Am I ...

Am I just a conduit
Of fear and pain
Like a stream of gurgling moss
Am I just a guitar
Strummed and stroked
Lovingly and viciously
Am I just part of the sky
With stars and clouds
Wiped clean, illuminated
Am I just a cervix
Lustful, life giving
Wet with tears
Am I just this
Or That I have become
Flotsam of feelings
Am I what you make me
Am I what I make me
Am I what I become ...

Pain (a college time poem)

There is I, there is pain, and there is my soul
Twenty two flashes of moonlight,
Twenty drops of saliva on my parched day.

Naresh, sells chai, hot day, cold night, chai chai,
Twenty cups of Naresh Tea, and ink segues into lines,

Twenty two sets of lines, on a hot parched day,
Twenty two cups of blood, on a hot parched day,
Twenty two smiles and smirks, on my hot parched day,
Quenched am I or thirstier still, more blood, more
blood,
Or just awaiting twenty two flashes of cold moonlight.

The cocktail thrill of an earthquake

(A childhood experience).
------------------------------------------------------------


Simply put, the earth shudders
As if existence has lost its rudders
Seamless howl of buried thunder
Like a steaming cup on an oven, down under.

The run; out of the home, hearth and breath
Smell of fresh air, enjoyed in forbidden stealth
Watch my house sway, like my yellow spring doll:
Cries of martyred confidence, tears in squall.

Life cannot be so short, as the warning of a doom
The lines on the hand are long, there's warmth in the room
A music of muted gongs, rings in my ears
Blooming virginity of thought, my tender years.

Danced the heart to the vile beat, so ominous and so potent,
Like the next sunirse silenced, and no tear would be left to lament
A smile carved into the conscience, etched in amber
hue, with balmy essence,
That a shiver, surmised in measured moments: sunny
days of callous innocence

Pyasa Pyala

A very old poem of mine .. rediscovered on the net.... :))



honthon pe aaya hai, pyasa yeh ek pyala
dil kahe door ja saqi, ab jaam bharega pyala

aag lagi jo fateeleh pe, naache pagal pyala
jaam saji jo apne dum pe, to dil bharega hala

aaj aayi hai shaam, to sooraj dhalega nyara
chahat suni hai maykhana ki aahat, kaun bharega pyala

uthti hai sukun ki aahat, to bhadak utha pyala,
fugan jo hui khamosh to, piyega khud saqi yeh pyala

rindon ke beech basa yeh, ek tanhaan pyala,
pyasi hai uski bhi honth, pyasa uska pyala

jaan baaki hai bas jism me, baaki bhar gaya pyala
jaane kab niklega dum, jo chalkayega yeh pyala.

I want more pillows

Yes. I want more pillows. The ones that I have are either too thin or too maleable to rest my heavy head at night and weightless heads on 'errantedly' relaxed weekend afternoons. So, I need more pillows. But I don't just go and get them. The reason being that I have a back condition.

Pillows are an odd lot. Fluffy, downy, sneeze inducing and suppliant. They are a debilitating addiction. Man's resolve, strengths and fight against sloth - all get sacrified at this soft altar. A bag full of soft, usually, cotton, feather or such like.

distances

one and one are two
a complicated mass of songs
singing through my hair
and a little whistle flows
through hers.

a symphony plays through
the wintry air and orange flowers
flow down in synchro.

miles of aromas, some shampoo
some morning breath, mingle
in still thoughts,an alchemy of colours,
disintegrating into a
monochrome of endless time.

Travlegoues of an exiled mind - Part 2

Dilema of Duality

The best thing about being in exile is that you are have enough room to be self sympathetic. You say you love your place, the old village/town, the old air, the lack of frenetic pace. Hey! Hold on. Lack of frenetic pace!! And you love that? Then why the heck are you living in Mumbai? Or for that matter in any of the fast paced metros. Or A, B, C, D or any alphanumeric graded secondary city where at least you have to run to cross the road and not be able to amble across the tar slurping a choco bar. So, you love the lack of speed. But yet every morning you say that the bus is late, you run from your house grabbing the breakfast toast/idli/dhokla/roti roll. You 'wabble' in your ability to do things fast. You are smugly esconced in your pad every night which was possible only by your acquired ability to run fast. Yet, when you are milder in thought (sobriety, sometimes, being the driver of mildness) you pine for that - place of birth.

