Blog

  • Protein of forgetting

    Forgetting is a lot of things like mom resigned to forget where she was my other day. Forgetting is in body’s mind, In protein specs free flowing.

    (Forgetting is a lot of things about my mom including my forgetting a body from her)

    Forgetting is in mind’s body, its protein particles are river dried up in the source hills. Forgetting is erasing mom from a protein free flowing.

  • Holes in common sky

    Lady Windermere forgot her fan . The chemicals are out to get at our trees .They make holes in our common sky.

    The fan above stirs our common chemicals .Anyone may forget her fan in someone’s house. We are all chemically linked. In our DNA’s . Our fans are so pretty, yet so fragile and vulnerable .

    When lovely women stoops to folly, she stoops to conquer her chemicals.

    We forget our fan groaning as in above.
    The fan above us stirs chemical rumors,
    About who forgot fan in another house.

    The chemicals are out to get our trees
    And our fans are forgot in other houses.
    Chemicals make holes in common sky .

    (Reference is to Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s fan)

  • Phenomenal women

    Phenomena are one-off things even when their cries are trills about freedom ,sung from cage.
    They are anything but all-time .

    Women they are, singing souls on a brief sojourn, enchanting men with the click of their feet, the ride of their breasts, the magic of ma. That is why they are phenomenal.

    (Phenomenal poet -woman Maya Angelow passed in 2014 )

  • Too far out

    The poet sees comedy in the man’s drowning, the way the man is flapping his arms. He is drowning, not waving to the crowd.The crowd is too far away into the beach.They think the man is larking away.

    Poor chap, he always loved larking
    And now he’s dead
    It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
    They said.

    …I was much too far out all my life
    And not waving but drowning.

    The man is larking? Waving his arms about seems like bidding adieu to the crowd.

    She is such a lark, Stevie Smith .

    Tra la la!

  • THE BODY AND I

    * Child
    Seeing is yours in my words. Seeing is a water not spilling from a child’s hands clasping the glass with both hands, feet in slow measured motion.

    Or his squatting on the floor drawing feet together to cry,opening and closing his feet like tentacles,in beach sand on their way back to the sea.

    * Thinking sculptures
    Here in the Dalhousie town ,  snows are gathered up on the roads as weird sculptures of  thinking. The wind  goes angry on  green roofs,. in a shadow of strength , with  pines dancing  to eerie winds.

    Dalhousie’s doctrine lapsed a baby’s rights on the royal back of a  fierce queen.A cold wind blew on his white empire.

    Everything  lapses and a white rule.  A chill crafts the thinking sculpture that melts by a fierce night wind.

    * Snow
    The old  would make snow jokes at the bodies, leaving bawdy ones to souls on way  to see Shiva in his snow.

    The snow failed to whiten  crows on the electric wire, perched like old bodies hanging on souls.

    In the mountains please feel free but hold on tight, Mary, they said.There was no Mary but old body.

    The old male body hurled its snow by fistfuls at the old  female body and the laughter cracked an old snow.

    * Truth and a half
    In the soft night rain on our ears we would take a  first baby  step towards verisimilitude.

    We began with first two red ants we had seen crawling  on a sink.How near  truth they were.

    The next step was a leap into  the dark.We beat a moving away from truth to it, by clipping a third line.

    We made  art imitate life by going only thus far and no farther and beat a hasty retreat.

    We have achieved truth and a half  as Roerich did with Himalayas ,going over their edge.

    (After viewing the beautiful paintings  series of Roerich on the Himalayas)

    * Gold on the peak
    There is a  pot of gold on the peak we would go after  in greed.We will grab fistfuls of white stuff and hurl them at us as in pictures.

    There is  cold in  bones of flesh, greed in our eyes leaving them red. The old cheeks sagged in apple shame (Apples are bereft  of a deep snow).

    We could  have climbed  hilltop where monkeys  snatch spectacles.We  have to get them back from a man  for thirty rupees of hard persuasion.

    Horses have us upon them in behinds
    but they do not laugh loud for snow.
    We hold on to their backs for our life.
    They take us where we  hurl snows.

    On the bridge we met a dog at  our pantleg. But we were afraid for bones in the leg .We  would shoo him away in superior fright and the old bridge shook in laughter.

