Fog: Notes in thinking
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This document contains 31 short poems or reflections by A.J. Rao. Many explore themes of nature, aging, memory, and impermanence. The poems are concise, often just a few lines or a short paragraph. Recurring images include trees, birds, the sea, and changing seasons. Overall the poems provide brief poetic meditations on life and observations of the natural world around the author.
Fog: Notes in thinking
- 2. 1 Mrs.Moore and the wasp and I Pretty little thing, said Mrs.Moore who was alone with it in her room and its brown buzz was plainsong. This one flew in my room yesterday. I feared the poor thing might sting and stop being poetry for ever. (referring to Mrs.Moore’s encounter with the wasp in E.M.Forster’s A Passage to India) Post Script After I had done a poem about the wasp, its mud house surfaced on my desk. My veneered computer table might have been mistaken for tree wood. The mud house ,tightly glued to the table’s laminate ,had to be scraped off. But the way tiny future wasps inside squiggled, there seemed no end of wasp poems.
- 3. 2 Space Here is a space looking to be filled while this world is cut off for now .A few headlights are found on a transit road ,a refugee washed ashore on beach, baby who kissed beach head down. My space will be filled by the poem what it all means for a space to unfill , a death on the future side of a pancreas, a memory dead from a laughing face . We make poems of space we lose.
- 4. 3 From my balcony The sun climbs a neighbor’s coconut , time for a long dialogue of walk .Everything is so clear and so well cut.A neighbor ‘s tiny moonlight flowers had done a night’s duty of fragrance.They are withered smiles on the road. The parijata tree had shed its flowers on the earth , their feet up in the air.The feet are so red , so fallen to the sky. Sister cuckoo is shrieking for her rain in Ashoka tree, with no idea of a sky hosting no clouds from Arabian sea.Her shrieks are a despair of farmers who hang cotton dreams on trees.
- 5. 4 Book shelf My bookshelf has turned old and gray, a steel – glass self of see-through age holding my old books to read nothing,just a smile, a memory of old smells,while silver fish swim in their spines . If I put it up for sale in used market,from sleep’s darkness I will wake up to find a black hole in room without its soft gray assurance of thinginess, smelling like mom’s belly in darkness.
- 6. 5 Smile We say selfies are serious business at 66 and a beyond , son of Shiva. You stretch your space sine die beyond your elbow and stick.You are playing to a dark audience. Be aware, average man is around just two years older than this age.Not much to smile about or under an undyed mouch,however ffunny.Average man just laughs in mirror.He finds his comic self hung there,a poet’s tattered coat upon a stick.(Yeats)
- 7. 6 Stone Walking behind was death’s shadow, a hit with no run, a knock on a head,a shadow that had no original being.A hospital monitor is now television to brain ticking in tubes to her body. She who had mothered our new year was a friend amidst exquisite stones and she is now a stone behind bone froze in time like the stone maidens that danced for ever on temple walls.
- 8. 7 Birthday We are primarily tuned to a new birthday of a child of long years,seeking its growth to a world of awareness, strings not pulled horizons not yet explored, walls not climbed, he that is inured to the loneliness of night. The child’s own melancholy had returned sweaty in fear and flight ,a panic in attack years ago,when a grand mom of stories went away casually to the outer darkness of fears and the mind went in search of a body lost. We now have our newer stories to recount.Our stories shall be without old melancholy with newer grand moms still in the making their stories with new hopes yet formulating.
- 9. 8 Vanish Mom’s guru had vanished behind a custom warehouse,her mantra left in mom’s ears above waters.Disciple has since entered soul of mango tree whose leaves are fluttering like birds in mild wind. Wind must be fluttering mantra left behind in my mother’s ears now operating below the waters.
- 10. 9 Brown car In short knickerbockers I would run away from the court wall’s darkness.The car came from dust of darkness.It would soon attain light to highway. The car brought my people from dad.They were strangers against my mom,who wore a familiar dust on her face and my knicker legs wore small dust. Dad was dream from my small sleep.But they were real folks of dad dream.They were flesh then but now in dust.Dad had turned to dust long long ago. I keep counting my folks to their dust ,the brown car that had brought them from out of highway’s nocturnal dust in dream, readying to join all this dust.
- 11. 10 Sixty in infinity We write poems when our women turn sixty, like how we write them about small -big things ,the thread that passes binding us to an infinity- little things that make their poetry and mine on the edges of the night. Sixty is a milestone in the vastness of infinity that stretches before me and them.
- 12. 11 Prose from poems We will stop to write poems when no longer close-ended.We will then switch to prose as we will turn old and gray in a wispy beard, eyes hoary somewhat of a brokenglass. Broken glass is a watery view a form that distorts the world turns it to an unending prose ,a poet’s openending estuary into the high seas of oblivion.
- 13. 12 Rath Yatra It would rain on this chariot day and gods went out yearly riding.Their wood is the nature of things the very jungle from where we had come,from our ancestors. Their chariot will roll on our lives the way towards ancient dreams.We love to die under its wheels we had lovingly made all of rain from jungle wood recently dead.We shall some day burn as wood,our ashes lighted by their smiles.
