PARCHI NOTES

* From a tiny dot

A cloudy morning. A bald man was chanting mantras under his breath in the neighbour bench. He has just finished his prayers and left.

This morning was about a fatal accident. In accidents drunk steel meets the sleeping road median. The scholar boy who took his life by an electric fan called his birth a fatal accident. He only wanted to meet his stars from Sagan’s tiny dot. The stars are themselves accidents. His death was an accident resulting from his birth.

Birth is an accident from lonely nights. A fatal accident because death is a direct outcome of the birth. Lonely nights are accidents by man and woman, whose births themselves are just accidents . Everything is so random.

Why blame a midwife who is a proximate cause.

* Sun is a low hanging fruit

Behind the saree waving tree, the sun is a low hanging fruit .

In the morning it was a lost thing in poetry of words. The words recalled a body, its journey from the darkness of a mother’s inside to a white wall. The body banged whiteness and a horn sprouted ,a head bump on human aliveness.

Soon there would be ice on the floor and rice flakes outside a van.

* Leaves

We were searching for white shells on the shores of after sleep and we got into leaves,like leaves to tree, or not at all. We cannot take a no from the tree.

We searched for white shells but got brown men in their acts of oppression. Brown men oppress brown women, who want to wear wings. Brown women prefer white men who oppress less. White women too wish to wear their wings against white men. All women wish to wear garments against woman.

Brown women must wear poems not as fig leaves against brown men’s shame but against the inside howls of their poetry. Poetry comes as leaves to tree or not at all . From their men’s shame come their wings of leaves they may wear on their ascent to the sun. The leaves may turn yellow with poetry but they can be used to light small winter fires by the sidewalk .

* Mutilated truth

Now on the neighbor green bench I wonder how my absence looks like on my original bench. There is a woman sitting on my original bench. Wonder what she is thinking about her neighbor and whether she has noticed an absence on her bench. She is sitting on the bench pretending there is no absence on it.

This morning a word came reluctantly about a mutilation. I took it as a wrong message couched in wrong words. I have found out at the end of the poem that poems are made of mutilated messages.

In between there came a fragmentary truth and somehow there seems a linkage between truth and poem .A fragmentary truth will lead to a whole poem . Because poems are themselves fragments of life.

Fragments are whole poems at the end when the epigram comes. Every poem has to have epigram since you cannot leave the loose end hanging . Epigrams are a fragmentary truth. They are fragments of our lives.

* Sour fruit and bitter flowers

Today is the festival of sour fruit and bitter flowers .

Now on the other green bench, I have the fallen pipal leaves at my feet . All night they would have fallen to the wind.

There is spring in waiting . A festival is on of the bitter sweet neem leaves and the new tartaric fruit , that was often the subject of our childhood stone attack. The fruit is a direct outcome of tiny blouse flowers that tasted sour and sweet.

The unripe fruit on the tongue twisted a child’s face.His tongue made a loud slapping sound, a deep palate sound he always made to show off to his friends

* Discarded hashtag #

We began with a discarded hashtag and would soon end up with a mustache . The mustache belonged to an old-timer colleague who had passed two decades ago. It always had a dark snigger under it.

I wonder how in the early hour the mustache landed up on my poems. Was it a discarded hashtag from my inner space?

[ #discardedhashtag ]

* Simple living,high thinking

We live simply because we can’t do our complex stuff. We are too much bogged down in words, exploring invisible connections between words. After we die we live our deaths simply.

We live our deaths on our high stools. When there is no rain from the clouds, our cotton will kick it’s stool and its flowers will turn yellow with death . The plants will fall to the ground their tongues sticking out. Our cotton will live it’s death.

We carry on our high thinking regardless .

* Drowsy old man infant

The drowsy old man-infant is now squinting at the ruddy sun. He is a new infant amid his several antique acceptances, the infant terrible , whose eyes are pearls with incomplete questions . Those are pearls that were his infant eyes. Everything of his eyes doth suffer a sky- change into something rich and strange.

Drowsy old man crawls on all his fours. He has a rich fur against the winter cold. He writes his antique poetry of questions that state nothing and are no remarks . His questions are best left to the after life. They are wholly incomplete.

* Gaps

Please mind your gaps, says the poet-gardener of gaps. Poems are gaps between words, their long stretching adding further gaps. The gaps are an emptiness between words like the milk between the stars on a dark night.

O chestnut tree, are you the leaf, blossom or the bole? Asks poet of a chestnut in a jam jar,planted on the very day of his birth. The chestnut dances in the wind and the poet does not know dance from the dancer.

* Ephemeral

From the green bench I recall the word that stuck – ephemeral. Wonder if water formed in the snow hills is ephemeral or the water in the water tanker here over which women fight their loud throats.

All ephemeral things reach their seas ,from the hills and the tankers and the women’s voices on top of mornings silence. Their bodies thirst for water from the hills and the water tankers, their ephemeral voices tearing the quiet of my morning walk.

** Why is the sky blue?

Someone asks why the sky is blue and forgets the answer each time.Actually it is different each time depending upon when you ask and why. It is difficult to remember what the last answer was.

Just now I ask because these are women’s voices coming on top of morning . The water tanker has come to this shanty on the road for today .The water in the tanker is ephemeral like the women’s voices coming on top of the mornings silence . Like water spilling from the top of the tanker .

The water from the snowed hills or in the tankers has to reach its seas. The seas are blue like the sky and everything is ephemeral like the sky ,depending upon when you ask the question and why .The answer is different each time.

** Water tankers

Water tankers are a bit of the summer sky.They come like migratory birds to our putrid lake. From the top of the tanker the waters spill like women’s voices from a mornings silence.

