels

My violet of the east - like a chocolate
I gently osculate at her dew
Un-playing the violence of devouring.
Satiating, forgetting the long un-quenched hours
In that invention of contortion, of love.

And I tripped back and forth
In the abysses of thought.
Binging, incubating her bites.
Knowing incoherent strings of shattered nights
Unknowing blue skies from blue hearts
Indifferent she, flew in indifference.
Leaving behind traces on fragile wings
Of a grasshopper , oscillating between green tips.
Or soars away breathing on young lungs.

In those sights my vision gets locked
I See 'em in admiration, across draperies
Of transparent windows. Beneath, the blue firmament
Dribbles flurries, while the air gives shelter.

I'm short of breath; you have flown away;
Come back on wheels, conquering ephemeral defeats
As victory, as the eternity between lines of the mortal poetry.
And we'll be the songs in a pure land,
We'll be love, formless; and tunes
Melting into all and sundry skies of the Earth.

The usurper and the playmate.


I , in my dominion of carnal shelter
Saw two images, intricate to the fading imagery
Construed in peril and then dispatched in secrecy.
One of an usurper, his sad eyes seldom lied.
Spoke of red yolk of the sun, with the fragility of stumbling squirrels-
Images conjured to the soil, wet grasses of a far away summer meadow.
Dead to the outsider, debauched in alchohol
Pinnacle of death's armour, a lady once remarked
Only confused my separate self then
Who only glided in tricycle , while he warped in inexplicable madness.

Another lurked with chime, harnessing seasons with conferred finesse.
She poured on dead towns, while hers encircled topsy-turvies
Of known channels. Her hourly quartet warped manifolds of time
Widely and foaming to the singlehood of the lashing wrinkles.
Perplexed tricycles unfenced, staked hours to lid of metaphors
Only logics died then, to the sullenness of receding.

You who never come

You who never come
While the world reaps famine
Miraculously alive marketplaces
Civilize cowards with warehouses of toothpicks.

You who never come
While millions fight the futility
Talking about revolution and Gaza debris, whereas somewhere
Unheard Andes bask in solitude of Bolivian skies.

You who never came
To take away the blank delight of mornings
Turning the cemeteries into golf courses
Toiling mute behind the mirror of pseudo shelter.

You who never tapped my dreamy nights
The endless conjuring of serendipity
But, assumed earthly forms of designed crime.
While the orphanage smells derision,
In your smiles
In your empathy.

You whose promenade hovers in leisure centers
Of legislative morality, broken piano lids
Amused to open windows where waves surge
Forever eluding , echoing negations..

I tell you death, except no smile of pride

Let the world read and frown
As the letters etch the troubled mud
Steering clear of the 9th -
Opacity is yours. Mine lofty.
Or the gentle predictable ripples
Alternating between crests and troughs
Scoped in the nightly binocular.
Locked in the shore of the collapsed few
Deterrent to constancy , slamming doors
Over empty dead evening rooms.
Words shine each new day
In cleverly twisted wrappers
And your approval, till the new inches
Towards another cliche.
Perhaps the greatest puzzle of a formless universe
Lies in its becoming, and reading
More from the foetus , than the terminal .
My burdenless hands deem crossroads
Comely gravity that alights
And sits inches away, in unbroken form.
Further drifts the distance
Because its the end we always desired.

Finitude

Except for the little mindless fish
Propelled in viscous streams,
Entire world as it perches on promises
Minute trivia, rolling from bedside to bedside
Avoids kinks of friction.
Mindless hydrant of desolate subways
Where thoughts trace the unheard
Imprisoned in the misnomers
While above, the conspiracy leaps another
Certainty of not knowing.
Solitary journeyman gazes lipped travails
Luminous to the few earthly
While in denial to the transcendence
But, when the end lusts for mellow mornings
Light punctures the dark
Rolling its tongue over inadequacies.

Nightly knocking..

The spoken comes unbidden
Reckoning the secrecy of the unspoken
Never inches to the written but,
Only amuses itself to an openness -
Ephemeral in its etherised denial
Diffusing to New York's smokeless burial.
Need you as a mirror, till you shimmer
And while Ackerman sleeps behind bolted doors
Nightly knocking you whisper my name
Unspoken perhaps. I can only hear rain drops
Latching yours to coma.
A today left me unrecognizable
Just a multitude of reflections
Beamed and frowned at
While the distant sun rages a crescendo -
Beneath, the grains of repentance
Ripen in the unrest of unknowing.
And my infinitesimal being
A night in its burning dream
An agitation in the friction of metals
Mirrors the momentary you
To the distant opaque eternity.

