Without a Country

[Have you ever really thought through
The damage done by accepting
“It’s all in the mind” philosophy? –
How crippling is the freedom it affords.

All appropriate, seemingly true,
Indiscrete, abominable… suddenly disbanding.
All rights and wrongs merging meaninglessly
Into this immense void of personal preference.]


We are designed to survive,
We cling to what we need,
The rest like gills, evolve themselves out
Through the sieve of societal propriety.

Never wantonly aiming to contrive,
He has discarded too much furniture
In these long hours of functioning without –
Jettisoned cargo isn’t easy to retrieve.

So where does he truly belong?
Someone without any tangible definitions…
Someone free… – Neither here, nor there,
Such is a man without a country!

Feb 1st and 2nd, 2010.

Perspective

Watching snowflakes play,
Isn’t the same each day.

Softened by experience,
I am no longer –
Quick to exalt,
Eager to condemn –
For I have seen,
The limitations of truth.

Unrighted wrongs,
Wronged rights –
Wait,
Accumulate,
Muddling their confusions
Rewording their definitions –
Outside my door.

Carving colorful ruses,
“…but I had no choice”
Appeasing my conscience,
“…there was no other way” –
I have watched,
My courage fail.

Unwon battles –
Between borders, Half-writ histories,
Callous codes, Libelous labels;
Plead –
Waving white flags,
Crimson with blood.

Struggling to preserve
Steadiness of tone,
Cradling frozen fingers
In the dead of night –
I have known,
The power of fear.

So how should I presume?
And how should you presume?
Nor anyone else, ever, presume?

Watching snowflakes play,
Is indeed not, the same each day.


Jan 17th, 2010.

Two Zero One Zero Zero Zero

[Countdown to nothing significant
For who numbered the years?
And who created history?
And pray who, what I perceive?]

Winter’s promise of summer,
Infused April liveliness
Into crinkled paper dragons,
In the span of a brief smile.

It is disconcerting,
How we sometimes remember
The scent of someone’s hair
In a random, once-had dream.

The subjectivity of reality
Is unsettling as well,
Like the misleading obviousness
Of certain crucial truths.

You set my heart free again –
Into the winter night
Like snowflakes smiling softly
In their perfect symmetry.

January 2nd, 2010.

2010

Fresh poinsettias on my desk
Bleed,
A youthful red…
But that’s not what really stirred me,
At this odd moment,
To juggle words in my fingers.

Too many fazed newnesses
Have been rolling around,
Waiting to slip off the tip of my tongue.
My shoulders are weary,
From shifting weights,
Between –
Long taken-for-granted certainties,
Fractured to bits
And
Loading of unwelcome lumber,
Of too much realization.

My frail arms have not
The power to brave armies –
Of ages of history,
Tablets of tradition.

I am but a poor poet,
And words can never undo
Illusions of permanence,
Cast by convention.

In several lifetimes,
I cannot accumulate,
Enough to ever pay off,
The cost of living.

My reality is much the same,
As my people;
But my predicament,
Far worse…
For unlike them I,
Sustain the protracted bitterness
Of knowing I remain –
Half-lived,
Half-loved –
Forever.

Dec 28th, ‘09.

Noir Nights

On the parchment of twilight,
[Smudged with the setting of
A resplendently selfish sun,
Hastily snatching away
The last streaks of rouge,
From December’s brittle evening]
Preserve, for me, a moment…

Of lumps of light,
Of giggly laughter,
Small specks of me,
Tiny tads of you,
A cautiously nurtured patch of us-ness.

It is in times such as these,
[Like now, in the silence of noir night,
When all semblances of carefully defined meaning,
Slip away, dissolving like smoke rings;
And a void vacant vagrancy homes
Nestling into my dusty eyes]
That parched and desiccated,
From too much of having-felt,
I yearn,
More than ever,
The supposed placation of that moment.

I search futilely among faces,
Faded, fresh; familiar, foreign…
The dark drape of night doesn’t unfurl,
No wall crumbles letting in sheens of you…


How far have I been walking beside my shadow?

