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Old jetties are useful too. For the old poets to agonise about. Especially with the cameras they hold against their feet, the sea lapping up against them as if the ships still call from the blue seas. Actually old jetties are useful for the underwear ads they carry on them.

Old jetties are useful for the clincher line of the old poet,looking for the ironies of a spent life. For the fine epigrams they make , when their dead end is reached and no new words crop up in the night.

* Underwear ads
On the very old jetty , a crow or two sits positively as the sea waves lap up against its feet. The jetty is broken in parts but appears to stretch into the deepest part of the sea.

Just to appear useful ,the old jetty carries underwear ads in large painted letters.

We want to know yet what we goes on inside. And the morning came ,as the poet said. Mark my dream as the poet Strand might have said. The morning is just a dream. The cuckoo in the tree above is the very morning. Below our dream is green bench with cuckoo thoughts.

Somebody will some day weave the foggiest plot around it some day. My body will not figure in it and will be a third party sleeper doing nothing of it.

* Prose with poet’s head
That is what Luc Sante said about his books. We all write prose not as a narrative of what happened in the past but of what is happening right now on this very page .That is how we write our early morning poems.

That is how a poet’s head works on waking up from forgotten dreams.

* Poet’s head
A poet’s head is just an ordinary head under open skullplates.Somebody said his head was open to the stray wind with its flying leaves .The old leaves just float and fly about.

Their noise on the asphalt floats as a single sound of solitude.

Is height the main thing about the mountains? Or the slowly melting kindness of its snows?

In the mountains  you shall feel free with the eyes and your neck you can swivel enough to reach your eyes to the summit . Till your neck disappears and you are on your back where the welding seam between their tops and the sky is clearly visible.

* The mule
The slowly melting snows of the mountains are kind . They are not arrogant about their height. We are 5000 ft above mean sea level. We crane our necks sufficiently to measure their heights above mean sea level. But not so much as to make our necks disappear and turn into backs.

The slow horse that is a cousin of our coastal donkey grazes in front of our holiday home. The mule is illegal bastard species, bred by man, mainly to carry his loads in the mountains. The mule puts it’s best hoof forward in snows mixed with its poop. When you are riding a horsemule ,it does not care how much it’s poop offends your coastal nose.

* Mean Sea Level
Mean sea level is not all that mean. It only tells how high the mountain is. Mountains do not know their height and can be needlessly puffed up about their height.

We are the coastal guys and back home our villagers have never seen snow in the hills. My driver here says he has never seen the sea in all his life. He is a hilly man, the silly fellow. You guys do not know the sea and we do not know your snow hills.

We are the plains people . In the hills we feel quite free with our necks which we crane high to catch a glimpse of the peak. So high we fall to our backs and miss to spot the precise joint welding between the mountain and the sky.

Back home,once we found ,from a hilltop ,that the sea welded with the sky so seamlessly that we would not know where the sea ended and the sky began .

Please mind your gaps, says the poet-gardener of gaps. Poems are gaps between words, their long stretching adding further gaps. The gaps are an emptiness between words like the milk between the stars on a dark night.

Do you find such long gaps here that you are breathless leaping? That is where the original muse resides.

O chestnut tree, are you the leaf, blossom or the bole? Asks poet of a chestnut in a jam jar,planted on the very day of his birth. The chestnut dances in the wind and the poet does not know dance from the dancer.

The Mayor of Casterbridge cannot transform his bad wheat. A bad wheat makes a bad bread and no process can make it a good bread.

* Chestnuts
We have never seen a chestnut tree but we had seen roasted chestnuts on sale in the footpaths of Hong Kong.

We heard on the day a poet was born his aunt had planted a chestnut plant in a jam jar. So poet sees himself a chestnut tree.

Poet Yeats asks : O Chestnut tree , are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

As the chestnut tree dances in the wind ,he hardly knows the dancer from the dance.

This morning a word came reluctantly about a mutilation. I took it as a wrong message couched in bad words. But I have found out at the end of the poem that poems are made of mutilated messages.

In between there came a fragmentary truth and somehow there seems a strong linkage between truth and poem but a fragmentary truth will lead to the whole poem . Because poems are themselves fragments of life.

Fragments become whole poems at the end when the epigram comes. Every poem has to have an epigram since you cannot leave the loose end of anything hanging . Epigrams are a fragmentary truth. They are fragments of our lives.

* Epigrams
Wonder why I have to have a mutilated message and when I finally have it for a poem I have to round it off by a family epigram.

I call it a family epigram because mutilation is a bad word and I have somehow seal off the message by a respectable looking epigram.

But sometimes epigrams are not family type. They are rebellious and end up saying more mutilation .The poems arouse suspicions. They sound as if they have a hidden agenda of an ideology. They are so incongruous with the rest of the poem. Poor reader ,if there is one, shall bear the brunt.

* Loose ends
Now I wonder why we cannot have the loose ends hanging. Let the impoverished reader supply the sign-off. If there is a reader, that is. If he is poor enough for it.

