Flashback

How tenderly fragile -
Like a snowflake,
On a warm windshield.
I wish I could hold it,
Save it, word it, preserve it...

The fleeting glimpse
Of a passionately guarded emotion,
Tied intricately, inseparably -
to one garish message tone.

Feb 17th, 2010.

Bon Voyage

From a traveler, to a traveler.

[Somewhere on that long wrong road,
Away from home,
I’ve gone astray,
Have lost my way.

In my dream it rained…
Rain that carried the snow away,
Piece-meal into crannies –
The white white snow,
Losing its religion,
Merging into water.
The fair cocksure landscape,
Coloring into rivers of confusion.]


Some stretches on that road,
[That long wrong road,
Winding away from home]
Will be gray, others green;
And some will reflect,
The bright summer sun;
Mischievious mirages –
Full of furniture of home.

If you ever reach them, touch them,
Between your fingers feel them;
Call my name –
The smoky shadows in this strange land
Might then,
Be imbued with palpable substance.
I might then begin to trust,
The warm breath of a silhouette,
Forever following my feet.


Feb 13th, 2010.

What I Want My Words to Do To You... *

What I want my words to do to you,
Is to make you shudder and stop,
Each time you decide,
To decide my decisions for me.

I shall let tomorrow’s verses come to me,
Tomorrow,
And today, today’s.
Also, those of all lost yesterdays.
Feel with me, sing with me,
Of days gone by,
Days wished, willed but never had,
Days to come…

What I want my words to do to you,
Is to make you shudder and stop,
Each time you choose to tell me,
It matters less, that I be happy,
And more, that I obey.

Did you know that there are –
Big battles I can brave,
Wild wars I can wage,
Yet some small skirmishes I cannot.

Bend for me, please,
I cannot fight you...
In your love you, like an impermeable wall,
Separate,
My joys – half here, half there.
We both know what I will choose,
But can you save me –
From bitterness?
From loss; the knowledge of my loss?
Can you unwind the unwilled twists and turns,
Of my half-lived half-loved heart?

What I want my words to do to you,
Is melt your loving stubborn heart…
Through verses, to have conversations,
That age gaps and rusty communication,
Have never let us have.

What I want my words to do to you,
Is love me your way, but also my way,
To love the willful voice in me,
For it is me more than all else.

What I want my words to do to you,
Is love me enough…
…to let me go –
Liberated yet loved,
For all that I am.

Feb 12th, 2010.


* [The phrase 'What I Want My Words to Do To You' is borrowed from the title of a film by the same name by playwright Eve Ensler]

Love Song

Tumultuous heart,
Fanatic heart,
O do not thee thus wail!

Clocks rewind,
Winds sojourn,
Rosy cheeks turn pale!

At spring’s start,
If lovers part,
Sip hemlock from this grail!

Feb 7th 2010.

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.