December 19th, 2009.

Joy of Poetry

Everything changes,
Beauty, perception of beauty,
Even their very definitions,
Once so dear to us.

Fortunate are those
That have the luxury
Of loving and living
In undulating rhyme.

The infinite abstraction of poetry
Is their weapon –
Slickly, they slice through,
Hoodwinking confused conventions.

Carefully, artfully, non-chalantly,
A-times almost mischievously –
In wrapped subtleties, they –
Utter the unsaid,
Obliviate the obvious;
Favor the forbidden,
Renounce the mandated;
Honor the disgraced,
Denounce the consecrated;
Loathe the loved,
Love the loathed…

This innocent, well-garbed recalcitrance
Is their sole triumph,
Their supreme delight.
Softly, harboring their solitary transgressions,
They ramble as they amble onwards.

Dec 17th, 09.

Untitleable

I have borrowed a lucrative excuse
From passersby in black gloves
For my seeming indifference
To queer escalating numbers in print.

The dead are not dead until
From my tapered sphere of concern,
I am able to notice –
Silence of a once-heard bird;
Absence of a whiff of tobacco;
Wailing of an aging mother;
Beading of a once-twinkling eye.

No, the dead aren’t dead,
Until the grief of their loss
Tiptoes like a sneaky thief –
Stripping the crinkles from my smile.

The dead to me, are alive
And I sing, dance and be merry –
If only I am careful treading roads,
Steering clear of vendors selling newspaper.

Perchance, the dead don’t even matter
In the bigger biological picture -
I’ve cherry-picked all sorts of scientific crap
To keep myself convinced, until I join their ranks.

Dec 12th, 2009.

Where Worse Things Happen

[Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. - Arundhati Roy]


[The blood-curdling echo of wails
Shall keep reverberating yet]

In the white silence of night,
In the vengeful stinging of frost -
The narrow breadth of my gauche hands
Has expanded monumentally,
Till it now encompasses
The galactic girth
Of my utter helplessness.

Each bleached morning,
I carry that leaden weight
Strung to my eyelashes.
Kohl, charred and inured
Spreads chaotically
From all the chafing.

Whereto should we look for succor…
The fallow faded promise of heaven?
The bitter belated justice of hell?

Or the paradoxical tying of our hands
(O yes, paradoxical!
I tried hard,
But fingers aren’t hair.
They’re unknottable)

And so we have become
Buyers and sellers
Of puppet masks –
We have one for every occasion
We have to have…
For underneath those facades
Our glazed over eyes
Do not [cannot] alter
Ever.

Dec 5th, 2009.

Silver Dawn

I can now lay claim
To having witnessed the marvel
Of a dark dawn turning white
On an ordinary december morning.

Pecking silenced
Into a gentle caress
With the turning of -
Raindrops to snowflakes.

Earth lies curled up and furred
In eiderdown from angel wings.
Thin confused blades of green
Peep out like shy maidens
In silver wedding gowns.

And lo, the red sun rises.

Dec 4th, 2009.

God does not play dice

There really was no competition,
Still
The west-ward setting perfect moon
Vainly endeavored,
To win against
The orange globe in the east.

For a discrete span
They both
Balanced almost flawlessly
Opposite each other
Shouldering the azure sky.

In my human pettiness,
I almost willed,
The moon to rise
Or the sun to set –
For them to upset
That fragile symmetry.

I wonder if they smile as they speed on.

Dec 2nd, 2009.

What Escape

[Ab tau dar k ye kehtay hein k mar jaein gay,
Mar k bhi chen na paya tau kidhar jaein gay…]

Looking the other way,
Cannot silence,
The perturbing pattering of winter rain.
We must struggle against
More than sight,
When evading realities.
Numb more than skin,
When immersing in illusions.

Thought they had it all figured out,
The near dead –
Them vegetables.

I dread the tale coded in –
Prints upon prints
Of erratic brain waves.

Nov 29th, 2009.

