We are multitudinous you & I,
As everyone is always so near.
Our parts shine through body
But the whole rarely glistens.
There is overwhelming colour
In our camera, seeking beauty
Parts of wholeness by the tree
A green multitudinous whole,
When it sheds loveless leaves
To multitudinous craven dust.
My sit-up rakes up a few butterflies
With Emily on the other side of river
Where we hope to meet after boat,
With our butterfly wings left behind.
We too have butterflies in stomach
The dead wings preserved in poem.
(Remembering poet Emily Dickinson)
Outside, rain is wide awake.
It may have had its dream.
I hear soft sound of dream
On footpath,near food cart.
That food cart is dreaming,
In its rain soaked tarpaulin
With muffled dream sound
And the smell of eaten food.
My sleepless thoughts were mainly of guilt.
A very long scroll stretched to a starlit sky.
I tried to arch over vast expanse of space
To see where the record of my guilt ends.
But ‘tween us two I can’t be blamed for it .
I now lay the blame for this ,at your door.
Wonder waiting for abruptness
Amounts to make it less abrupt,
We all will get sacks sometime.
Our holes close abruptly in river.
And we will no longer look back
After we empty our ash content.
We all empty earth pots in river
And turn back our boats abruptly.
A hole we made in water closes
As abruptly as of Oliver the liver.
Oranges are in O’Hara’s poems
As words begin to fade in page
And abide till sunset in corridors
As oranges are not a materiality
& it is words that make them up
With their absences filling pages
Since the poet cannot be painter
And forms exist only in absences.
(Recalling O’Hara’s poem “Why I Am Not A Painter”)
With a distance of time ,
what had looked white
Would turn vague and
grey by growing years
Our wading knee-deep
muddy rain waters
In the streets by a white wall
missing in places,
The men who tucked in white
lungis in the waists,
Small coins that felt round to
fingers in pockets,
Far off rivers dancing around
heads of mountains.
The heart pounds in its rhythm
Fearing legacy from dead dad.
Will they open heart in its cage
And probe secrets in its mind?
Will they insert colored plastics
To smooth flow in its plumbing?
Or will they merely burst a few
Bubbles down the choked tube?
Heart sits up all night in its cage
Clutching future in its tight fists.
When Clare asked: What am I?
It seemed nobody would reply.
He had to self-consume woes
Including shadows of his love.
They edited shadows as shades-
With Victorian prudery in public.
Yet he was, living in an asylum,
His poems edited by a steward.
Now the steward and the inmate
Are both safely below the grass
With the same vaulted sky above.
A question still stays what am I?
(Reading John Clare’s poem “What Am I “)
Rain on a bridge walks a dog,
Dog and rain, a re-purposing.
Sleep is re-purposing a birth,
A side -street to re-route life.
We will put sick dog to sleep.
There is more dignity to life
And uncle says let a love die
Since love is a dignity to die.
Aunt asks, who is the uncle
To decide the dog’s dignity?
The Morning is Just a Dream 