Author: nisheedhi

It is midnight and thunder, a ghost walking night , time a prince asks to be or not to be. Who is there ?shouts the sentry in Elsinore.

A woman walks alone,her fear rhythms different from a male walker’s. Everyone’s fear is read into midnight , a book woman reads differently on esrogen. A man walks differently on his testes and consequently the world’s violence strikes him differently .

Fat man was the second of world’s droppings.The first one was a little boy ,who was thunder and lightning, on little men and women.

My own fat man comes into my sleep and dreams and I am caught in fear rhythms .Fat man is now caught into his airy nothing , up there ,on the happy hours of the heavenly hard rock.

Fat man drops, he being the killer of mocking birds.My God, what have we done,says the pilot.

We had many happy hours together in a fragrant harbor of fifteen years ago. The beers were many and stomachs went hard as rocks. We pissed many a happy hour off our beers together.

Now he is no more ,my leaning tower and has no tower. Hopefully he now rests in clouds ,in a well earned break from his lean and hungry schemes to topple windmills.(Yon Cassio,he is lean and hungry looking).

He was neither lean nor looking hungry but plain hungry. Besides he was thirsty too. With only a year between our births , I wait for my own happy hour up there, when we will “peace” together.

Here I am waiting in the eye , its pupil in tears and an overflowing. Vasan eye care will now check my iris and the uvi. I am not weeping. Am I sweet in my body?

Down in the pit of my stomach is the fear of turning a blind poet. Another Borges who makes a library of books behind his eyelids .Neatly stacked by centuries, ever since Sophocles wrote Oedipus and Milton his Paradise Lost .

“Body count

“We have learnt to crane our necks
above the stink and the plastic,
to where Baba’s finger draws silver triangles in the dark….

That’s the North Star, he says,”

We have learnt, after all, my dear
to crane our necks, beautifully
above the rot and the fish smell
of sins and human longing…””

Momina Masood

Baba showed her the North star and probably the earliest child star Sirius .They craned their necks and craned till they would fall on their backs .Into this resulting astral confusion ,Baba lost his neck ,as the neck became a back from which Baba never arose.

In the meantime we are here , doing a body count of our stars from his last count.

* Last count
The news came in the morning. The young man who had on the previous night pointed the stars to his daughter found himself turned into one .Forty four was no time for turning a star.

Look at the Mars, burning brightly, he had said to a wide-eyed daughter. In the morning he was found absolutely blue. The heart stopped at 3 A.M. trying to gauge the depths of an astral sky.

Did he die in sleep? Was he in a dream he never woke up to recount?

Dusky ,the death blogger, said she felt she was on a short holiday here, which would soon come to an end.Neither happy leaving this place nor happy staying .Always on the edge of the chair, waiting for the next occupant .

Well ,the next occupant was here two days back .The short holiday came to an end the last Saturday .

Our own holiday will come to an end some time. We are fidgeting in our chairs .

* Book of lost words
Dusky wanted to compile a book of lost words, of words lost from the lips of the ageing people. Just words, no sentences. So they they would all join up and make meaning .

I lost Diski after her cancer death on the tip of my tongue.I have recovered her partly .Now she is Dusky making a new meaning. She has not lost the dignity of her name. Rather she has added her own meaning to the dusk of my life.

She had said in some other context “everything passes” and now it has become a quoted cliche,that it refuses to pass from Twitter .

Of no use is Dusky feeling red in the face every time she sees it coming back as quote.

Dusky and everything else passes. She said everything passes but nothing disappears?

But now Dusky has disappeared. Cliche remains.Everything else passes.

I am large. I contradict myself. I am multitudes.(Whitman). My own deep truth contains it’s opposite deep truth. Actually I make up all my truth, all my poems.

In the end all my poems cancel out my truth. My deep truth is also my deep lie ,which I have just made up. I have made up all my words. My words contradict me? Actually I contradict them.

Because like Whitman I am large and do contain multitudes.

Do I contradict Whitman? So be it. Will he be unhappy in his happy lack of house? Like other unhappy people in unhappy lack of houses? Actually he is a happy Whitman who has since vacated his happy house. That was how he could contradict himself in all his multitudes .

But I am not that large. I make up my own small contradictions. They are my myth.

Poet Anne Boyer says there are two kinds of people: one kind is made of general stuff who do worldly activities like eating,drinking ,talking,etc. The other kind also does similar things, except they do not know where they have to keep their arms while doing all these things.

Many times I just do not know how to conduct my arms. Surely they cannot be loosely lying about under the table.

Looks like I am the second kind. If you are the first kind , please help me with the placement of my arms.

In Emily Dickinson’s times we had exotic jessamines. Now we have evening jasmines on women’s blouse backs.

They shine whitely on dark woman backs, when the cows return home.
Other times, their fragrance rises from a dark street flower vendor’s spread out cloth.

We keep looking .We keep chasing Rilke in the stars and under the old man’s bed. The eyelids are raised gently to the stars as they keep flowering beside a pale moon. They hide women under them. The women’s blouse backs have old jasmines in them .

Ater Rilke,you keep looking
Under the stars and beyond
Or under the old man’s bed.

Chase after Rilke’s old man.
Keep looking a star beyond
Or under the old man’s bed.

We have old jasmines in our washed out pockets. They still smell of the stars.