    * A garden of rocks
    Rocks are men  missing souls,in forms and shapes designed to make living in water and air below an empty sky of nothing.

    They have  body  shapes,absurd forms of our lives in the night rain, in  the frogs croaks.Some are  turbaned noblemen who do nothing except nobility, absorb nothing of weather with the smoothly rounded cheeks round with unintended laughs.

    They are funny laughing faces , their torsos hard as mountains and splutter with their laughter into  broken porcelain epidermis.

    They are patchwork  porcelain . In the outside complexion  they break into honeycombs with inside humming bee nothings.

    (After a visit to the fantasy rock garden created by Nekchand in Chandigarh)

    * Wardrobe
    His highness’ wardrobe stretched end to end ,for seven hundred coats to hang.

    There were seven hundred dresses. But the body seems somehow missing. Here are shirts and no body in them.

    (The erstwhile Hyderabad ruler’s wardrobe was 167 feet long and could accommodate 700 dresses end to end, two for each day of the year)

    * Dad’s face
    In words it is my deal in silence, an agreement with electric fan,a stillness breathing night air.

    Sixty six years of dad’s still face was as if it was an electric fan whirring in a room’s midnight.

    Wipe the dust off the fan’s face to experience death’s stillness ,still a running proxy for away.

    * World is a purty place
    Dorothy’s poem speaks from a low falutin view from a winder. World ,it says,is purty place to live in. In fact it is purty place from everyone’s winder.

    Our own falutin is a low window, in our world wide view. A neighbor does not get our goat all the time. Nobody gets his goat either . Except what is hanging with its tail up on a butchers window . A butcher’s window is low falutin and everybody gets his goat.

    For the goat’s hanging carcass ,world is not such a purty place. You cannot appreciate beauty from an essentially hanging position.

    * School
    School had no brick and mortar walls and gave us a holiday during rain. All around us was the foot -high plinth wall, delightfully extending to the bluest of skies.

    The sky was at times pale white ,not blue with amoebas of clouds.Class had no walls ,only borders marked out by beginnings of walls.Between the plinth and the asbestos roof was where the infinity of our sky began.

    * Enema
    Her kneecap is not working to climb the stairs and the lift is not working sadly, temporarily out of power. It is sadness she is reluctant to own. She passes it over to me, nursing my own sadness cumulated in my blood as mankind’s sulking sadness .

    Sadness is not hers but actually the enema technician’s. The commotion in the arse will be mankind’s, not hers.

    ** Enigma
    It was an enema ,successfully carried out, a powerful volcanic flow from the nether region. It may be called magma by some kind of a geological analogy but is certainly not an enigma.

    We have called it enigma out of politeness.

    * After we are words and come to pass
    We memorize 60000 words of Paradise Lost and face evil head on, a storm on black sky.

    We are justifying ways of God to men.
    We try to find some romantic ways of black storms.

    God’s words will teach us not to ask questions.We are old man Job.We shall analyse words in our ashes.

    But to whom do we justify God’s ways
    after we are words and come to pass?

    * On my mother’s eighth death anniversary
    There was not even  rain and the sun plops down with the fire and the ash.The smoke blurs my eyes over sticks and camphor, a smoky memory of mom.

    Words are ash in mouth. My origin recedes to a blur defined by a ball of rice .

    ** Three balls of rice
    In August we will offer rice balls to crows of our ancestors .It was in August eight years ago when mom turned ancestor from a mom. Ancestors come down on our compound walls as crows every year to eat our rice balls.

    Ancestors understand only Sanscrit .Our priest will act the interpreter because we don’t follow Sanscrit .

    We offer three rice balls one for mom ,one for her mother-in-law and the last one for mother-in-law’s mother-in-law.Only mother-in-laws qualify as our ancestors .

    * Narrow eyes
    With two narrow windows on either side, the door is only ajar with the man who froze in the path somewhere near the hillock. Above the hillock were cloudlets frozen and they cannot rain their monsoon because the man should reach waiting eyes in the window anytime.

    Woman’s eyes were faint behind the rusted window rails.The birds in their v’ s are however frozen in their skies in the West. The palm beside the hillock is heavy with fruit in its frond.

    There is no relief for the woman’s eyes. In such stillness how can there be any respite?