Or he too may leave the ends hanging too. A curiosity! He may supply the bad words for the mutilation .He may leave it like that.

* White shroud
The music is painful on the ears and I sit here as mute audience. I wait for the white shroud.

I can only recall this morning’s darkness. The darkness of a Korean poet. A Korean blanket , warm on body and dark on the eyes.

A shroud will now cover my darkness. I see no more darkness. Tufts of my silver hair shall fall all around me . The music goes on in the wall uninterrupted.

* Ah No
Now on the green bench someone is already sitting and now I am on another under the green neem tree. Kids are on their swings discussing school politics. A man in green lungi is dancing his limbs to perfection.

Morning we thought of a stern Hardy whose Ah ,No comes every fifth line . Wind and rain come too quickly and too often. Like hei ho in Kurt’s slipstick. A ballad has to have a refrain and in any case happiness is episodic in character in a general drama of pain. That was what the Mayor said in his novel. Ah, no.

Now on the neighbor green bench I wonder how my absence looks like on my original bench. Now there is a woman sitting on my original bench.

Wonder what she is thinking about her neighbor and whether she has noticed an absence on her bench. She is sitting on the bench pretending there is no absence on it.

* Who is pretending?
I thought the woman on my original bench was pretending that my absence did not exist in the bench. Actually I am pretending in the neighbor bench that my absence exists on my original bench.

I am pretending that she is pretending not to acknowledge my absence on the original bench. She is merely pretending nothing.

As we understand you cannot have long duration love in our short duration life. Poet Dowson says bought red mouths are no guarantee against the shadow of a Cynara.

Think, a waitress cannot wait upon you because there are other waiters waiting. Waitresses hardly care about a poet’s flinging roses.

But you cannot wait all the time. So you better buy short term red mouths. This way you are trying to avoid a serious mismatch between short term gratifications and long term passions.

Duration match is the essence.

* Old people die in Face Book
Nowadays old people die frequently in my Face book. The living old people quickly say R.I.P. Old people are in line but they have to speak their sorrow .What better way than say RIP.

Old people die too frequently and in the beginning you say May His Soul Rest In Peace. After so many deaths ,now you just say RIP. You are not very sure about the soul thing and if it rests at all.

* Some old people do not die much
When we hear the old people dying in our Face Book , we quickly say RIP, some times in capital letters. Sometimes we say just rip, in lower case. Once in a while , we write all the words ,with no acronym.

Depending on how much the person has died. Some old people do not die much.

* Celebrity dying
It says far too many celebrities are dying now , more than in the olden days. Probably because far too many celebrities are now there ,more than in the past. They were dying earlier too but before they were celebrities .

It seems they are dying too much now. That is people die nowadays after becoming celebrities.

* Abbreviated lives
I read somewhere that Bronte sisters had led some of the most abbreviated lives in literary history .The word abbreviated carries a beautiful image. All the three sisters had died at a very early age. It was why they were so beautiful. God’s loved them.

The image conveys an achievement of a great deal of meaning in a short span of life.

That is what you may call ” packing so much meaning into such small duration”.

* Eminently die-able age
That is what the poetnovelist wrote about the death of a girl character in her novel. She was writing about small things, the god of small things who loves you and so you die at an eminently die-able age.

By the way ,when can you be eminently die-able? Seriously after you come home eminent. But she did not say pre-eminent. Anyone can die eminently,that is if sufficiently old to make your presence felt in the society.

Of course you have to be born in order to be die-able. If you collect enough number of mourners for your post- death ,you are eminently die-able.

Morning was my  night spilled over as a Kolkata flyover was recalled with men under it. The flyover that spilled into the lives of anonymous victims as it came crashing on them . It was our city’s men  who had made it .

An act of God? Does God do a shoddy job? Was it their God or ours in this city whose men went to build it?

Why do you make me  feel guilty? I am not my brother’s keeper.

My painter friend says her colors are her clutter and figures do not appear. How does one get out of colors?

Our colors are a kitsch, our temples a riot of colors. We are sentimental . We are yet to receive our figures. Rembrandt’s figures make you sentimental by their clutter of colors.

In our dreams we have achieved figures minus their clutter. My mom in my son’s dream is colorless. She is a mere figure, without clutter. What if my painter friend paints figures from her dreams, minus their sentimentality ?

Rembrandt’s woman has a hand on a hand on her heart. But the colors flow from her heart. On the darkness of her room.

In the other green bench ,we find a man generally raises his elbows and feet and heaves a deep sigh after all that is over. Morning ritual exercise can be boring. Now there is another man who is making nostril noises.

The poet has the last laugh, in the sense he would be the one laughing last, when he would no more last . After a last laugh the poet would be posthumously happy. He might have made hay while the sun shone but all was cold now. He might be waiting to collect his last laugh that was his bonus. He might have been one up, that is literally at his last croak.

One Up.

* Irony
Somebody says America is too full of irony these days . When you want to be white and one up, you are highly informed .You always have superior weapons, better technology to carry your irony through.
Here in the browns land we carry our irony on our heads like bricks our construction labord