The spirit is all knowing

Running like a wild dog on

the worn out roads of countryside,

I search for the rain,

search for the visions

of you and spring.

Its dry as a desert.

Huge mirages with 

no oasis.

The spirit in us

is silent, thirsty,

waiting to go

home.

I write this,

my spirit being

nostalgic.

Some cities refuse to die

Some cities don't die.
They refuse to.
It just appears
to be dying,
in permanent decay.
This small town
I was born in,
its one of those.

The air is
heavy here,
each whiff
filled with
memories.

The decay is
forever here;
crumbling walls,
many lakes-
vestiges
of ancient Kingdoms-
names,temples,
forts
fading into
obscurity.

Unlike big cities,
children still play
cricket here.
Football is an outsider.
Dialects, people,
weather, predicaments
refuse to change.
The decay set in
long, long back.
So long,
nobody can trace
how long.

The city I was
born in
refuses to die.
It appears elegiac
when Sun sets in
evenings on
one of the many lakes.

A beautiful breeze
filled with music
reverberates
through each night,
refusing to die.

Haiku-I

Rivers at the foot
of mountains
streams always, like blood.

Never running dry,
its sad, happy,
stoic, meditative.

The valley
thick with forests,
sunbeams like spotlights.

Dust dancing,
like dazed drunken
actors of a bankrupt company.

I find strange
noticing these,
unlikely of me.

But, your presence
makes me
nuanced, subtle.

Nothing but dust

We are nothing 

But dust in the end.

All this to achieve immortality;

All the throat cutting.

Few will remember you

As light in their lives.

Those, whom you gave darkness

Will forget you, happily.

We are nothing 

But dust in the end.

Untitled

I am alone
in this crowd.
People do talk
to me
but fail
to converse
with me.

I know
its cliched.
when the world
does not
understand you.


I want to
swim
in the
great oceans
with no
islands
and
no Sun.

But,
I don't know
how to swim.

Moon in the River

I want to
drown
in silence
of  a river.



Wind makes the bamboo
bow and scratch
the river's surface.

The moon
in the river
is rippled.

River,
in its rush,
takes a few boughs,

moon
is blemished,
its face scratched.


Wind subsides.
Bamboo rises,
moon is full again.

Obviously, its difficult to understand

Grey Sky.
Remote Clouds.
Feigning rains.
Unbearable heat.

Sadness of summers
laden with dark clouds.
Growing heavy
each passing moment.
Two people refuse to talk,
sitting abreast.
Due to very trivial reasons.
Cloud growing.
Silence like raindrops
making it heavy.
Poised to come down.
Two people are the
dumbest of all,
refusing to talk.

One pigeon
doesn't know
where to shit.
Pigeon bubbled
the cloud from
its beak.

One man is bad.
Why God gave him
eyes, he can't understand.
I don't blame the pigeon.
Only, he should time the shit better.
Like on the eyes of a
man, who is bad.

Biography of a day after Bloomsday

Two sparrows
in my balcony.
A crow
far away.

Summer heat,
humans curling,wavy.
Chimneys
giving off smoke
from the earth.


Evening draws.
Ceiling fan's
shivering shadows
spilled on
walls.

Sweat-
water splashed
on
face,eyes refreshed.

Sunset
is a
long affair,
complete with
theatrics.

Nights
filled with
strange music.
Dreams
are cooler-
and I
have your
company
in dreams.

Picture Composition

A narrow winding lane of mud
was in front of me;
And the sun was overshadowed
by the welcome clouds.
A couple of children
on bicycles ran past me,
the tinkling horn of the bicycles
filling the air.
A few steps ahead,
big trees leaned onto the road
the mud lane disappearing in the trees.
Two birds fly off from
the foilage and it starts to rain.
The road becomes slippery.
I take off my slippers,
walk barefooted to my house,
beyond the winding lane,
beyond the trees  arching above it.

My Grandmother is addicted to Rubik's Cube

My grandmother, is not so old;
she is not yet frail.
its only when she speaks,
I get its hard for her
to search for words
in what is a dried up well,
no monsoon can gauge its depth.

Her hands don't yet
shake on their own accord.
She has a sense of the world,
a sense of me, an in depth
understanding
of what should be,
and what should not.

For me, she always has
one corner of the heart,
untrod by others.
She listens, and
then dismisses, often
smiling, and I doubt myself,
what I was saying,
for, she has a sense of the world.

These days, when my grandfather,
is away for a few weeks,
she is addicted to rubik's cube.
She can't get the red ones on a face,
its been five days, the two red squares
are eluding her, making her slide
the cube all day.

And she loves to call people,
the same ones again and again,
seven times a day.
She isn't one of those old
grumpy women, pretentious,
holding everything in offensive.

She has her own jazzy personality;
an astute sense of dignity-
saying people, in the face.
She is cool, liberal,
and loves calm and quietness.

But, she has lost her will to learn.
Often, she says, how she'll
while away her days
and its really sad for me.
But I don't tell it to her
because she isn't really old,
she isn't even frail yet.

Postcards

Halfway down your journey,
you relapse

from the black leather upholstery
of your black taxi

into tranquility
of that city or wait, it was a town

you read about in that poem,
in that book.

Its like the last step, on a flight
of stairs, which isn't there.

With eyes open, under scorching Sun,
you see coconut trees dripping from the rain.