    But the iron rails have not stopped rusting.

    * Spoken words
    Spoken words were a poetry in themselves , in the spaces in between and after. We speak in slices of a night’s silence , with the wind battering the trees and trying to capture our moments.

    We address our minds to the cuckoo that has just got up from its mango sleep. A wind will hurl down raw mangoes yet to fully ripen for our eating.

    But there is always background noise in all our spaces, a noise of falling bodies like mangoes . The wind will fill the spaces between them.

    * Jhamsingh and breaking
    He was the princely cavalry man with a fine mustache and keen sense of humor . He went to buy horses and used the money to build a house for God. What a fine sense of humor! God had come to him in a dream under the banyan and he would make a temple instead. God would be hard granite and wear a pencil thin mustache in the new built temple .We are all a soft fine clay.

    Surprising, God needed a house and the Sultan needed horses . It was He who had made him, us all, horses and Sultans in our original molecules. Didn’t He ?Why would He need a house in a figment of a dream under the banyan?

    Was all this a horse play? Isn’t everything made of soft fine earth , waiting to be broken ?If not why are those funny terra cotta horses laughing at the end of their long necks?

    ** Terra cotta horses
    We were amused by Bankura’s Terra Cotta horses. Why do they always wear amused expressions at the end of their long decorated necks? Apparently these Terra Cotta horses were amused to see us on our short undecorated necks.

    In a one-up situation ,we wear a satirical expression on top of our short necks.

    ** Jhamsingh was in a jam
    He went out to buy horses but made a home for his God instead. Sultan had other Gods and would like to pray Westwards. His God lived that way .And he wanted the horses more. Jhamsingh was in a sticky jam.

    It was Sultan’s prime minister who got Jhamsingh’s neck out of the jam.As recompense ,it was agreed he would make a house for the Sultan’s God too. Thank God, now everyone’s God has a home.

    * Cumins and goins
    He the poet of the lower case keeps coming and going. “In just” has just cumin with a lame goat balloon man. Like in the ads new stocks are just in. The balloons are high up to the spring.

    Here in our basement there are comings and goings. Basement girls come out for the ice cream man , who pulls out his punches from the basement of his trolley where the cones were sleeping . Our girl tongues come out from their mouths where they were sleeping. It is such a fine spring to watch the comings and goings of girl tongues softly over ice cream cones.

    (Reference to e.e.cumins poem “In Just”)

    * Poetry is a river in Mandsaur
    Poetry is a breeze rustling in the tree after the temple tank’s mossy stillness.On our consciousness had luminously arrived a phallus God, in His stone beauty- hues.

    The cyclical eight faced God stone is ,in turns, tranquil-white and angry-red in eyes.A washer man had used it in rhythmic beats beating laundry.

    We have our myths, carefully polished over Time’s washed stones of the dry riverbed, our cumulated minds enormously meshed as haystack of a shared consciousness.Our gods have uneasily existed all these days with spirits who have to be driven out from darkly lonely houses and fearful men.

    On the hillock pallid ghosts come haunting in moonlit houses amid systolic blood-chants .You know our god is fear ,not rain’s beauty or lonely jungles with the fall of cascades I keep thinking, while my glass eye twitches for brown beauty and pixelated praise.

    ** Poem is a river
    A midnight’s poem flows over the smooth round stones like a river and reaches its Bay of Bengal.

    Some night poems do not reach the sea but enter other rivers on their way to the sea.Like pilgrims walking in the jungle join other pilgrims and journey to their hill Gods.

    * The lower case
    Cumins the lower case poet keeps coming and going. “In just” has just cumin with a lame goat balloon man. Like in the ads new stocks are just in. The balloons are high up to the spring.

    Here in our lower case there are comings and goings. Basement girls come out for the ice cream man , who pulls out his punches from the basement of his trolley where the cones were sleeping . Our girl tongues come out from their mouths where they were sleeping. It is such a fine spring to watch the comings and goings of girl tongues softly over ice cream cones.

    (Reference to e.e.cumins poem “In Just”)

    * 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, enfant terrible , whose eyes are whole pearls opaque with incomplete questions . Those are pearls that were his infant eyes. Nothing of his eyes doth suffer a sky- change into something rich and strange.