- 14. 13 Pure View The pure view envelops the light within weaving darkness around core of being.Leaf around leaf promises a deep flower nestled in contrast, a fierce independence untrammeled by a reality check of color. The color is moss green away from pink.Pink is leaf around leaf, petal after petal.The pink reinforces a forced moss-green of leaves mimicking tiny ground leaves of slippery earth surfaces , rained walls. Men are daubed in pink, women in russet.Sun turns blushing red, a bleeding shame.The trees soar leaf after leaf, to a blue sky.The sky turns pure view, cloud after cloud.Pure view is nature brazenly imitating art. ( Taking pictures from Nokia Pure View 41 MP camera phone is pure joy , an act of willing suspension of disbelief)
- 15. 14 Making faces Our alphabet is trying to fix a face beyond reality of a common seeing, a knowledge that is a state of blur. This boy in yellow knowlege robes makes faces at our cumulated folly as we are giving alphabet to baby. His pantomimic face riles our folly the way he distorts reality of baby,the way he debunks all knowledge. (At a ceremony of giving alphabet to the baby at the temple of Saraswati, the Goddess of Learning at Varagal)
- 16. 15 A stroke of luck A sweet , not enough married, woman now majorly spinsterish all by herself has now her lips sealed to any nature. What stroke of luck,we say, her life and limb are not stitched to bathroom and bed.Trust her luck to keep her hands free. We old men still have our hands free and while we are at it our poems flow and by a stroke of luck we have lips free.
- 17. 16 Those are pearls Rilke’s father had no moustache .The brows touch and in the eyes a dream.By a poet who looked for dreams in vintage photograph creatures. Like Ariel spirit who sang for you to disappear and be gone for ever singing of pearls that were eyes of dreams that made his pearls five thousand rupees for a string in the pearl bazar of four towers,far from oyster hosting oceans. We are looking for dream fathers without a moustache, their brows not touching, as knit in thoughts from a far off space, soft to touch like pearls solidified from dreams found in old photograph creatures.
- 18. 17 The rich wood of Adrienne The poet’s wood is not all that dead .Poet is recently but wood remains .But its map is gone from 2012 on. Wood is tree dead but just once dead and can’t surely die again and again.Wood shall not die ,only map by poet as she would type her world in map. A world is gone but the wood stays because it is dead and dreamwood. A dream dreamed can’t die in wood.Old maps are still out there frayed and folded, maps she once walked. ( a homage to poet Adrienne Rich on her passing)
- 19. 18 Forgottenness Speaking we do, to forget and erase,the hotel eats a food for our thought right up to the chandelier in bloom,a memory that is lost of forgot moms. Our years come back in the thought like Christmas snow, bearded men in each year’s pretending differently,the festivity in hearts some fine ice. Let us now have a clink of ice back,drink to the health of the deceased,spread flaked rice outside a hearse,as we freeze the moment in a page of forgottenness torn from memory.
- 20. 19 Mango pickles We have passed many mango seasons. We are still mango in tree and cuckoo, the latter shouting for west hills rain. We can pelt no stones at mangoes now but can eat stones off their sweet pulp.Our eaten stones sprout tender leaves from stinking garbage dumps ,homes to pigs.When they grow big they host cuckoos ,their branches rub each other in love. Our mom is now mango to the breeze.She can make no more mango pickles but hosts mango tasting cuckoo music.
- 21. 20 Heat wave The heat came all the way from hills touching the bushes with the lizards in torpor , stomachs dazed like stone.The birds slept their summertime siesta. Waters everywhere wore warm heart,with love as waves to overwhelm us and choke our bodies with tiny vapor sucked from limited bogs and ponds. The sea stopped growling at midnight and sending soft feelers to an inland to fill its loveless vacuums to its sky and bring down waves of rain from it.
- 22. 21 It is a bird No one knew hud hud would come by the sea, from Northern islands,a floating hoopoe,with a wing span that covered our black mountains. Our dolphin here turns up its nose against looming ships in high seas.It is our black mountain with nose.It could not stop the big black bird from entering our huts at midnight. (Cyclone hud hud this year caused untold destruction to the port city of Visakhapatnam and to numerous hamlets of local fishermen on the Andhra coast)
- 23. 22 Contrails We went outside ,so we kids could flap our fingers at the contrails after jets that came smoothly flowing like water under feet, surprising us behind trees.The birds took no notice nor their trees. They were not a pilot’s smoking trails and the sound seemed audibly missing like the lagged sounds of the thunder and we would wait for it not to come because there was no fun in the sound when there would be no light streaks. They were the trails of silent sky-jets that stretched like monkey god’s tails.They laid luminous paths and our eyes shone with excitement in our finger nails ready for a little white fluff to sky-drop to lodge behind them , like tiny pearls that would enter our fingers fluttering at flamingos flying here on yearly holiday from their frozen Siberian back homes.
- 24. 23 Mum is the word ( for mango) We have passed many mango seasons. We are still mango in tree and cuckoo, the latter shouting for west hills rain.We can pelt no stones at mangoes now but can eat stones off their sweet pulp.Our eaten stones sprout tender leaves from stinking garbages homes to pigs. When they grow big they host cuckoos .Their branches will rub each other in love. Our mom is now mango to the breeze. She can make no more mango pickles but hosts mango tasting cuckoo music.
- 25. 24 Girl turns woman The closed window is struck by voices that come flying from the basement,a choral celebration of womanhood.They will not break my glass panes like street-side boys cricket but coagulate on them like rain moths hitting to gain an entry to light , only to die on wings. The voices flow from a jointly vibrating drum-skin like the strident tom tom announcing a new girl-woman thing.They strike like midnight jackal wails with joint complaints against the moon.They sound you about a flower arrival in the grass waiting to be discovered.