Threshold of Joy - I

I see bubbles of rhythm, floating between
Knowing and unknowing, dangerously near
To wanting; beyond the skeptic distraction.
Not born for season, but for shifting, flowing, melting -
Forget all, the would be's and should be's
The deluded depths of egotism
Shedding of skins over few nightly gestures
Let this rhythm teach you a new song
Melt the woman in you beyond alphabets
Till cloud carrier surmises
His piles of blues for an entire octave
Vastness, still and surreal
As you unbecome my night
For a jostling day.

I, the individual

I crossed the threshold of today
Chasm of time, some lost in half retreats
Others in indecisive diagonal paths
Cigarettes, caffeine and other technologies
Each lost to misnomer existence
Individual soliloquies, pacified
Consoled in chaos.
I am the eternal pause
Amid the incessant dynamics
Between thinking and doing
Where ambiguity spurs silence
Astounded in imperial charity
And the subconscious vices
Start the naive pyre
Elaborate in fake modernity.
I, the individual
Needs no country
No axioms of religion
My individualism is my agenda
Relentless and unvanquished altar.

An Accusal

Poetess, none will read your words, your metaphors
Staunched emotions , sprayed graphitti
What can your poems give me?
Where are the words in your poetry?
Daylight insults me in your poems;
Night, it follows suit.
And I come back, retracing
The ink stained room of yours
After two decades of surfacing
along a debauched circumference.
But, do I ever see you lingering?
If it is not so,
If your voice fails ,
To resurrect my own
My shimmering fingers will not
Even touch your words.
Your poems surround you
And there lies their death.

Penance of the Infidel.

On a dead morning, debris of snow fell.
The howling of a distant stray dog ,
Hammer of an abandoned clog
Broke the lyricism of silence.
I walked, purring the weight of heavens
Invisible traces you left on my mind,
Embracing the void of the night,
With a patterned umbrella in hand,
Treading the path of a woman's life,
Leaving behind a sea of tears.

Following the twisting river,
Meandering paths of a lonely shepherd
Led me far by the lamplight.
The frozen cranes didn't move,
Wept rain and wind.
The ice of the frozen pond
Reflected the silhouette of your sylvan hair.
If only I could hide my tears,
With a patterned umbrella in hand.
Treading the bitter path of a woman,
Her heart sank to mine,
And mine to her tears.

Honor, compassion, tears, and dreams,
These aren't my forces
yesterday, today.. all without the hope of words.
I commit my body to the river of bitterness.
To the woman falling to the ground
Beneath the patterned umbrella of carnage.

Suppressed patterns

I'm sane, I'm un-uttered
Beyond self mortifying metaphors
replete with cliches of prejudice
I'm the dream you had for alienation
The dreading yet coveted loneliness
Streaming from eyelids, then dripping down
Slowly. The moist chin of stoic nights.
With the advent of stealth solitude
And people, one to greet, another to flirt
Till the unravished pride rips apart-
Ah. Bittersweet taste of skin
Losing to an external flesh
Epicurean acceptance , an opaque mirror?
But believe the absolute, not the relative
I belong to you.
I belong to you absolutely
There is no imagination in the silence of nature
But in my words, in the humming interlude
The heart of woman, unlike its stony counterpart
Needs love, no ambitions
And together we will befriend
The lonely solitude, the lyricism of silence.

Reawaken monologues

I'm neither the son of earth, nor of water
Fire is never my beginning, vastness never my end.
I could be the inertia you felt in city streets
The gravity that hindered your flight
The nightlife you never wished
The daylight you always ran into
In bare trees, raped in mid winter
In demolished mosques, dried debris of Muhammad
I spring, secular and unknown .
I'm the sleep in a wearied traveler's eye
The indecisive fate of Alfred Prufrock
The Irish vessel ,which emptied itself
Once upon a cold January night, seldom tampered.
Somebody would desire me in their lonely caffeine drink
While another in her ambitious swim
Across the sunflaked channel
I play executive with death ,
Instrumenting the impervious elegies
The roaring requiem at the Fall of Berlin,
The torn walls of raw towns
Where dying is a belief of life
And living, an unconstrained persuasion.
I'm the pen scholars never held
The questions they never asked
The veil forbidden from light
The comfort you felt in suicide.

Ode to silent reveries

In reveries I drew an unreal you
Imagination , surreal and misleading
Imbibed in wind, lost in another
The fading night in a faraway abstruse city
Erases ,once in delight, then in joyous leap
Circulating around the touched brightness
Offending its gleam, in a wave of psychopath.
Your imperial excuse can make way
For another democratic mistake
Clung to an average metaphor
Loved alone, and left alone
In an affirming romance, folded in lie
I admire that random disappearance
Than your elongated stay in dust and irony
You could exist alone, untouched in my dream
Amongst the conservative epithets
Where the noise of tomorrow
Meets the happening mouth of yesterday.
Only today, the cart you left untied
Went further in its silly locomotion
Convinced of the unwanted freedom.

