Tuesday, January 6, 2009

THAT STRANGE DEATHLIKE INDIFFERENCE OF UNHAPPY SAVAGES

KAFFIR

Long ago
An Irish priest,
Seeking India
Set sail from Belfast,
Found a man
hunched over
On a phallic rock
Scratching an itch.

I know not
what became
Of priest or man
But when I
Sit on a rock, and
Reach over to scratch
The itch is still there.




POCO

Back from the British Library ,
I’ve just finished reading “The Spectator”
And is listening to Kathleen Kaff
On the BBC
When comes swarming in
Mosquitoes, black flowers and
A legion of English gentlemen.


HEADACHE

I wish
I had no brain
A moon
Had risen from my heart
And a smoke of letters
Filled
The empty oceans.


DIGESTION
=========

The dead have come home
To be fed
By the grateful living
Fish,meat,rice,curd and pastries
Disappearing down
numerous
Ancestral stomachs invisible
When one among the living
Flits across the room
Suddenly afraid of success.

He starts
climbing the stairs
Getting humbler in steps,
Keeping him company
Like a blown up sperm,
A friendly little ghost .
.


Once at the top
He is ready to fly
And the little ghost,
A drop of love.








SEA

====

Suffocated somewhere
Within the depths of the blues
Was Noah’s ark.
The souls aboard
Bubbled out to the surface
Looked the sun straight in the eye
And caused the greenhouse effect.


The fish died in sleep
Leaving a dream floating on the surface
Crammed into a skull,
Where a thousand butterflies
Tickling to death,
An innocent dream.


Wind was sheared from the wave
And subjected to
Solitary confinement
In a shell,
Leaving me adrift.




TELEPATHY
==========

A poem
In someone’s heart
Like a wad of cotton
Among hospital refuse
Giving my brain,
A greenish tinge.


HOLLOW MAN
================

My thoughts were like
Ripples in space
I set down to compose them
They coiled into a brush
And polished the vacuum


A part of me-so abstract
Suddenly fragmented into
Wind,water and glass.
And somebody else’s sleep
Caught up with me
With a shudder.


DNA

====

They came from the papal state
And hadn’t been to a kindergarten
And exclaimed,
“little men!we should be in Gulliver’s land”
the ‘men’ suddenly grew up
as if by mutation
and took the fathers
down the ages.

Till ,
A sense of still being there
Gripped them and they hastened up
Only to be frozen
In test tubes.


MAGNITUDE
=============

A stream
Flowing in dark and white
Through time
Like a revelation.

But ,
Never allow it
To mirror
A rainbow
For it will come alive
In various proportions
And poison the ocean
Causing tsunamis.


THE SHAM I SPEAK
====================
What are these pieces of twisted tissue
Flanking my skull
Like some internal organ pushed outside
Was it there just when I was born?
(where is that silence gone?)
When did these organs start jutting out?
Often I look in the mirror
With head turned sideways-looking:
But I don’t know them
I make faces trying to move them.


They are held in place
By a hole
That reaches somewhere into me.
I have seen people
Who could move their ears
The pair closing on the skull,
Like seedlings at night.


My grandfather strangled himself
Trying to get the wind out of his head
They are like valves
And keep everything within me
Muffled.

Still when I reach for them
And rub
Just to know
The pain is there.



SEPIA

============
My father is in the backyard
Selling off his property ,in portions
He sends for me
To where he stands behind a bush
As tall as him,
It’s shadow on his forehead.
He asks for his medicine water,
Urgent;
He drains the glass quickly
And walks back
To where they are felling a tree.


Suddenly ,
The surroundings become a picture postcard
And every second, an autobiography .


THIRTEEN

===========
When I’ am dead and buried
The mouth should come detachable
It’s walls coated with pith
The tongue a shade of green
Like a leaf.


BLISTERS ON A SUPERFICIAL SURFACE

====================================


I sitting here ,hunched over
Have a vision of scare
In red.

A cylinder of gas ,
Bursting
Over(somebody)
Leaving a tree of yellow flames.

I sitting here,find myself
Upon the cylinder;red
Fate-compressed
Getting up,
I think of history
Think
Think
And think of nothing
(closing my eyes
I forget the cylinder
It being empty)
I, standing here,braindead.




CUCKOO



I was mocking the cuckoo
When it flew away
Not getting the joke.


MEMOIR


Mathru devo bhava


But what I remember most is
The day she called me
And showed me her breasts
With scales setting in
Circular pyramids of
Translucent flakes.
With the labyrinths exposed
Inside out
Like a sea anemone.

I’ am an albino, colourless
But all her other kids are green.


poesy


The teacher
reading out from
Edgar Allan Poe,
of a woman who,
of passion died
at the age of seventeen. ,
paused
to point at the girls,
”just your age,
on the cusp of womanhood.
Aren’t they beautiful?
yes,
everyone of them”
when a painful joy
filled the classroom .
And half the class
a garden of wounded roses




MEDICAL COLLEGE



The people you see,
Twisted, wilted, stunted
And frozen in their plights
Are not the patients themselves
But the bystanders.

ECCLESIASTIC

Inside the cathedral ,
Incantations flow down
Washing ,
Redeeming the flock
Washed ashore are,
Wrecks begging
In the cold.

MUEZZIN
---------------
Cut off from the fountains of the earth
I cry out my pain to the heavens
Like vapour, my pain rises
From my heart, which is a furnace.

Surrounded by coconut tree monsters
Minarets, underfed
Sleep through unhappy childhoods.

On mornings, when it is too cold
To pray or not to pray
I rise, man with creaking bones
And find that
The sun, has a flawed personality.

My heart is Muslim


My life shrinks into me
Like pestilence
And prayer becomes death.
Even the dogs have lost faith in me.

My eyes are Christian

Over a garden of withered roses
Years implode into seconds
And every second,
An autobiography.

Men come for namaz on Diwali day
With the light of crackers
In their hearts.

My hands are Hindu




A handful of seeds flung into the courtyard
Pray for forgiveness
By sunlight.

My brain is afraid.


I stare at the sun till I go blind
And my pain spangle the evening sky
Rising, with music
A sigh here and a sigh there
To seed clouds,
Bursting with sunlight.

And I wait, for rains
To come down,
With songs of the heaven.

GUITAR

You,
Stick close to music
Like flies do
To the blood near my heart
When it flows over.


Alibi


Life is an alibi
For some
Metaphysical crime

We have all taken snuff
We are all waiting for the sneeze.


ESCAPE

Some angel
Stretch me out,
Survey the slopes, hills, valleys, founts
Measure the offsets
From heaven and hell

Today,
A pendulum seeks justice
From time