- 26. 25 Berry them On the hills the berries would appear.Time for you kids to bleed your palms.They were yesterday’s moon-flowers their milk spilling like soft moonlight lightly sour but fragrance to memory. Beware, terror thorns bleed for real.Let it be cold blood in your rat’s teeth,not on your pudgy schoolboy fingers with the telltale homework ink stains. The sun may slip and fall off the edge, he who had filled all this purple pride.Hurry to bleed pockets but not shins.
- 27. 26 Walk I walk these streets in water maps ,rice powder designs , dogs lying in knots , girls with sleep in eyes,tooothpastes dribbling in mouths moms violently wake up to school. I walk them and my metaphors fly as obscure words , as fears in belly,connections discovered , decisions to be reversed on reaching home. Dogs in knots have now to get up walking slowly to the other corner .They go back to sleep in new knots their dreams intact,sleep resumed. Shadows walk on hills to be lifted as soon as clouds pass and eagle.The clouds then walk on our roofs and trees dancing to autumn wind.
- 28. 27 Pure view The pure view envelops the light within leaving darkness around core of being.Leaf around leaf promises a deep flower nestled in contrast, a fierce independence untrammeled by a reality check of color. The color is moss green away from pink. Pink is leaf around leaf, petal after petal.The pink reinforces a forced moss-green of leaves mimicking tiny ground leaves of slippery earth surfaces , rained walls. Men are daubed in pink, women in russet. Sun turns blushing red, a bleeding shame.The trees soar leaf after leaf, to a blue sky.The sky turns pure view, cloud after cloud.Pure view is nature brazenly imitating art. ( Taking pictures from Nokia Pure View 41 MP camera phone is pure joy , an act of willing suspension of disbelief)
- 29. 28 Fingers With dad away on long leave uncle officiates in ceremonies.With uncle away nephews wait for the big trip up and yonder.Now they perform ceremonies expertly in waiting anterooms ,keep little fingers in abeyance. Where dad lives is freezing cold .Uncle fingers are froze there too.Soon nephew fingers join them.So all fingers will jointly freeze.
- 30. 29 The silver mountain The silver mountain disclosed answers to a meditating saint in its deep recess now sky blue with priests interceding for us on behalf of a phallic stone god. Then were no blue – red painted pillars enclosing people bathing phallus gods with smooth gluey banana milk paste, just a saint and his god in banyan trees sprouting from silver recesses for wind. The saint would look for beauty in jungle and in silver mountains, on his cross-legs blinded by a gold of sun , a child’s doubts ,a flicker in the mind like a child’s smile. We search beauty in blue stone pillars climbing kitschy colors engulfing men.Their beauty flows in white gluey paste around phallus gods in silver mountain.The mountain is no more silver but blue with white clouds about it as gluey paste. (On a visit to the Siddhulagutta temple in Hyderabad)
- 31. 30 Red dust The mountains bled every time in the throats, for lucre stashed below lungis tucked at waists ,our faces ugly in dusty greed.Money would turn their blood to fine dust layering our roads. Our trucks left their tire treads in fine dust layers on the roads all the way to green sea, where ships went blue in containers for yellow men of other shore. The red dust covered the trees and roads and walking people all the way to an invisible sky.Our earth is now a red planet at the other shore of our space. (Large scale iron ore mining for export has left our mountains totally devastated in parts of South India)
- 32. 31 Mysteries Whether it is pecking at the bathroom glass all the time or only when I go there is my mystery.What is the mystery in the sparrow’s mind about the bathroom visitors , their bodies wet in the knowledge of a pecking sparrow? A sparrow tirelessly pecking at own reflection is a mystery , set against futility of its effort.How the bird can be stupid enough to peck against own reflection, ignoring past failures is a mystery that overwhelms bathing bodies. I cannot look in its eyes ,set too high and tiny, only sense a light squirm in its body as I enter.Overwhelmed by no mystery it squirms lightly which is the same each time I enter its space. The quest for mysteries is mine, not sparrow’s.
- 33. 32 Sixty and infinity After we write poems about a stool and a crow, love and its remorse, we go on to Lord god with prayer, a blue god with butter in mouth the very God who lifted mountain for cows against heaven’s anger, who spread camphor and love to an antline of people in the hills. Why not write poems when women turn sixty, like how we write them about small -big things ,the thread that passes binding us to infinity, little things that make their poetry and mine on the edges of a night. Sixty is milestone in the breathlessness of an infinity that stretches before us.
- 34. 33 Simulacrum In a rhythm, please speak up now with us as rain- moths are pulling out their music from puffed up cheeks and painted hearts .The cuckoo sings a rain song from a gnarl. Its rhythm will go on till morning and sun. Crack a burst sound from the almond shell of morning hid in kernel on night’s branches the tip of a tongue testifying its early rising.The adrenaline had wildly gone up the night. Girls, hold your skirts and swirl like earth-ball to kick the blue of the airy balloon to a yellow sun .The sun has tied his horses to swirl around it .It will now be your fate to move in simulacrum. “The sun has tied Earth and other planets through attraction and moves them around itself as if a trainer moves newly trained horses around itself holding their reins.” Rigveda
- 35. 34 Buddha in our lake Buddha has stood in the middle of our path away from our cleverness and a swirling boat a felicity of word, a beauty of image, a thing.In the green waters he had waited for us men to lift concrete goodness and politician’s fame of an actor petrified in the histrionics of time. Buddha stands in his stone pleats in the lake. His dazzling smile of a middle path beckons us from our own concrete holes, to a golden dusk that glorifies the lake, with all its dirty contents flowing from our shames in our concrete holes. (we have a magnificent monolithic Buddha standing in the center of our city’s lake,Hussainsagar)
- 36. 35 Chair At our wedding, chair was a basket for carrying by uncles and brothers.We sat prim on feet drawn up shyly.We were so queen in indulgences. Now we wear chair on our bottom for carry by uniformed airline staff so we could fly in the flying womb just as we did in mom’s first waters.We have enjoyed this chair always but stupid bum had always vertigo.