The 'problem' is we all do that, I do that. The reason is when you have enough to quench your apetiete for - food, success, money, fame, the works - then you start for other things. Call it Heizelberg's pyramid or any other theory. Vivekanada had said 'Do not teach spirituality to the hungry, you will gain nothing and neither will he.' We start to crave for the old road back 'home' when we see that we are STILL not happy with all that we have. And never will. What the comfortable familiarity of those 'left' roads and lands can give you, nothing else can. We do not actually want the smell of the land as such, but a quick runaway in mindspace. Well, MOST of the times. Naipual lives in far away lands and writes about how much ruined and wounded our civilisation is. Jhumpa Lahiri is stuck in the first gen/second gen dilema of every gen of the USA. Kafka ran off to the snow filled mountains of a different country and yet his the smells of his country that drove him to narcissist madness never left him. Heminway wrote in Africa from within the window frame from his American past.

There is no escape.
But for us lesser mortals, self sympathy - and immensely satifying at that - is what a sense of exile can give you. Nothing else. You can't go back home, you can't leave your adopted space. In someway, and very deep down, you actually love your new place. The duality of your origin and acquired surroundings can never let you rest in peace.

Paris is the city of love. But you can't love there, like the Parisians do. Because the air that enchants your senses and stimulates your sensuality should be saturated with mogra. It should be warmer, maybe with a hint of petrol smoke or burning coal. There, necessarily, should be ogling passersby (or even completely static loafers eating peanuts). Because therein lies your need for discretion in holding hands or putting his arm around her waist or her hand in his hip pocket. That makes the sweat of palms exchange each other, that makes the grip tantalisingly taut. But but but. When you are living in Paris, will you not kiss in public? You will. Because that's the 'freedom' you have seen on TV and the movies. You will love that. Yet you WILL pine for the 'restrictive' world of burdensome society to love in.

That's the seething duality that never lets you in peace.

How does that fit into self sympathy? Well that's a fringe benefit you extract from this dilema which you will never confess about. The fact that you will love in Paris and enjoy the pestilent race of your city/town, is disturbing. If you sometime acknowledge even the existence of this duality of thought, your uprootedness is vindicated. Complete and irreversible. Which you will never be able to come to terms with.

TBC ......

untitled

this mind is such a philanderer.
tears, smiles, non-challance -
coy lasses with almost a
cavalier Parisian charm, lure him -
make him swerve, in sparse moments,
from one to the other
with a remorseless elan.

the mind thus cleaves my
sanity, over and over again.
a handsome and dandy parasite
clutching the daisy bunch
which I try to keep in bloom always.

untitled

the limit of patience lies
in the start of a scream.
once that is reached you
are impatient and hence criminal.

i am impatient and pensive
i am restive and soulful
i am impatient and criminal.

Dreams

There goes my little bee
A small wee bit of sleep
Out to search for honey and dreams
A little drop of nectar to feed
Babies and egoes.

Shining in the yellow sunlight
Stripes of clear clouds swallow
Blue skies.

Please let my love grow in
Shards of glass, shine in every mirror
Soak in honeyful catacombs
With all the babies and catacombs.

Travelogues of an exiled mind part I

I just went around the world, just a little bit. Saw things that I wanted to see all my life. This is a beginning of a process of posting thoughts that I wish to crystallize over time and mindspace.

It is the sense of exile that is sinking into me like a ikebana bouquet in a fertile soil; beautiful but sinking.

Christian art - Its simple, varied, within a few borders and repititive. It maybe because that it is just one figure that dominates the canvas: Jesus. Then he has his apostles and saints. Kings and queens jostle with Popes for space. Resuurection, the Virgin Mary and angels are spread all over the space as parboiled rice grains spread on tarpaulin - capable of quenching hunger, simplistically beautiful, numerous in form of the same thing.

I just hate Baroque art. Its claustrophobic in shine and excess of detail in cramped spaces. Grandeur is celebrated in gaudy explosions of an artist's sense of paean sining and history recording.

Loved seeing Dali's sculptures and his nauseatingly appealling obssession of the persistence of memory.

The theft of the East amazes me, and the gumption of flaunting them is even more amazing.

