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The women took turns with the shoulders as they went in and went out the hole.The afternoon resounded with their thuds and we closed our eyes in pretended nap.

Where we sat there was hardly difference. All our husk turned out to be life’s content.

We wonder why the dogs have to bark at nights with mournful snouts pointing out fuzzy possibilities of other things, of pale moons hanging by trees, of wind whistling in the rush of a sleeping lizard, of a car past our lengthening shadows dragging our day times to the other spaces,the other times.

Wonder why dogs have to shout at our bellyaches in the wee hours, before another fine dawn breaks on our missing people as we rub our eyes at dawn.

And why we do not put up our snouts to the night before another dawn breaks ,crinkling our rheumy eyes at the incoming suns of our window.

Soon he would become homesick, sick of a home away from a home where the coconuts danced all night. He would go to bed and not get up to a big bank of numbers and notes.

Small numbers crawl up to big ones where they swallow the small ones into a big sky of a billion numbers where light is distance , not sound.

You keep a day book of numbers but your red ledger is quickly filled .Their figures enter steel cupboards where they would live for the night. You forget to take them out next day.

(upon the passing of a senior colleague in my bank , Mr.P.G.R.Prasad )

We floated all our red and blue balloons of colored kites that chirruped like sky birds scraping the blue off our childhood skies. We daubed yellow paint on dancing bodies
pretending to be tigers in their jungle race.

We lit huge wood fires at the road’s center to burn demon kidnappers of God’s wives
and later saw them in the evening laughing in pain from the blue sky of their ten heads.
We burnt monsters only to bring new ones that we would need to burn the next year.

Our sounds have all the complex patterns nuanced like the goat skins of our dreams
that are goats that would die in stomachs for the larger stomachs of fierce goddesses
and for our ears for their aural complexity .

Our meaning comes from our mobs of time.

This morning you will examine life as a document from the archives while looking into a balcony’s dark extension, its trees secretly living unexamined lives in a dark breeze.

Socrates is not an unsociable jerk but is only finding a worth living life of a bearded philosopher of a wife who is about to sprinkle dirty water on a beard,quivering for meaning.

We are not to find meaning in pigs going in ham sandwiches, forming lumps in the throats of philosophical inquiry, finding meaning in pig’s life nor in our life’s history of eating pigs with its justification rooted in nature in a convoluted evolutionary theory.

We only wonder if the examined life is worth all this time,and what we do finally with the overwhelming sarcasm behind all this, with the smelly bones at the bottom end of such inquiries.

Here I stand now to receive blessings from a father’s thin air ,now felt at the balcony’s falling off to a night. My night poetry being of many spaces this very room shall afford a window of opportunity, the curtains a glimpse.

Lest I forget the sill I bring the moths out of season,out of rain,their embraces to the glass of death.Their glass wings shall bring a re-generation of leaves and the fallen flowers ,heads down in shame their feet put up to the sky of surrender.

I forget the lake of my liquid space ,its waters jutting out from the rocks, a white smoke behind a garbage dune killing a soft wet poet’s innocent verse.

I forget the road of the hanging trees ,the pollution van standing to abolish poverty and pollution in a round plaque ,the crows hanging in trees with worms to early sun sleepily rising like always.

Lest I forget I hear the drum beating of a train picking up gravel hitting speed in a rising crescendo of the drum stick by a bearded player who changes tracks and drum beat shamelessly mimicking the train while it is away on nightly rounds with people tucked away in a dark womb.

We went into our eating ( by way of a cul de sac where we reach the bottom end with the fingers scraping the darkness there), in chilly and garlic ,with a touch of millet and sweet solid cane sugar .In a blind alley a car can take only a u-turn from a wall staring at our going away after a belch ,with a lips- reddening leaf with a white stuff in it.

The fingers touch the bottom darkness that tickles , quickly come out to light, a wave length stretching and return to where you all began, to bag’s handle, an entry into the car’s little space, a medicinal talk that went over to little cul de sacs in bodies on a journey to largest of them, to their deadest end .

When John is done, he tells death do not be proud , in one of his vague serendipitous moments, the discovery of a camel in the sand ,a temporary life’s grant. But then camels can be lost any time to come.

John says death be not proud to make death die. Actually we are dying too many times cowards. Coward Johns are sooner dead than alive, in stone where they have a perpetual fear to sleep.

All johns have to die sooner or later,physically speaking. Which means beyond quantum physics which says you exist only when you are perceived existing.There are no standalone objects . Of course we are metaphorical.

So we may as well make a poem from death. When John is done , we tell death be not proud .But most of our poems are about death. Because deaths are such fine silky- smooth poems. Deaths are standalone unlike people.

Poets die these days ,of much poetry and cancer.These are those days , when a smile begins in the curve of the lips and God knows if it ever completes the journey .

I never knew that poet William Hawkins ever existed .It looks like he never knew that I existed .Yet he and I existed and exist respectively. It seems quantum mechanics says only that exists which you perceive existing and there are no standalone objects. I now perceive him existing within the time brackets 1940-2016 A.D. He must have existed .But he never knew I existed and so I do not exist. Thank God ,I do not exist. These are those days.

His brackets are closed. Mine will some time.

* Brackets
In 1949 they gave me a bracket and after that , some open space. I am still in that open space.I now find the open space uneasy ,when I see others getting closed by a second bracket.

Poet William Hawkins’ first bracket was thus (1940 -.The second one got only recently closed. He is now William Hawkins (1940-2016). When poets die they get neatly bracketed.

* Quantum physics
Till Williams Hawkins no longer existed ,I did not know he had existed . Quantum physics says there are no standalone objects and it is only the seeing or perceiving that makes objects exist . So till poet Hawkins no longer existed ,he had not existed .

Since he never knew I existed I do not exist .At least till I no longer exist .Interesting this quantum physics.

We resume and park portable Parker in pocket, dark and about our living. We park our dark stuff in her laughter.

In our pocket Parker is highly portable being darkly contemplative, sniggerer by side with her fun reasons for living.

Dying by noose is a bit uncomfortable. We do not get quality ropes nowadays. Our eyes are not pearls after a sea salt.

We may as well refrain from laughing to preserve our stomachs from falling.They hang out much on a pizza or two.

(referring to Dorothy Parker’s poem Resume)

* We also resume
We resume from where we had left off. We pick up our previous nights threads meticulously every morning .And then we resume our business as the sun resumes his business in the sky and the birds theirs.

This will go on till we lose our threads .Like for instance ,my mom lost hers to the night.She forgot where she had kept hers.
The night was too vast a field for a microsearch .At such heights you can only have top eyeview.

* Parker’s poems
Let us park all our dark stuff in Dorothy Parker’ s laughter.We may park Pocket Parker in our front pocket . Salesmen and pests are not allowed inside your basement ? Others may park their vehicles outside the gate ,so says the signboard before our apartment bloc.

Don’t worry ,we park our pocket Parker in our pocket .We park her in a docket for dark poetry.