- 37. 36 Branches She has branched off our big branch our own child, drinking the same sap and her leaves shall fall as if our own on an autumn earth, from the branch. My own blood relatives keep flowing along with hers streaming in my flow.This baby is her branch but mine too in the branch, branching off my own. She is the same branch, as the man in the shirt-sleeves staring in space unremittingly from my whitest wall from among dozen heads stopping to say nothing, branching their own.
- 38. 37 Watchman Watchman is ticking life. Watchman is drunk bird. His chicks eat his breath.A watchman’s bird will go like all birds from nests in breath or from breath.He is now room with bird. Without , he will be space like bird without the nest. Everyone’s room is mine.When my own bird goes he and I are same space.
- 39. 38 Matchboxes Women stand to fill their emptiness with fire-sticks , not sit down till evening so they quickly run away in case of fire.Matchboxes are empty like old houses in Norway of chopped wood’s smelling letters of note written about by poets on papers of pulp ,like Norway houses. Match boxes are like tiny empty houses such that you roam about freely in them to experience wind between their walls through absence of furniture, for minds to wander away from them to the hills to know where the wind has come from or where the fire resides at stick-heads women run away from while standing. ( on a visit to the matchbox factories of Sivakasi)
- 40. 39 Taking a tail home Bringing home was what I had thought instantly of a just opened sky of birds froze in v formations ,on the east side buildings, where girl is walking jauntily. Sun water I shall mix with trees and girl and bird in the swamp pecking at plastic bag flying in water hyacinth stuck to it helplessly from actually flying away to other hyacinth-ed waters of lazing ducks. I thought of the stray dog wagging tail on the edge of the lake at the rising sun but could not possibly take his tail home.Pockets were too full with other things.
- 41. 40 Our Siberian friends We went outside ,so we kids could flap our fingers at the contrails after jets that came smoothly flowing like water under feet, surprising us behind trees.The birds took no notice nor their trees. They were not a pilot’s smoking trails and the sound seemed audibly missing like the lagged sounds of the thunder and we would wait for it not to come because there was no fun in the sound when there would be no light streaks.They were the trails of silent sky-jets that stretched like monkey god’s tails.They laid luminous paths and our eyes shone with excitement. Our finger nails were getting ready for a little white fluff to sky-drop to lodge behind them , tiny pearls that would enter our fingers fluttering at flamingos flying in on yearly holiday from their frozen Siberian back homes.We were disappointed that our Siberian friends had not yet arrived.
- 42. 41 Fog in the throat At times there is death’s browning,an experience of the fog in throat ,a chemical stirred by a stray dog smelling our death in casual walk. The dog is sniffing his own death barking head off on our intrusion at a death walking in on two legs, trying to fight a fog in his throat. (Reference is to Robert Browning’s poem Prospice)
- 43. 42 Radio child As everyone knows ,everyone has inside cliches and closely working with them, in beauty routine.Every child knows to keep company with the old.Those are little things one has kept in old drawers. Every tea cup is inside cliche, qualifies for poem.Especially if there is no tea,drunk before poem.Green leaves are no dregs forming strange birds.Dregs are Darjeeling tea residues left after train.Train is what reaches the edge into a sky of tea. Dregs are left if a retard climbs lover’s deathbed ,a lover who was a sweet tossing shoes in the air,in a romance like last night’s withered jasmines left as dregs on beauty hair’s smelling on pillow.Sweets are cliches in teeth,smell clarified butter.But shoes in air are strange birds since classified and found in the fossil society’s rare bird archives. (Referring to a Bollywood film titled Barfi)
- 44. 43 Panic As we had approached it we fell headlong into its oncoming, fitful sweaty barrenness a blankness staring from our eyes, crazily tongue-tied like the evil man in a dark cloak with hell- hair on the ears, covering sound.There was no option about music that came. These were words in Charukesi of our God who stretched end to end in the deepest sky.We stood breathless as his feet measured all the three worlds , under a palm umbrella one foot on our head, his wooden slippers making no clicking difference to sweaty silence. Our panic held a bunch of iron keys in fists.Our breath went out of our body as the keys opened inward sadness, a body held captive as he measured infinity starting from our head.
- 45. 44 Bird chick The bird could be aloft and fluttering its wing but for design defect forming and falls and putters under cupboard crying from its inner anguish to God,inner anguish about others ineptitude, for which it putters about in half wing. No point in fears about possible cats,possible smiling cats of the dark night.We are lucky locked in dreaming sleep.God is locked in his sleep in milk ocean.Night cat is, at all , tail-eating renewal ,an ouroboros of God-nature’s re-visit, a deja vu thing as we sleep our night.