As the tankers come their trunks are full of gushing water for waiting plastic buckets. Bodies are waiting in canvas bath rooms for plastic buckets.The women are colorful with their voices like plastic buckets. Some are cracked like recycled plastics.

* Pretenders

The first green bench is occupied by a man swiveling his neck like a table fan. I am on Green bench 2, worn out and faded in color by several park bums. The man who sat meditating in his closed eyes on the next bench now gets up to go.

There is a watery breeze as though rain is at hand . The pipal leaves are falling yellow at my feet.

We saw this excruciating family drama playing out in yesterday’s afternoon movie. Everyone pretends he is some one else and in the confusion their joint mask falls off. The mask falls with such thud. The old man wears an older mask. Since he is not already dead he pretends to be dead sometimes. His tongue pretends dead.

What do you want written on your tomb, asks a pretender.

Here lies a pretender who never believed he was someone else.

How about some boy-girl stuff ? We ask. Actually ,we pretend we are not of boy-boy stuff. Back home , we set the Thames aflame with our boy friends. Please do not evesdrop on our laptops,we tell our moms who want boys with paired with girls. We do pretend.

Dad pretends he is not having the other woman in his life. For reality he hits steel in the road . He pretends no more .

* Falling bodies

When the boy Icarus fell by the wax melting off his wings ,the clocks did not stop nor did the phones stop ringing. The farmer tilled his land and the fisherman dipped his rod in the river . No one was looking at the sky. Nobody heard the splash.

Look there is now a sun brightly smiling on a pair of drowning legs. And the expensive ship must sail on, regardless of falling bodies .

The torturers horse is innocently scratching it’s behind on the tree. But it looks as if the dreadful martyrdom must run it’s course, in an untidy corner .

(Reading W. H. Auden’s poem Musee des Beaux Arts)

* White shroud

The music is painful on the ears and I sit here a mute audience. I wait for the white shroud.

I can only recall a morning’s darkness. The darkness of a Korean poet. A Korean blanket , warm on body and dark on the eyes.

A shroud will now cover my darkness. Tufts of my silver hair shall fall all around me . The music goes on in the wall uninterrupted.

* Discarded hashtag
We began with a discarded hashtag and would soon end up with a mustache . The mustache belonged to an old-timer colleague who had passed two decades ago. It always had a dark snicker under it.

I wonder how in the early hour the mustache landed up on my poems. Was it a discarded hashtag from my inner space?
[ #discardedhashtag ]

* In the barber shop
Waiting for my turn, I sit here amidst a bunch of newspapers with local news. Film songs on the wall danced on funny torsos. A guy is having his head shorn and a chin with a brushwood of two days. Chin makes small talk. I have to wait for him to vacate the chair.

The barber will cover me in his white shroud. His indecent stomach will touch my fidgeting inside. My hair is silver and shining . It will fall off in silver clusters on the white cloth.

The barber’s fingers are dancing on the brushwood head. The head closes its eyes in pleasure. His hair is strewn all over the marble floor like knots of darkness.

** Darkness on head

I have had no hair now for some time . Dyeing is dead and old hair has gone home. Long die dyeing.Now I am not dye-able.

With so little to cut ,the barber has a cool time . When he cuts I have silver white tufts like dappled patches of light all around my chair .They merge in the gleaming sky white marble floor. In the neighbor seat there are pieces of darkness all over. Such a contrast!

* Under the Neem tree
I have redefined my postulates . The green bench seems occupied and I sit on another ,watching some kids go up and down on the swing.

The snow hills were a retrography of yesterday , stretching to the endless brown hills with a white streak of snow on their tops. I redid the photographs , their light adjusted to bring their textures forward. The shadows overwhelmed my photographs.

* From the parrot green bench
We saw five or six gender issues near the park. Men in women’s disguise?Between them they are counting money.

They are hardly gender issues but money ones. Everything is freakonomics . Here it is a freaks economics. You turn transgender and dance in birthday or wedding functions, raising your hem. There is money by Shivas auspicious wife.

I see a bitch approaches looking for a lamppost. The park tree is good enough for it.

 

* Hibiscus in dilute darkness

In the village of our beginning the hibiscus first bloomed in a dilute darkness. It was black to shape. There were bananas whose elephant feet touched snakes of water from the well’s rim. The bananas carried heavy loads of ripeness. They bent of their old age fruit. They knew death lay at fruits end. So they bent of sorrow.

In the balcony of our winter the hibiscus blooms red and its anthers bend in fear.

In our beginning village, our houses had gorges between neighbors for shame to pass. Our women carried cloth bundles of shame through them to the backyard well where they would wash our shame.

Mercifully now there are no cloth bundles with maps of our shame.

* Why the sky is blue
Someone asked why the sky was blue. Since he has asked the same question many times and never paused to hear the answer ,it is clear it has no answer he expects to hear .

Blue is a mental state and if the answerer is in a different frame of mind he may go blue in the face and shout at him saying “who says so?” .Why presume it is blue and ask why it is blue? The question can be rephrased as “What is the color of the sky and if you think it is blue,tell me why it is blue”.
To be safe ,ask the question and buzz off without waiting for the answer .

* Midwife
We cannot blame the midwife for any accident. It is an accident not of her making if you were born.She was a mere support staff for meeting the exigencies of an accident called your birth. And if the fact of your birth was the proximate cause of your death ,you may blame your parents for it since they were directly involved as parties to the said transaction.

Under no circumstances can you blame the midwife for the accident of your birth leading to the accident of death .