    Drowsy old men ask too many questions.
    They are incomplete like their antic suns
    Drowsy old men are bib drooling infants,
    Their questions incomplete, not remarks,
    Leaving all of them for afterlife solutions.
    Drowsy men are no eyes for real red sun.
    They ask incomplete questions of mothers
    Who they were when they were ,and why.

    (After reading Questions Are Remarks , a poem by Wallace Stevens)

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

  • Making mountains of poems

    Back in the mountains ,minus their apples,we made them into poems .The poems were about the white snows hurled at the old man’s white hair and the old woman who hurled the white snow was snow-white in hair and outlook. There was white snow everywhere about locked steel boxes , their chains in deepest snow rust. A pine or two rose behind the white steel box. There were white rabbits you had to pay a tenner for holding.

    The poet was busy arranging the pines in neat snow rows. And the rocks he made them into rock consistency in their exactness that surprised older men in their white hair.

    In the mountains , there you are set free. Mary, Mary , hold on tight said the old man as in The Waste Land (T.S.Eliot) and the old woman plummeted.

    In the land of Oz there is a tin man who needed a heart.But he has a heart already behind his tin.When he cries at other peoples suffering his tears will rust his tin body making him entirely immobile. Better thing would be to make him a tin-pot dictator so that he will desist from crying for others and save himself from rust. Or he may be a humbug wizard of Oz.

    * The wizard of Oz
    The wizard of Oz is a humbug old man wizard .He cannot get the little girl to Kansas. Girl and dog have now to seek the good witch of the North. Little did girl realise she had the silver shoes on which could take her and doggie to Kansas.

    In my Panoramio photos of the Dwaraka seaside, the google maps wrongly showed Dwaraka in Kansas.Result: The peaceful cows on the Dwaraka templeside find themselves transferred to Kansas. Holy Indian cows in Kansas! Wizard of Oz !

  • Bed bugs

    Till a while ago we didn’t know they existed. But now they no more existed. They were our strange bed fellows but no longer.

    They had bodies that would get their succour from our bodies.

    * Ravana’s ten heads
    It is dusk by the mosquitoes, around the park green bench. The kids’  play shrieks come  on top of the swing’s creak.

     It was an afternoon movie, a story about how we live  out our stories.  All stories work out the same . Only the characters seem to intertwine  like tendrils in the dark green forest,indistinguishable from each other. Everything seems such a mess , whether in Napoleon’s  Corsica or in  Ravana’s Lanka.

    Each of Ravana’s ten heads  seems to tell a different story the way head moves but in the end each of them is  the other, the same story all over. 

    * The flea

    John Donne’s flea sucked his blood and then hers, a flying wedding bed. Nothing physical but entirely metaphysical. Since the flea united a negligible amount of blood, the Union was not much of a sin. She had most of her maidenhood intact.

    The dog which had followed my pantleg the other day is not there. Probably it is busy with the fleas.

    * Tinsel in temple
    As we walked towards the temple we saw tinsel. A woman and a girl were walking slowly into a movie camera. Please sir,this way, says a clap boy.

    Somebody near the monkey god says how old are you sir? Sixty six. And you sir? Monkey god smiles through his holy water as a camphor flame lights up his Apple red monkey face, burnt by a sun fruit. We embrace flame to our eyes.

    We are not old relative to our stories
    All those that vanished only to return
    Repeat cycles under never ending sky.

    * Red peach and yellow flowers
    Morning was windy with a mild sun , a red peach on the hills. The tree broke into bright yellow flowers with not a leaf.

    I sit here in the improvised badminton court, which is also used by people of the laughter club who come here to laugh together. The laughing club will now make efforts towards a dance of laughter.

    They have a habit of laughing for nothing. They merely laugh their sides off, a response to nothing except the wind and the sun.

    Then they hold their sides from falling off and spin like tops their raunchy torsos. When the laughter is done ,they are serious facades scowling at the red peach of a sun.

    * The night of Shiva
    We keep awake in solidarity with our tiger skinned god who drank our poison in his blue throat. This night loudspeakers shall blare film songs and over cups of tea we keep awake while he freezes poison in his throat.

    The winter breeze says Shiva Shiva and takes our leave. The days will be long extensions of lazy afternoons.