- 46. 45 Ceremony We all went into a tedious little ceremony of lost innocence, in our rainbows of wisdom.A man issued his words that touched souls , softly spoke in the smells of turmeric and a faint fragrance of innocence and flame.His words flowed from his soft liquid eyes as though he was a child entering knowledge wild-eyed and with tiny bits of the blue sky,the earth having lost its contours in space water and fire emerging in a litany of words. It was a child who sat in a lap, with fingers in a bed of rice grains that filled stomachs as though it was a food that fueled wisdom.He wrote his first letters as in a secret code to the treasure-trove of burning treasures searing to the eye, hot on the painted brow,a certain secret gold thread on a little chest that qualified him for the arduous journey.He then gurgled first letters, word and song. (The initiation ceremony of a child’s first learning in which the Goddess of learning bestows her blessings on the child before his long and arduous journey in education)
- 47. 46 Flecks The roof seemed to sit lightly on its light with the sun above and a looming rain.The roof thatch took light in soft mouth spitting a few flecks of light to the floor. The creeper spread itself on the scaffold in backyard, turning a green gentle sky as moon flowers waited to turn pumpkins.Flecks of moon danced to a light breeze. The wedding tent fought against the hot sun as a clarinet blew out its puffs of mouth.Flecks of a hot sun tickled the groom’s back causing bridal flurry ,while her own dress sported flecks stitched on a silken texture.
- 48. 47 Wild tune If it is wild tune, it is a poem ,says Frost,rather frostily of waves of snowed hills.Frosty breath goes of mountains falling.Tea breath that was cloud is here water. Water is earth and mud about stone god .Stone god is helpless about violent wife.Violent wife is piece of mother deranged because of progress dams in her bosom. Her tune goes wild and somewhat eerie in the nights about dead people waiting for their fires to be lit after copters come.Copters bring the wood for the wild tune.Stone god dad is waiting for his death ash. (A busy pilgrimage until the flashfloods, Kedarnath today has turned into a virtual ghost town …..There’s an eerie silence at Phata village, broken each time a chopper lands or takes off. Three pundits are performing the last rites near the river Mandakini : Times of India report
- 49. 48 Jewel thiefs We are concerned with your story telling about events, other goings on in place. They do not exist in a plane of their own. The figures are not two-dimensional ,hung by a thread ,triangularly to the wall. Their eyes protrude from sockets and lips,the eyes , one to the north and the other screwed to the western pillar, in a squint as if dislodging a sun ray from the skylight.In short they lack flesh and some bones and they loom large like noon shadows,dark and menacing, in the high afternoon. They can scare the shit out of your eyeballs when you are not careful of their coming.They zoom past, on their soundless bikes and rip your alabaster necks from behind.Your gold will stop glittering for their highs and you will remember your grandmother.
- 50. 49 River legends That time we saw the river rising quickly, past our sleeps and drowning our everything including sleeping cots and then we heard cries of people climbing to roofs for a bit of a sky. Legend had it of a young old man squatting hunched up in the attic up above the swirling waters as if he was reading from history books narrating a story down the ages.He was history mad,water averse.Actually he loved pillow too much being bald banker off the rockers. We were not bald but a training banker and too young to be off the rockers. But what lovely rain to drown under ,what a pale sky to be afraid about.The sky was father we feared most.He would spank ears with his rain to instill nature fear in bank minds. Legend had it of mom now in a sky, my source river that rose in flowing dam to turn a legend as bodies flowed.The legend turned ashes in a river.
- 51. 50 Smorgasboard Picture your day , a lifetime story when written up ,fully and finally .It is an old man’s story, not to be a mix of colors, weirdly textured,a palette of words, a brushstroke of uninitiated, an antic landlord. Woman is doe-eyed, picture-like looking for her man perfect type a perfect type story, as eating out from your hand, a Saturday persona of long spun stories of grandma. Grandmas are dead from paintings of exhaustion of laughter in prime.Stories flow under naughty moons.Grandmas were laughing at moon stuck in the night’s coconut palms. Days go on like lives likely to stop,their eyes still retaining bits of sky.Dream planes crash on sex snakes,their lips drooling on soft pillows, fear ruling the juices under shirts while world spins out the window.
- 52. 51 Forgetting Forgetting is a lot of things about my mom including me and I 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 a mom from protein’s free flowing.
- 53. 52 The world And the world appears in the moment and disappears as a handful of earth, in its lips-smacking flavours and slurps, some sounds later,a truly trite silence.Silence matters to nobody or to God. We keep yapping about golden silence. Silver version is average Adam’s apple going up and down ,in indecent haste, a woman-induced effort in a garden of mischievous serpents. Actually world never happened except in a night’s sleep, as somebody’s dream in the cloth-cradle ,as a bundle of sleep,as electric fan whirred above ,to breeze the bawling bundle to sleep off dreams.
- 54. 53 Hail While I was still holding a stomach ,the hail banged right on the plastic roof its luminous pearls lost to posterity.Grandsons have them on tongues. Stories shall be told on deathbed.Our extended tongues tasted none of the icicles except as they are projected to future grandsons in time’s vague womb. Do not hold a stomach for thunder .That is when a hail falls on a plastic.Stories do not make perfect storm.Hold a tongue up to sky to catch it.
- 55. 54 Stroke We do not like strokes in television watching, staring at a clock fixation as if smiling for ever, a frozen smile, not moving shadow on face ,flitting as if a white cloud passing on a hill and soft sunset hue added for gold.Poets like to add gold everywhere. Our stroke of luck does not happen all the time ,in the television or out.This sort of a smile is just some ice,a frozen Arctic waste on mom’s face,fixed for ever and there is no gold,a worn sunset with no talk of dawn.