If you knew

We never witnessed the dawn
The night was almost done in hours
Soft winds blew across the dimples
Misty morning whispers splashed
sunflakes, in dollops.
Sounds of yesterday in my city room
In a cloudy monochrome, quenched the dryness
Unrest had died, rolling in a stereotype shadow
Togetherness was but a crater in eider-dawn.
Nothing much changed, silence of night dews
Turned into a secret stillness
The aurora in your smile, stooped into forsaken buds
Intruding as always,
To the disapproval of celestial chorus.

It was complete in your incompleteness

Came the pierced mid May in penumbra
Got myself a Walt Whitman poem, and a closet of blues
Summer brightened up, in elongated solos
While slowly the day dissolved into night
And the ring would quench me,
Find me a shelter in the empty nest.
Baffled ,I drew you , in shivered strokes
Amateur words wrought in Gary Moore
Retraced in pantheism of Wye.
In that dimly lit room, my ink parade
And Gary Moore.

On evenings I would chase the snapped kites
Climbing heights, sleeving your unspoken words
Beneath my striped shirt, till it came out
Through torn corners, before my ink inched.
And when the sun slipped into darkness
My wearied legs cycled, along the boulevard
Across million slums and busy streets
Till the fourth crossing encumbered me
Beneath that neon lampshade, my ink parade
And Gary Moore.

On nights , as the friends retreat
Throwing up casual remarks, crafted flirts
Your smile lit in an unseen finesse
Made me more lonely, trapped in a leaping green
As I recounted the minutes, people around blossomed
Somebody in the night sky, somebody in unimaginable infinity
Limitless thoughts pursued through Saki, ending up in Cummings
As I lifted my eyes, the faint image lured me further
In that ill smelling alley, seeking ; My ink-parade
And Gary Moore.

Replica Inc.

I whirled my mortal remains in the quicksand
Where lips of time met in denial
Half remembered scent of a mothball
Hidden tacitly, beneath the blue top
Reeking of the perspiring green youth
On a rainy June night, when silence dripped
Between my chest and your etceteras.
Undid the hair, your freckles brushed against mine
Leaving the crystalline clip, encircling
The fecund nails, nourished into the root of the night.
Till the rupture of the plasticity, mixed into gray
Of the replicated anger, earthbound and shrouded.
Today, while the light wrapped morning
Melted my icicle, and million droplets cluttered the street
Elusive and desolate sojourn in west
Walked a mile with me , in a familiar
Rearranged laughter.

Filth reborn

Unrest lurks deep , draped in terror
Imperial wind stains the milky sunset
Impaired in that decadent vision
I caged her, in lovelorn defiance
My fingers traced sinful territories
Retreating voices of the dark
On such a moonlit night
Bathed in lunatic ambience
Valkyrie was born,
Stormed from tired centuries,
Crucified to erotic despair.

Icicle



Icicle, born in antiquity
Hanging in contemporaneity. They call it sun.
For her, its the incentive to run
Forsaking the transparency, or the myth of it
Slender, stained, angled to a stranger's rooftop
The playmate of winter grows unveiled
And on nights when the chilly foes yearned,
For my skin, embellished in frost
I would step out, impressing on;
Inciting Icicle's tears, dropping cold
Quenching the stick of fire, I tamed
Between my fingers. Whispered eclipse,
Till the drop died wet , annealed in amazement.

Flippancy

It's only easier to inherit yesterday
And let go of dual tomorrow
To dwell on the interlude
Stringed quartet of unspoken words
Unwritten but laid amongst hundred dewdrops
That autumn begot, only an easy pimple now.

And I dreamt

Today, just after a prolonged dream
Of Macchu Picchu heights, I swum across Amazon
In search of blue Peruvian skies, dry stone walls
The flora and fauna, mystery of Inca
Propelled the arms.
Polar, akin to the flock of birds above
Pushed upstream, while the silent veins froze
The raging upthrust whipped on
The bosom, impassioned and untamed
Lofty cliffs deemed formless, sight grew dim
With the wrath of the fading light
Coarse pleasure of youth turned gray
The icicle that never melts on my window shades
Unwearied in that frozen ecstasy
The solitary, yet locomotive venture
Seemed motionless,
Swallowed in quietness and beauty.

Impassioned & seasonless HER

Perfumes of Spring trill against the shadow of Fall
A sense of half knowledge wanders, sniffles, nauseates
Mystifying the unborn fruit of winter
Enfolding the child with caresses and gestures
That would only make her eyelids flutter
In silence. Carrying the kisses with the wind
Till the air precipitates love on her cheeks
With words, reels; like a halo on her visible aroma.
Neither voice nor sight were her weapons
She would play the passive act, roost with agility
Without parenthesis the luminous eyes
Poured delirious youth, untamed, drunk on turpentine.
Every new meeting would make me more ignorant
Clenching along the worm of oblivion
Her interstellar flight like a torrent of snow
Froze the cries of Macchu Picchu.