    Yesterday we were at the Royal tombs where the sultans slept for centuries. Their nobles moved their hands up and down in the air and their behinds retraced saying no-things,no-things. The behinds are on their basalt too .tTheir gleaming behinds said no-things,no-things.

    * Holiday ball
    Two kids play ball , a red round ball , the holiday ball. When the Assembly is not functioning. Says the kid.

    This morning we thought of how time curved around us in a vast green space. Around the parrot green cement bench while the kids toss a big round ball.

    Please do not throw ball at speed, says the little girl.The red round ball curved around an Assembly not functioning, a holiday from a politicians time.

    * Silver fish

    On the moonless nights we are spread on the roof ,our eyes lost to the flickers of stars. On other days we are spread on the earth’s grass ,our eyes fixed on the breathless blue sky.

    That is when we see tiny tadpoles of silver fish swimming restlessly in the unending waters of the sky.

    We sometimes find silver fish moving in and out of the spines of our books. There they eat the wisdom of our ancients.

    Some times we close our eyes against the breathless sky. There we find the silver fish roaming in the inside of our eyelids.

    * How bodies thought
    This morning we imagined how the bodies might have thought, laid end to end, on the Manikarnika river steps. Beside them was  a pile of wood that would not burn rains and was just smoke.

    From the boats we thought what the bodies thought before they would burn. We thought how Shiva’s ashes spread on his blue body ,as a black  soot colored the sunset brown of his temple. We then thought how the wood felt to burn their trees, why it had to burn with bodies. Why Shiva had to smear his body with our ashes.

    By  river of our boats and marigolds,
    Our deaths sleep on wet river’s steps
    Amid slow fires as soot blackens sky.
    We wait patiently for a turn to burn.

    * Rainbows in the ECG
    The poet says the heart leaps when it beholds the rainbow . Child is father to man in all such rainbow views. The triolet trio by another poet says the words are truly wild. How can that be ? It must be man is father to child.

    The poor poet of the triolet trio has limitations. He has to repeat the same line at 1,4,6. in an eight-lined poem. With such limitations , he cannot say much.

    Or may be ,father is child to man.Have you tried Cockles’ world famous anti-bilious pills? The next door neighbor is saying there is no news in the Times Today .You plough through its pages for three hours to verify the claim and find it is true.

    In the meantime the child has grown to grandfather whose heart leaps on an ECG monitor.

    * Snows : The Himalayan tour
    We were in deep snow and had a mighty fall, like the good old Jack . In the mountains you have a free fall, a pure white fall from a deep blue sky.

    The bones hurt , colorless bones against a white snow. But outside the bones a hurt is generally blood red or maroon like a school girl’s sweater in the hills. When you have a free fall , you shall feel entirely free in the vastness of the mountains. Like the winds in the ocean not bound by the rules of the waters.

    The bodies have falls like autumns. There are winds setting them free.

    The old ride happy sledges down. Like they are horses. The horses that do not laugh out loud as in the internet chats. But when the old slide down in fright, the horses seem to neigh as if they are laughing out loud.

    If masters urge the horses on by filthy abuses , they retort by their instant poop droppings.

    ** Horses and crows
    In the deep snows horses take us to the higher echelons. We are not big shots and we only want to see our phallus God rising from snow. The horses have hoofs that carefully negotiate snow and mud.

    The horse’s masters urge them on. If they are wayward they hurl filthy abuses at them. Horses somehow understand . They are hurt if the masters call their parents horses of questionable morals. And their moms unchaste and their dads fornicators. They protest instantly by poop droppings.

    The crows in the Himalayas are fat and their cries are hoarse caws, so different from their cousins from our daily coast. But they sit on electric wires just like their cousins in the plains do. Against the white of the snows they shine darkly. They may not take to the rice balls we offer to our dead every year. But we have not verified this against the white purity of the snows.

    ** Rabbits
    For a mere Rs10, you can hold the rabbit. Sort of .Get yourself photographed holding the rabbit. Rabbits are a cute loveliness like the snows on the top of the hills. It is like getting yourself photographed hurling fistfuls of snow. It is such cute.