- 56. 55 Distances of time With a distance of time ,what had looked white would turn vague and gray by growing years, our wading in knee-deep muddy rain waters in the streets by white walls missing in places,the men who tucked white lungis in the waists,the coins that felt round to fingers in pockets,the rivers dancing round heads of mountains. The walls stretched interminably to a white sky hiding bush and snakes in them gently rising,feet shuffling to rustling sounds of dry leaves.The squirrels had built bridges for man-gods and earned three dark stripes on their backs.Strange birds sang in the sky deaths of lives.With more distance of time our eyes slowly fell and the body hurried past closing our spaces.The distances are now small, the skyline close.
- 57. 56 The pugilist nose At the start of the walk the fly danced around a pugilist nose in clear geography of a gray sky with no rain, only a promise. It seems raining in the other sky. Will the clouds turn rain like flies? In the sky is a swarm of doubts that will soon turn flies, flies buzzing around a walking nose. But now the sky is the other sky.And as I reach the end of the walk the nose is fighting rain like flies.
- 58. 57 Homesick Soon he would become homesick ,sick of a home away from a home where coconuts danced all night.He would go to bed and not get up.To a big bank of numbers and notes. Small numbers crawl up to big ones where they swallow the small ones,in a big sky of a billion numbers,where light is distance , not sound. You keep a day book of numbers but your red ledger is quickly filled,their figures enter steel cupboards where they would live for the night.You forget to take them out next day. (upon the passing of a senior colleague in my bank)
- 59. 58 Ugh things The butterfly was a crawling ugh thing on the road against my woodland shoes of yesterday’s walking toward old man who dragged a limp foot for exercise. The black itchy creature of ugly disgust is one’s own fear of death, a decrepit body trying to create its marvelous moments marking beauty of tiny things, rainbows held aloft on grease bubbles on wet days. There is not much we can do about it,only project butterflies on ugh things.
- 60. 59 Truth Truth is what touches a fringe,a fact that dated back to grandmothers eating their rice,one after the other, in Sanskrit. Contradiction is a dead tongue spoke to bring down bodiless, grandmother and grandmother, the rice eaters in their crows. But that is what all our truth is.Truth is rice eating yearly crows that understand only Sanskrit,that is the tongue of the dead. We build bridges with the dead the way a bodiless truth works .Truth is learning our colleagues no more eat rice off their plates.
- 61. 60 Rain For seven days and seven nights our rain would go on our thatch that held our young crows captive.Their black was almost washed to gray and the thatch looked a rice field sprouting last year’s left over rice. We have made up the rain stories.Our farmers were taken off turbans and the light was not sunny yellow,only eerie ultra violet rays touching the bellies that had no raging fires. Like the girls we have made it all up.
- 62. 61 Next We are in a hurry to know the next, curious to know.Our now asks who is next.This woman is a light-bulb and her light is in a pocket and shows through blouse. Brother is a wind in trees gently passing old woods.He had a next after years of his brother’s early next.(His bulb had quite a light now softly passing trees.) We are in a hurry to know the next, curious to know.The woman is still her bulb with no next sign to light.She will be happy to know the next, curious to know.
- 63. 62 Mirrors and sparrows The way the mirrors stood we felt like recent sparrows pecking at their bird selves to an infinity that goes on in such mirrors of history .They had built the mirrors to selves off men’s wealth and work, but soon wealth was over and in the zenana the women stayed huddled in incompleteness of space. The palace is like the queen’s,beyond the green of Atlantic.A king guest offers its manna and palace stands in splendor,with banquet for a hundred. Now, a new hotel preened its feathers to men’s wealth.The nobles in long mustaches stared down from roof wood like they were old sparrows looking at their own infinity. (On a visit to the Falaknuma palace in Hyderabad)
- 64. 63 Frittering away the moon Four’ O clock, after mandatory piss ,not groping back to my bed I pass through a good old poet’s shadow bumping into it on night’s balcony where I go to check on clean moon. The moon has just been siphoned off. The sky persists with its remnants,hardly anyone’s idea of clean moon with the trees below in numb homage,some crumbs for a rag-picking poet. There was nothing laughable in this as a shadow’s sad steps were heard. A moon can be frittered away in sleep.Happens if we do not get up for piss.
- 65. 64 Stroke When the stroke came she was watching television serial flowing in climactic music in bass,a snarling of violins at the precise moment as bad woman entered.What a stroke of luck she passed, we said of grandma in television. Grandma outside television smiled at man’s heroics, girl’s sacrifices but her satisfied smile would stay pasted on her face, not get up to go,much after hero has left his stage and living room has fallen silent with echoes of his drama sounds.
- 66. 65 The box One enters the box with spiked gate to make clockwise oval circles of familiar world views, at times, with strange incursions of thoughts asking why a certain black cat beside the rock and the sprinkler exists in today’s accomplished view. It is not the cat alone by the rock. Try changing it to anticlockwise to see strangely preoccupied faces that seemed to be thinking much in burping stomachs and acid.Squeals of old laughter greet morning views of mist and rabbits- disappeared rabbits that had merely jumped out of the box and gone. There was no grass left in the box. We are making circular motions dutifully in our own square boxes. We look up to see standing people in balconies of red-and-blue houses bursting with morning men and lungis. They should be back in their box soon.
- 67. 66 Stroke In this mist are vague contours of people and shrouds of them walking towards me and away like wind that wanders in mist or a rain that comes in walking on the road ,as gusts of a wind, as people and daughters about, people and mine from a womb and white robed figures in long tails hanging from their necks. My mind recognizes sovereignty of the foot, functioning on own.The fly does not walk its texture nor does the song set it tapping ,a ghost foot declaring rebellion,preferring to join them in a mist, as if parts are wholes themselves.
