We do feel creepy at most times
On a dank balcony watching men
Going about their milk and eggs,
Every other morning purposively.
They obtrude on consciousness
As if they are mint for a noon tea.
Like mint they bend on our grass
Their shadows cover existences.
A mind is a monkey on the tree
Jumping from wood tree to tree
With shifting meaning of words,
A syntax making new meanings.
Mind has its tail of a short span
It’s tales in ever changing words.
Together they make a meaning.
Our poetry is in their aggregate .
One did not know the faces enough.
Faces look alike in Vietnam jungles.
They would box pale moon shadows
As the wolves howled in their nights.
Songs sounded eerie on pulp faces.
He preferred known faces in a ring.
(Legendary boxer Mohamad Ali who passed away a few years ago had refused to be involved with the Vietnam war saying “Sorry I have nothing against the Viet Kong”
Parijata flowers ,heads down and shy
Put up their feet to sky of surrender.
I forget a placid lake of a liquid space
Its waters swirling around dark rocks,
A white smoke behind garbage dune
Killing soft wet poet’s transient verse.
Across road ,walk our fellow men.
They dream of their trees by sea
Tossing their elbows about in air,
To breath sun worshiping mode,
Scared of the virus in lung’s fiber
The thing that sticks in its spikes.
You now have lost words
To a poem, by Jane Diski.
She is lost in a never land.
You can’t phone lost poet.
We can’t access lost poet
With password forgotten.
We poets have lost words
Like boys, in for ever land.
Drowsy old men , on alprazol,
Ask infant questions to moms
When moms are mango trees
Thousand miles north of wind.
Mom has no answers on wind.
Drowsy old men write a poem
Asking questions like remarks
By drowsy old men from sleep.
(After reading the poem Questions Are Remarks by Wallace Stevens)
Women sang sowing songs.
Songs might have been sad,
As sky would be soon empty.
There was not enough slush
To go for the standing paddy,
With common legs drowned
And not even up to the ankle
With saree raised just above.
All the while I and body are
coaxing poetry
To happen in parks, on road,
at a bus stop
Between old men from each
other’s silence
And fill canvas with images
and poetry.
Early on posthumous poet
Shrieked in a prose closet,
A still bird to think in poem.
God’s sake, you stay quiet.
You’ll do your poetry thing,
Upon the mind’s free wing.
(On reading Emily Dickinson’s poem They Shut Me Up In Prose)
The Morning is Just a Dream 