    ** Dog
    On the shaky bridge the friendly dog sniffs our pant-leg. No, it is not about to bite it.
    It is just extending a snout of friendship. Together we shake on this rickety bridge ,it seems to say.

    In the Himalayas the dogs are large and furry. But they bark all the same, when a new dog enters their territory.

    ** Goddesses
    In the snow ,hills goddesses bless everyone with year-round wealth and happiness. They go in processions on the road accompanied by music. The men blow large sized curved trumpets in their honor.

    Sometimes they shake the Goddesses as if they are dancing.

    ** Pines
    The pines are everywhere in the snow hills. They are covered with a wheat flour of ice. The sun comes and laughs their snow flour off, making them green again.

    So they always pine for the sun.

    ** Rivers
    In the mountains the rivers come down as heaven’s snow. They flow through the boulders making such deep gorges that we turn giddy looking down.

    The boulders in the hills sometimes feel the need for autonomy .Aided by a reactionary rain they loose themselves and crash-land on the mountain roads.

    Apple trees delicately hang on to the edges of cliffs. Like houses, brightly painted, their roofs of green tin sheets, their walls of wood and stone.

    Apple trees stand bereft of their leaves. They will grow them by June .By October ,their branches will be laden with fruit.

    ** Holiday at somebody’s home
    You go up the carved steps of the mountains and reach a holiday home. A home that is no holiday, with wind and storm blowing on the windows.

    You have Dalhousie’s old ghost rattling the doors. He was the one who lapsed native kingdoms. Until his own empire lapsed.

    Everyone lapses.

    ** Apples and cheeks
    The Apple trees stand on the edges of the hills ,bare naked and dancing. They will sprout leaves, flowers,fruit by June till Oct.
    The peaches have only young leaves and pink flowers. It will be two or three months before there will be fruit .

    The women have Apple cheeks. They have baskets on their backs full with fresh grass. When it is Apple time their backs shall have red ripe apples.

    ** As they snowed, they would reap
    In March apple trees are just stubs. They will start leaving by April, flower and bear fruit by October. The Apple farmers have gone away to the lower reaches , after digging trenches around the trees where they will collect snowfall. They will be back in October to reap fruit. As they snowed, they would reap.

    Right now we see gnarled trees with not a shred of leaf. Our driver promised to send us in October a Video of Apple trees laden with fruit .

    The women who have apple cheeks now carry grass on their backs. In October they will pick apples into their backs.

    ** Rented suits
    On the way up we got into our rented plastic suits . The horses would take us to the snowy heights. We rented our horses a hundred a piece.

    In the hills all things are temporal and rented. Our red and violet suits are such a relief to the drab whiteness of snow. The pines were in their best white suits. But the pines were in their temporal suits. Just for the night. When the sun comes the dresses will be returned.

    The horses do not have plastic suits to wear. When they feel cold in their bones they just drop their poop in the snow. Their green poops offer such a fine contrast to the white snow!

    * Rocks
    Our garden is of rocks that grow to flower. They have some hard interiors but broken porcelain skins. They have funny laughing faces, their torsos twisted out of shape by thinking. Like bodies embedded in the Hall of Mirrors ,revealed in original distortions.

    Under the blue sky they think and exist with humans of soft flesh .

    Stone deers are about to run on grass ,in an immortal moment of their doing nothing. In general rocks are missed heartbeats, gone awry. They dance our shapes and stay silent in our forms.

    They have  weird body shapes
    From absurd forms of our lives
    In the night rain, as  frogs croak.
    Some are  turbaned noblemen

    Who do nothing except nobility
    And absorb nothing of weather
    With smoothly rounded cheeks
    Round with unintended laughs.

    * Dog on the bridge
    The dog who met us on the shaking bridge loved strangers.. He was friendly to pant -legs, which he would catch by his teeth ,full of biting love.

    The bridge hardly shook. The dog did no bridge shaking thing. We did not even pat him in reply.

    ** The shaking bridge
    The bridge dances on its ropes. No motor vehicles are allowed to pass it.

    Only dogs and Indians are allowed . Actually other species are allowed too, except jumbo elephants. It is also free entry for the other human races but who wants to come here?