- 68. 67 The village doctor The man with a red dot looks down his eyes marginally to below the skin, the subterfuge where stomach humors show. The hakim is monkey man of a myth’s fame, making men swallow brown pellets for quick cures for stomach’s skin and mind maladies that make women shake like full-blown trees caught in a windstorm, their hair disheveled. A middleman helps us wade crowds of men.Men wait outside to enter unreal iron cages,anterooms for an entry to the medicine man.The man would then bend his ears sideways to muttered tales about stomachs and devils and scrawl prescriptions in quick round letters that wriggled like earthworms in a new furrow.The middleman now takes us to growing rice,proud to show his rice dominions till sky-high. We see more men coming for women’s ghosts .
- 69. 68 The boy monks of Gangtok In these hills they spoke mostly of frank-innocence, myrrh ,camphor, a white smoke curling to heavens, a hollow echo in layers of hills like rumble of the first thunder.Boys are not boys,not even men ,just tiny gods scampering on hills in search of Big God,in sacrifice.A red apparel is their sun god intensely burning in standing trees. Innocence is at stake, in cricket and ludo,a game of dice and chance, a flicker of smile, a wave of mirth surging in the hills like a stream,freshness traded for Big Knowledge.
- 70. 69 Common poem Between us two and common poem is tree with potential red flowers.Take care ,you perpetual woman.You and I shall listen to this tree, its bark ravaged by time like face letting the big petal drops fall and tears from leaves,drop by drop. Let me pour its red flowers in your palm.Take care , you perpetual woman .Also you take care of boat in Ganga and its gentle ripples on our shore. (I watched this beautiful Bengali movie Bhalo Theko yesterday)
- 71. 70 Uncle is idea Uncle is now idea, on green carpet and a house beside two coconuts,as we see a fire rage in a kitchen and pigtails quiver with fire chants.Last time, a year ago, he was thing on way to be mere idea in my mind.The thing is now an abstract thing,an argument away from a sarcasm. Uncle is an idea together with dad and a mom of the far off mango tree.The ideas vanish when I turn idea,an argument with neat conclusion.
- 72. 71 Uncle It was time to cease to be an uncle, a lecturing dad , a senti brother, to he who stared from a photo, in grayscale rolled shirtsleeves .Uncle would stare at the bottom of the starry sky. Later, nephew would join him. While uncle was at it ,in his life he had bitten his sarcastic lips about the world and its maker and you nephew was peculiar. Nephew now asks uncle to wait till he reaches a house bottom so they will jointly stare a sky making fine sarcasm together.
- 73. 72 Protein 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 me forgetting a body from her. Forgetting is in mind’s body ,its protein particles a river dried up in the source hills. Forgetting is erasing mom from a protein free flowing.
- 74. 73 Scenery We continue to pit two tiny hillocks against the infinity of a sky bending dangerously on the brown bushes with loud explosions in their rear and a gray smoke in the elevation.We have a man and a woman near,two faceless figures for a scenery.They have no faces but cheekbones. A rock gets angry with a loud bang with machines making it look small in the bigness of the blue scenery.Woman bathes in emptiness of rock.Rock falls into emptiness of morning as smaller holes bath in bigger holes.Brown bushes bath in their shadows. Holes have shadows in themselves.Shadows have no holes in a scenery.There are tiny eruptions in shadows like lizards in holes quickly catching tiny eruptions to eat their emptiness. We are in a hurry to pit two tiny hills against the infinity of a breathless sky before it eats them into its emptiness.
- 75. 74 Layers There is the rattle of the machine and a vigorous thump on its flanks, another noisy night thump to quiet the dusty cooling fan inside C.P.U. letters separated by layers of dust.They fly away, keep them together with full stops between the letters. The water bottle is down with a neck hole semi-circular for sipping like a semicircular moon in balcony with a night wind quietly humming.The night watchman’s whistle bores a semi-circular hole in the midnight. Now is pressure on top of a prostate falling for a leak, like expected cloud in monsoon any time coming but not, being satirical about a swollen strawberry lightly woken from sleep for poetry. A he he is about old man’s love life come to ceasura. A vigorous thump administered yields no love results punctuation gone through a window. Poetry is still left in a night’s layers when peeled like tearful onion rings nothing at the core,only an absence,a silence between the layers of dust.
- 76. 75 Wild tune This is a wild tune ,folks, from snow hills of woman grass heads,as flute sings ruin on precipices over watching endless tea. Wild tune is now a poem of personal ruin.If it is wild tune, it is a poem ,says Frost, rather frostily of waves of snowed hills. Frosty breath goes of mountains falling.Tea breath that was cloud is here water. Water is earth and mud about stone god. Stone god is helpless about violent wife.Violent wife is piece of mother deranged because of progress dams in her bosom.Her tune goes wild and somewhat eerie in the nights about dead people waiting for their fires to be lit after copters come.Copters bring the wood for the wild tune.Stone god dad is waiting for his death ash. (A busy pilgrimage until the flashfloods, Kedarnath today has turned into a virtual ghost town …..There’s an eerie silence at Phata village, broken each time a chopper lands or takes off. Three pundits are performing the last rites near the river Mandakini : Times of India report)
- 77. 76 Truth in a Mumbai local train Images do not mean much ,only idle fancy, a passing show sliding away by a train,with hanging people as big busy blurs.The tracks people mean only squatters off houses of tarpaulin sitting with crows. These dark birds squat on the tracks to hit a train’s bottom, wanting to get at truth,a morning’s getting a sky’s orange worth. Images do not get at truth ,only at blurs.They move slowly like squeaking train fans as if to get at truth, unhindered by crowd. But nobody ever got at truth in a local train.
