POEMS

MY POETRY- its VARIOUS STRANDS and ECHOES

poetry caressing the heights of wonder

amazed at the limitlessness

of a single maze opening 

several doors on a map 

spread on the deep ocean floor...

"Blindness" and some other poems published in 2014

How You Found Me

(originally published in Zymbol Magazine)

You came to this place that day

The floating garden with

A leg made of iron and another of water

And it was the night throwing

Nets of solitude all around.

While you stretch your lonely ease

Under a tree, a nothingness disappeared into

Its ageless roots growing

Slow from the branches and sealing its

Weight to the weight of the earth

And all this while birds flew to their nests, clutching parts

Of my dried heart in their claws.

You climbed up to their nests

Gravity waned and the nests rose as

You touched their corners

A race drove your blood under your still limbs

Insects hiding in your bones stretched their antlers

And love from your heart dripped into mine

Pinned to my bed with an oxygen mask drawn

Like a transparent boat over my body,

Asphyxiated in the ocean waters

You brought a sonar and found me resting

Under the sea. The rust hadn’t yet crawled

Over my 21 year old body when you found it,

The journey beginning from a dried heart

In a floating garden

Where all the while, my eyes were following

The birds with bits of my heart and

The invisible cupid was watching with

Fleas crawling at his toddler feet

  

Blindness

(originally published in the Lindenwood Review and nominated for the Pushcart Prize)

Tonight you open the soles of my feet

And rise in the capillary tubes of my bones

The grains of years drawn on them like circles

You keep rising to the deserts

And blind silken winds meet

The woman under your iris

Slow stones turn on their backs

And blood from an elephant tooth

Filters past my tissues into the four chambers

The first has a blue baby licking the molten thumb of fire

A bird flies in another, with surprise grating its wings,

Into hollows of unknown nights

Smouldering fires cook my blood in cauldrons of straw

And it crackles in the straight capillaries you rise in

To lock your eyes into mine

And we go blind

Man Eater at Our Table

(originally published in Zymbol Magazine)

Our homes are studded to a burning space

Their windows drip with blood

From a branded face and their curtains

Are a grown man getting a beating

Someone is always walking through this gate

That says smile but sheds a sack of bones from its eyes

You can piece them together. You can pull flesh

Over them too and give them eyes,

But the tongue and the marrows will be empty

And whoever feasted on them had had

A dessert of rose petals. Look closely,

Those are eyelids on a platter and

Someone is seated at the table with

Sooty hands, dipped in the darkness

A clear night is dripping black rain through

The broken rafters.

The man eater leaves with the day in his pocket

Furling the sinking sun in rotting rags

And the evening in his fungal fingers

For burial at our doorstep

Nostalgia
(originally published in Nether Magazine)

That evening as the pavement stones

Started beating a music on their bodies

And the trees sprung out of nowhere

Like a panoptic prison’s guards

Who catch you in an ambush

When you have been thinking the day is blind.

You inject yourself with morphine

To sleep when the cat at the window

Is licking the pain off its glass

And wait at that grim hour for

An ice-cream trolley to huddle past

The crowd outside and enter this room

Like a ghost walking through walls

And rising through stifled chimneys like

Smoke from a fire that was never lit

Holy me you say but the knocks

At the door, the irregular impatient impasse

At the door knob wreaking havoc with

My world in my room say silence

The Years without You

When I fell down flat on the steps

"Dreaming"- my art

In my eighth year, you emerged

From amongst the laughter

With a tree in your hands

And planted it at me feet

We got up and pulled at its shade.