    * Midnight rain
    A desire is a lower body, a higher mind, a midnight’s  rain,  a tree’s stance. A wind that is making midnight unduly vocal. Dogs are contextually missing .But snakes exist in their slither down the drainpipe of rainwater. The rain slams  the sleeping voices of drunk watchmen fitfully  alert with their sticks. Their wives’ laughter stays hidden in a medulla , a hibiscus flower meant for goddess worship. Their daughters mutter newly learnt “A” for Apple  in sleep.

    The rain is incident ,knocking conjugal doors at odd hours. Interfering in conversations. When we wake up from conversations our dreams begin. Our daydreams of golden sunlight, when there is no more  gray and silver rain but an exquisite sun-and-rain situation, where the sun warmly collides with rain. Where the rain and sun live in mutual bliss.

    Like when dogs and vixen used to marry in our childhood. That was  when the kids persuaded the rain to beat our roofs on promises of chicken eggs, duck eggs. The grown up rain has no mind nor  body to eat eggs. But rain was a child’s  friend and a  friend had to eat farm-fresh chicken eggs for breakfast. So it could beat our asbestos roofs faster. And slither smoothly down its corrugations along with dried yellow flowers waiting  to drop to the earth.

    ** Drunk
    Our watchmen are drunk by definition. They have to watch for nothing, except thieves who no longer come in oiled bodies. The thieves are now cyber thieves with no oil on their bodies. Our watchmen are drunk on frustration .They have not to watch oiled thieves.
    Watchmen do not like stick watchmen who tap our midnights. That is why they are drunk and stay asleep all day, all night.

    * Continuous breaks

    I have to start where I had left off
    yesterday . Today is another day on which you shall go on or be dead with it. The day you stop you breath no more.

    Windows are open for words ,their content December cold froze in hole on to a bigger balcony hole, their light a new sun’s hole in wall.

    As long as there is hole in my sun ,my poems are continuous breaks.

    ** Breath
    For want of words in the night I might have stopped breathing .Morning it was the litmus test for verifying if I continued to breath .God’s mind was what a poet thought when he hung on to unknown words from the night’s landscape. Those were the very words that brought life back .Poetry thinking was God’s mind.

    One thought one knew Gods mind, not what was in it. One thought that poetry knew God’s mind. One never knew when the breath stopped and the words no longer came .

    ** Hole in the sun
    As long as there is hole in the sun, my breath shall last and the words go on in the hole , making newer suns as we go. In the tree there is a bole with the sun , soon to be the size of a world we breath in. The bole is full of words, full of sun.

    The sun shall rise behind the opposite apartment making a hole through my window. In the hole a pigeon shall make its nest for future holes. When they die they make big holes in space. The holes shall continue in time,their space being just a hole.

    * Living and dying dimply
    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 .

    ** Stool kicking
    In the olden times we would get tired of our rusted buckets and kick them hard.

    Now we simply kick our high stools.
    We kick them ever so gently into the bottom air as if we are flicking our cigarette ash into the ash tray . This way our task is easily accomplished .

    We would also explore the higher reaches of our electric fans as they swirl in the rarefied air.

  • When body drops

    Louise Gluck’s father always had thought death ,away from the sensual things .So did not lose much when body dropped. She ,who was his mirror image ,thought so too. So that when one dropped , one dropped nothing.

    A little bird of the night sits on my clothesline ,disappearing in the first sun. He sits on the wire with a sock hanging from a washing. The other sock drops like a wet body .

    I have always imagined my father in his mirror image.Because I have never seen him in body. Consequently he did not die much.To me he has always remained a mere figment ,who never existed in his socks.

  • Bumless

    As long as we are alive,we carry our bums under us. We do not lug them around once we are up there.

    We feel light as air ,once we shed our bums. We will feel eternally light and grateful. We can then move around in bubbles like ghosts used to do in our childhood stories.

    I have to ask my friend fatman how he is feeling now.

  • Scars

    In the lonely old days ,poetry does not bring back the fat man but the scars inflicted by him may yet show up in your sleep. You saw him close enough but the others saw him from a distance. Good for them.

    The scars are not that relevant now that he is no more.And we too will attain our state of bumlessness soon. Not all wounds need healing, not all scars are ugly. You who are just a year behind his birth are not far behind his death.

    In any case, if the scars are ugly,hide your bum. Any ways ,you will not have it under you for long.