This brings me back to the sense of exile. Mental uprooting is worse than the exodus. It also gives a sense of freedom from all moorings. When do say that I belong? It is when you identify your existence with a world around you. I have thirteen different places to say I belong. Yet that can't be, paradoxically. So I belong nowhere. Its a rich emptiness like an aromatic vacuum - scaringly sparse and yet inescapable.

Going from existential angst I go into existential numb.

Will continue/

Undulating lines

The catharsis of insolvent memories
Seeps out in tears and pretentious smiles
In Pather Panchali
In La Pieta.

Fields of brown singed grass
Flow over the taut bosoms of virgin
Mindspaces
Contemplating coition and moksha.

Semblances of sanity visit
Whistlestopping executives on Divine duties
Balancing up the piled up stones
Pyramids of hopes and supporting lies.

Still there exists my own grasps on reality
Clutching door knobs of rooms
Housing all dreams
Sheathed underneath mommy's saari. Safe.

Love

If I could clad any emotion
It wouldn't be anger
But love.

But it prefers to be naked
Like a papier mache sculpture
In a chilly sleet.

I try hard to put a cloak on it
But it bares itself everytime
Exposing its gentle, docile bosom to
Virulent winds of wisdom.

Strnagely enough it still has survived
An oddly standing bronze satuette- Green

Amid a purple holocaust.

Lunchtime stories

Luncheon was served on round tables
With polished cutlery firmly esconced in
Starched napkins, warm and flaky.
When she started to eat her soup
She found two stories floating in the cream
Croutons of a melted past, downy.

She lifted them to her lips
Noth together on one large soup spoon
They dangled at the egde of her -
Pink lips, like petals of a morning dew stained
Rose, in full lustful bloom.

She strongly told them to keep quiet
But stories rarely know silence,
People all around her ate. Clinking and clanking
Tinkling and tankling, mimicking falling
Jewels on clean bone china bowls.

Stories, as they were, prevented her from
Savouring the presence of the soup.
An unseen tear drop met an unspent smile
Somewhere near the chin, exchanged pleasantries
And disappeared into an essence.

She forced the spoon into her mouth
Chewed the croutons and swallowed.
They tasted slightly bitter, like malt of a rare scotch.
Stories are delicious, smelling of a decadence of an
Alluvial mind on which harvets are all done.

Castle

Plumbing the droplets, escaping the faucet of my dreams
I built a little castle of pearls, just to stare at-
Not to live in.

When the moon shines or the sun sets, it gleams eloquently
And I see small birds and large butterflies
In each crystal.

Sparingly I clean it with care and a small handkerchief
Always afraid it will dry up one day, evaporate
Into a very thin air.

Untitled

Bleed Bleed Bleed, burn burn burn
Slake your thirst and run
Through green grass and marshy bogs
And through fire,
Baby I have given rise to hell.

And when gas fumes rise and rosaries fly
Along with Ice candy and jolly lollies,
Gather them for your sofa feasts -
And when you are plastered up
The really hurt Michelin man
Cry out for more blood and
Cry, for momma to soothe you.

Road to redemption

Stringing drops of blood
On a thread of smile
I cruise on the six lane highway
Of life-a charlatan, an outlaw.

She stands far away in the
Sunshine, like a revelation
Beckoning me onboard her
Magic carpet - to eternity.

Auburn skies and red eyes
Cloud my vision, maybe I have
Driven a little too fast
Down the road to redemption.

One afternoon in a dark room with an open window

The afternoon sun shone brightly
On my two feet, just peeking out of
My blanket of dreams.

Warmed thus, they tried to find some
Solid ground, just below my bed
And found a carpet.

Soft it was, downy flaked maroon
Threads – woven to perfection
Each string. Then the eyes opened.

I saw my warm feet, saw the stale
Bread on the table. Yeast, jam
And a few Creole words of fantasy.

Then the sun moved across my
Window, searching for my hands.
Found them, drenched them.

Then it moved finding my lips -
Wet. Trying to dry them, the sun
Failed, fell and left.

Sympathy

The undulating curves of fate
floated
in the sky,
abandoning even nominal references to
silent screams for sympathy.

Driftwood

The driftwood of memories clutter my living room
Like carefully collected antiques with -
Old turquiose inlay work on ivory of -
Dried tears.

They look at each other with sombre
Smiles - some smirks and some genuine:
And I often join them with a moist heart
And some sarcasm laced whiskey.