In the rain you came from the valleys

Finding your way behind approaching clouds

A tribe crossing the Sahara

Waking the music of the earth

Beating fire into the desert

That day I saw a monsoon snake

Yellow as some things putrid

My legs ran while I froze at the gate

The snake was still skidding there in the same place

People walk through my frozen airy form

You saw it, and saw me

You pulled me away bit by bit

Drinking my invisible form

I moved into your umbrellas on other rainy days

            When a confusion of heads knocked at my doors

            They came dressed up in collars and coats

            They came with warrants and whines

            I opened the back door, stepped into

            The body of your dream and closed out the rain

There is a fairyland, in a dream I have not forgotten

Flowing slow fountains on its body

Where flowers suspend from the sky in a rain

The grass is blue and there is a tinge of pink in the sky

Every monsoon I relived the dream

Until your eyes blinked open in its sky

And the colours came back to their place

            Here I sit painting the still sound

Of your eyes that look on at

The running colt of mine that

Shatter glass with their hoofs

And extract the flesh of an autumn fruit

It is odd when there is no one to show my painting to

When the simple turn of a page shuts the shutters

Of meaning with uninterest and impatience

How sweet and sour mix! But I begin to wait for salt

To osmosize my various parts strewn amidst

The scraps of the painting

You come with a pinch of salt,

Say a prayer and wait for me to get up

You see me and not my parts

Before you see the colours of my painting

You see the colours of my eyes

All this time my eyeballs were dyed blue

I show you their colour many times

But you see them clear and white

I open my eyes and I’m beautiful

Made to order to fit into your shape
_________________________________________

A Finding

A moth, the colour of wood,

Fluttered on the zoologist’s window while he slept.

Some time at night, it fell on the dusty pane

And spread its wings for the last time.

When he woke up next morning

He had-his-tea-went-on-a-walk

All this while the moth lay in its endless rest

Then by-chance as he was looking for a book

He saw a part of a yellow

The yellow extended to orange

Then became brown, then black

He looked and the wings grew into

An abdomen, into a head of eyes

He picked it up and placed it on the dissection table

It stopped growing

Living demands, clotting of water drops

Is a trembling pebble under every step

            How odd, in a world of eyes a

            Moth can live unseen for years

            How odd, in a world of borders

            A moth crosses the jungle and comes to this window

How odd, he names the moth after himself

__________________________________________________

Life from a Rainbow Cup

Something will twitch in the yellow sun

And pink will flow out from its veins
A bride will pluck its maroon

A flag will soak down its blue

And marry red for white

In French, ‘white’ translates into ‘blanc’

-A curtain hiding contorted screams

Greenland is not green but white

And I can see purple in a silver birch

Bodies have colours, but don’t name them

They respond to brutality with bruises

And to love with blushes

Some brown will sleep in the corner

Of Mona Lisa’s lips. Someone will

Pick it on his brush and twist it into

A golden tree. In someone’s dream

The ‘Starry Night’ becomes a mermaid

Some colours are like a scratching neurotic but

All frames are not black. Grey is always

Stumbling into the picture from somewhere

It is a yellow room with shadows

The colour of the curtains drips green

Already the trees are falling in this wind

A cave opens from them and takes us to black

How fittingly it all stops

In the flame of an earthen lamp

The magic vanishes in its light

________________________________________________

Philosopher

                                                          The water was roughing up its hands

When I reached the site of the battle

It smeared its forehead with gifts to us

But then someone stepped on its

Forehead and became a tombstone

Those who looked on saw little people

Dancing in its transparent body

Only its face is dead. We think

We know this because it has closed its eyes

Now that everyone is already walking

Past the tombstone without second thought,

Any time the water will stand on its feet

And start walking with closed eyes

We who stand like trees will try our best

To talk it into opening its eyes

We will try to see the farthest tree at the horizon

Because we know, somewhere Buddha rests

We tried to shout his name

But could not remember it because

The demon child has not yet seen the soil’s blood

His skin is rotting from excess

He’s begun to think, he’s a Pharaoh

And they have made him a living mummy

Here the cures have come quick like bombs and

Unbeknownst our spiked shoes uproot the grass

And out comes a snake coiling

Now, it will pull us to the centre of the earth

Where all earthquakes start

If we are lucky to come out,

Buddha will lend us his eyes to see and

We will realize that something must open

Our inward eye, the third eye of the water

_______________________________________

Love Resides in These Too

Gossamer- the finest thread, sometimes

The first discovery of the day;

Perception starts from it and spreads.

The holder of water and life

The spider’s gift to the garden

The summer’s thin belief, floating

Freely between the silent love

Of the morning and things.

You will breathe it in, odorless

And it will stick to your form, invisible

It will be there every morning waiting for you

Inglenook- the earth’s place in the Solar System

The perfect distance between things that sense

And things that incite

An old man’s comfort, a fire man’s despair

A circle in a campfire, a straight line in a fireplace

But solace nevertheless. We live because we

Know it will sometime be our place before

We leave the inglenook and enter the fire

Penumbra- the cast-off lightness of things

The body splitting in a joyous dance into

The many arms and hands of a goddess

The hidden meanings of life trying to take shape

Falsities along with the opaque truth

It is always there waiting at the margins

To engulf the whole shadow in its luminous halo

Petrichor- the smell of earth after rain

A taker to the unremembered and hidden.