While There is Still Time

[Let the caramel aroma of kindling attraction
Inebriate us,
While there is still time]

While there is still time –
Trace the steady gaze,
Of mysterious mellow eyes
Not discomfited by having been noticed.

While there is still time –
Overlook the staccato glance,
Of twinkling dark eyes,
Embarrassed of being caught.

While there is still time –
Hold hands, long and slow,
Whispering in goose bumps,
The language of touch.

While there is still time –
Farm verses, floral and fragrant,
Weaving a sinuous tale
Of elves and endless love.

While there is still time –
Dance through the night,
Catching flames, flickering tenderly
Within dilated pupils.

While there is still time –
Ramble aimlessly, in the land of
Tall trees and shallow houses
Till a purple sundown.

While there is still time –
Desist your binding caress,
Muffle your heart’s drumming
In that last lingering embrace.

While there is still time –
Curb your writing fingers,
Cease the carving of a name,
On your naïve gullible heart.

While there is still time –
Afford yourself this little mercy,
Before you no longer can…
.
.
.
Let each other go,
While there is still time…

Nov 26th and 27th, 2009.

Where Solitude Failed

What years spent with solitude
Couldn’t manage –
Was to weed out the sturdy roots
Of longing,
The innocent unachievable longing
Of being understood…

Treading the cobbled silences of soul,
Prying, easing out shy sorrows
And gifting them with words –
Hasn’t helped thwart
By an ounce –
That longing.

How cruel a partner,
Despite ages of being together,
Solitude can be sometimes,
Flaunting its many tints –
Searing snowy silence,
Lightless loneliness,
Dark despair.

What solitude couldn’t teach,
Was to merge in its shades.

The curve of her serene features,
You know not;
Nor the hue of those sinkable drinkable eyes.
All you have is a dream,
A patient little wish,
A light that glows and fills you up,
A flame you make from lighting things;
Things un-had
Things you may never live to see.

What solitude couldn’t manage,
Was to dim your dream.

You still catch the glisten,
Of those unknown knowing eyes
In uncast shadows
On moonless nights.

What solitude couldn’t teach,
Was to shutter the sinuous sidewalks
With endless windows opening
Into depths of those dewy dreamt eyes.

What solitude couldn’t manage,
Was to curb the restlessness of your fingers,
Ever-longing for the warmth of proximity.

Where solitude failed
Was in taming the tremor of your touch
As you embrace,
Another dreamt-up angel
In pursuit of fulfilment.

Nov 18th, 2009.

Honey Moon

My wispy hair, like a spider's web,
Obscure -
The reflection of yellow light
From the questionable glisten
In your greedy eyes.

You want so much of this moment,
This moment of love -
It perishes, shrivelling miserably
In the scorch of your glare.

Yet again, I cremate
A parchment with a faded fairytale;
And finally bank the cozy cheque
Of 'guarantee'
In lieu of my hand.

Oct 27th and Nov 5th, 2009.

Hope

He travelled far,
With dying brown leaves
In search of hope.

On a lonely kayak
Crossed the seven seas,
In search of hope.

Hope, this year around,
Is not a black eyed susan,
No cherry blossom in spring,
Or swaying sunshine in a lagoon.

It is waking on a wet morning,
Not aching from ripples of a memory.
It is basking in the beauty of a moment
In the absence of drum-rolls of longing.
It is in the passing and passing of ordinary days,
Filled with quiet comfort of having nothing to wait on for.

Hope, this year around,
Is not half-fullness of a cup,
Nor an abstract sign from providence,
Or glint of blue leaves on a purple sunset.

It is carving a divinely fragrant verse,
Not played on strings to woo a beloved.
It is possessing a well-concluded story,
No longer desperate of the need to share.
It is a warm cup of tea with crackers,
And a bar of chocolate sufficing as bliss.

Hope, this year around,
Is in being who you are,
And that being enough,
Enough reason to smile,
Smile each afternoon,
And walk all the way.


Oct 7th, 2009