If only ,there were postcards, without cities
on them, letters without senders-

just things written, answered,
then posted again to someone unknown.

What's the mountain to a river?
It can't express love, like the river

Its stern, grumpily guarding the river,
writing postcards to her, from ages.

On failed poems

Richard Strauss' Metamorphosen

on strings-

takes me far,

very far away

from the heat and dust,

from pain,

evenings, full of sadness.

It rains there,

and the soft swishing sound

as the trees move

in the wind.

Poems, most of the times

they fail miserably

but I keep on writing

one after the other.

It gives me peace,

a strange pleasure,

to write failed poems

because you know

the good ones

even before you write them.

the best ones go unwritten 

we never ever write it,

might it put a stray streak

on the painting

in our mind.

In which I am a fish

And there is water
around on all sides,
like The Great Flood.
And I am a fish,
complete with gills.
You, too are there,
its just the two of us
in the flood.
Two fishes,
circling,
round and round,
afraid they'll be lost.
In my most favorite dream,
I become a fish,
I have gills
and you retain your hair
and you ask me,
"Is there nobody?"
"No, just us and clear blue water and the Sun above."
"Is it eternal?"
"I don't know".

Khushwantnama: Lessons from the Sardar's life

there is too  much of 

pretension in this world.

i realise it often,

sitting alone

in a conversation

with lot of people.

there is greed,

changing faces of happiness-

the unattainable happiness,

a constant fear of death.

people aren't generally good 

to each other.

they cross them,

double cross them,

have relations and happiness

butchered in a barter shop

of silver happiness.

and, then there is loneliness,

after all you have got,

after everybody you want

is near,

there is loneliness,

where the though of each person you made

injustice to,

each person you could have helped,

each person you pushed down

to climb the ladder,

creeps up,

eating your braincells,

one by one,

and there is nobody to tell

of this utter loneliness.

No, I am not preaching

God or spirituality here.

Each person has a soul

for the mysterious and unknown,

it tells, it always tells

what should be

for there is no right.

The soul is often overridden

its only long after

the flame of life 

is so frail,

as to not even survive

a slight shift of the breeze,

that we hear the echoes

that we couldn't,

when there was 

din all around.

Summer evenings

Then, there was
a summer
raining of lassitude,
burning off weariness.
From a brilliant shining
light blue
to a bright burning orange
to a bloody pink,
I sit,
see the sky changing colors.
The seconds hang
heavy on my eyelids,
full of ennui.
When you lie on your back,
on such evenings,
look at the sky,
its so clear
stars shining in clusters.
The cool breeze rises
up to your face, to
your nose,
taking your ennui
far away,
leaving you
suspended,
mid air, free,
in dreams.

After the deluge

The lightness
entered inside me,
last night,
as I lay,
wrapped deep in
dreams.
I woke up,
sat on a chair,
felt collapsing
on it,
like a
bag of
possibilities,
buckling from
inside,
on its own
weight.
And then you,
you, with your
hair sprawled,
laying haphazard
across your face,
eyes quickly
blinking,
then melting
into a smile-
all glee, happiness,
infinite possibilities
inside me,
lighting me.

Summer Verse

All the rush
is futile.
Ecstasy, Passion,
Love, Jealousy-
they come
when they have to.
Each day, Sun
kisses the Earth.
Once in every
few months,
comes the rain-
a final ingredient
to what's brewing inside-
and gives the beautiful
smell of wet Earth.
You see certain things,
smell them, feel them,
make memories
of them,
some sweet, some bitter,
some horrible, disgusting.
And, once in a while,
it sparks,
the fire inside you
burns with a demonic rhythm,
reaches a crescendo,
and you realise,
all the worries,
all the evenings
wounded by it,
all the dawns seen
by you
after sleepless nights,
all of it,
all of the rush
was futile.

By the moonlight

The wet
shadows
of the trees,
swaying in the light
breeze,
forming a netted
pattern on the
road in the
pale moonlight-
I notice
them more,
when walking
alone,
for you always
liked these shadows
as if shimmering
like the surface of a
water body.
With you,
now,
I am
each day
more closer
to
what I've been
to  myself
in my dreams.

The Shaman

He walked
in unbearable heat,
towards the snow
covered mountains.
He was alone,
didn't want to meet
anybody on his way.
But, he did,
meet a shaman,
in a cave,
as he was sleeping over,
one night,
after eating unnaturally
black ripe fruits
from a haunting tree.
He asked the shaman:
Is there winter, snow, mountains,
loneliness
ahead on the way.
The shaman looked deep into
his eyes:
Go on, my son,
there is no mountain,
snow,
what awaits you
is more and more
unbearable heat;
it will turn your
golden skin black,
your hair will be fall,
you'll want to die of thirst,
but suddenly,
you'll feel utterly lonely,
satisfied,
as if,
in a hut on the
snow covered mountains.

I am a distorted man

i am a distorted man,

from inside.
i draw disfigured figures
distorted,
from outside.
i write poems,
incoherent,
trying to write something
beautiful in distortion.
I think about strange things
like the leaves that the tree
abandoned yesterday,
but why did it abandon them?
maybe, they were distorted ,
like the figures I draw,
from outside.
neglected people in rags,
in squalid corners,
made invisible by the
blinding brightness of the world
catch my attention,
I want to talk to them,
because I know
they are perfect
like everybody is,
in their own distortions.