It is minuteness hovering like a bee

Heralding the love that imbues the

Water with the soil. Energy flows

Out of the elements, enters us.

The smell changes into colour.

We see we are green, slowly ripening

Lagoon- a rare island of water

You can imagine it even if you’ve never seen it

It reflects like all water, it wears robes of ripples,

Hides its hazards, spreads out life like its own form,

Cajoles us into living, then makes

Us fall, only to find that it is not alone,

That we are not alone

_______________________________________

Journey

Every night you come into the frame

Where oceans part, flaying themselves against the sky

Every splash relives the centripetal mysteries

While attraction collects the ocean floor

The conscious dark is innocent like snoring trees and

The dense earth sputters spoonfuls of sunshine

While love stretches its legs like an evening shadow

Transparent silver moonlight becoming its eyes

We sit through the night as if under the same tree

Sharing the wind’s journeys

________________________________________

A Girl Buying Flowers

The flower shop has a new girl

Confused you might think in the

Arrangement of colors and shapes-

Appraising them,

When all this time something is leaving her

Drop by drop, leaving the heart

And growing bodies from its graft

A syrup is draining from her being

All she does is to find the flowers it collects in

Some flowers, she sees

Have open mouths to receive it

But there are also the eager

Incapable buds in the bunch

Then absentmindedly

The scents evaporate and mix in mid air

The shapes lose their difference

Color crosses her

And suddenly the flower comes

To her, watery and transparent, in the mind

She plucks it from inside her,

She places it in a sunny bunch

And makes it a gift for him

______________________________________

Dreams Continue into Reality

A dream of doves, their feet tied together

Does not end when reality comes-

Soles pressed to the floor

Eyes waiting for the silken curtain to rise

The smoke of prayer rises from its mouth

To the golden eyelids and a tear waits

For the rest of the body to form

Slowly velvet grass sings a lullaby for

The earth’s shell to open up

Paradise must slip down the old raincoat

And enter the crevices drop by drop

Coverings are futile here where

Sound can grow trees

Something begins to till reality

Out of the pits of a flute

The length of dreams must have corners

That are folded by the fairy floating in my head

And in a single night I’m alive

But it took many days to join my various parts

To mix life in buckets and dye my body with it

Life leaves a rose bud and enters the

Many open mouths of my ocean

Like the very first batch of fish

Entering the robes of the water

How dark is this over-sized robe that

Floats around our bodies

How endless is its spread

How hollow its trimmings

We forget what is beyond

Slowly as we open our eyes for the first time

Our single wish that has stepped

Everywhere inside this robe

Is to come out and comb the hair

That hang from this faceless form

I look

And a sunspot, sea water, a cross-stitch

A dust of pollens, a pod of cotton

Tapping, engraving, stimulating,

In this robe, something rubs my feet

_______________________________________

Dreaming

Three men lie asleep here in

Curtained beds and all I can see

Is the dreams they are having

How haphazard, how cliffwalking,

How chlorophyll-boiling brown,

How feather floating, how needle sinking

How alike

In a dream

Cherries lie under a tree

Weighing like iron bullets

Till a bird picks one in its beak

In another dream

A ship rests between the sky and the sea

Still as the enlightened

Silencing the waves, singing lullabies.

When the sea is calm at last,

It fades into the sky

The third dream is the merriest. It is of

A rose smelling, marigold decorated fair

Where every now and then a balloon

Escapes a child’s hands and vanishes

Into the sky, as effortlessly as

The voices of people coating

Their throats with nectar

Then there are the bodies growing

Like forests and hard as stones

Or becoming umbrellas and smiles

But,

Outside, the world is walking slow

And the sky is thundering

Outside the world is shouting with hands

And the sounds are flowing away in water

Outside monkeys stand hiding behind doors

Ready to pounce on you any time.

Let’s sleep again and dream inside these curtains

Lest someone recognize us

______________________________

Sketch of 1833

Present day Golden Temple

Prayer at the Golden Temple

There is an engraving on the walls of gold
But what is written underneath on the stone

And the clay that was once its plaster?

When I see the moon, the moonlight

Becomes the language of prayer

The chants rise from the temple and slowly

Rise against the sky

At some point they reach the moon

When we are asleep rolled in equatorial

Forests or travelling on the thin

Stems of the smoky alleys of our dreams

Then the blind man hears footsteps

And walks to the unseen with them

____________________________________