- 78. 77 Stars by his last count She has now come to keep the night in a state of rumble, a peace unkept ,a remember of a day that stretched like days in no hurry of denouement ,when nothing would finally happen. Another lady went away of malignancy leaving a high and hiccuping husband with a dancing throat in the kitchen in male egotism and paternal rights.The lady has since embraced her fire leaving her man entirely unembraced. She ,whose eyes have long gone wild in her son’s sleep, is looking for stars in the night at their last count by him.She has forgot the count in the melee, of she who went away to embrace fire leaving husband highly unembraced.
- 79. 78 The fall This fat lady is of the fall in the dark Kolkata night of an uncle no more in air.The fall could have been branch -arresting, if only there were a tree between balcony and earth ma. It is the telephone wires that did the arresting bit .The fall went on,unfailing ,the way to mother earth on the pavement where a mother earth smelled a garbage of old lettuces for dogs and boys to scrounge at break of smoked dawn. The falling lady goes on with her daily business, children’s marriages, the duties of a grandma she owes to earth ma.About bones life flowed,blood flowed to gravity but fall goes on in body,the stuff of her dreams and in my own dreams, an image of endless fall.
- 80. 79 Water With two coconuts and wind to wave in ,there is angry God at the other shore.Between us and him there is a wading,as if of oblivion, of our never returning. We are wading chest -high in waters and our heads below our drowning act.These waters are our common wading,a thread through our living and dying. This is the very aqua inside the coconuts,waving in high wind, the very waters,we had come from and we had waded,when we had begun,our eyes still shut,to a blinding sun waiting at cave’s end. (on a visit to Narsing Jeera temple in Bidar)
- 81. 80 White lies White lies is what the man in the story tells his wife about their non-existent sons in America,The story of four sons . Three of them are in America earning their filthy dollars while the fourth one has stayed back at home to look after the aged parents. The sons in white America send white dollars to the parents to enable their journey.What if one of them has a white wife who is good enough to get him to buy a car for them and it is still a white lie. How nice,who knows what lies ahead! White America, white wife,white lies. The man spins his yarns in the train’s clackety,clackety to a wife who knows in the depths of her heart it is these lies, these white lies that make up their lives. To the lone fellow-passenger who has own white lies to speak.Everyone has his own white lies. His narratives fill the vast silences of the night as the train slices through them.Their white fluorescence illumines the darkness in his soul. It is these white lies that dispel black existential questions for a moment.Like the soft beam of the train’s headlight that brings several dark bushes into transitory existence and then leaves them to the oblivion of the night.
- 82. 81 ( A Telugu short story entitled “Yatra Special” by Dr.Somaraju Susheela)
- 83. 82 Paper boats We recall a rather silly paper boat we made folded with a pyramid rising right from the middle of it. Where would the villagers stand and the boatman with his oars? In the early days of boat making boats had these clumsy pyramids,albeit with no pharaohs beneath.We had just learnt boat making for our temporary rain puddles.There was no cold night’s desert with a Sirius ruling from above. Our grandchildren find it rather difficult to reconcile desert pyramids with monsoon street puddles ,leaving little space for boatmen with oars and standing villagers. With quarter page of newspaper what could anybody have done if rain had come to our streets with no prior intimation to us amid no flood alerts on radio?
- 84. 83 Potato peeling We had been peeling our days, me and mom, she hers, I mine.Her potatoes were chips for a roof drying ,like her mangoes that went drying for a year’s dinner.Mine were a flicker, a light now here, now gone. I had peeled my days off the sun.Bits of a sun went drying for my roof pickles. When all the others were away at the Mass , the child and mom peeled their respective potatoes. Plop fell their feelings in the bucket. The others were wiping their tears.Her head bent towards him the potatao peeling way. My mom’s potatoes are no more. I am still peeling my sun off its dusk. (Referrring to the poem “When all the others were away at the Mass” by Seamus Heaney)
- 85. 84 Mirrors The way the mirrors stood we felt like recent sparrows pecking at their bird selves,to an infinity that goes on in such mirrors of history .They had built the mirrors to selves off men’s wealth and work, but soon wealth was over and in the zenana women stayed huddled in incompleteness of space. The palace is like the queen’s, beyond the green of Atlantic.A king guest offers its manna And palace stands in splendor,with banquet for a hundred.Now, a new hotel preened its feathers to men’s wealth.The nobles in long mustaches stared down from roof wood like they were old sparrows looking at their own infinity. (On a visit to the Falaknuma palace in Hyderabad)
- 86. 85 The old woman She was the old woman of our age as we hurtled towards our old age,her crinkle too young for our age.Her body shook an entire laughter,acting life like it was no real thing. An old woman of our essential age,her body wrinkled as if it laughed its guts out, emptying inner bags of its several childhood laughters,spilling on the floor, rolling over as inside-splitting ,old hag bodies that had gone and to go hereafter. (At the ripe age of 102 , the veteran actress Zohra Sehgal passed this year)
- 87. 86 White A telephone call talked of an an old man with a white topee .His small-time father ,who worked in a cement factory.The cement is no longer.The white topee is no longer. Memories linger of a city on the sea where the waves beat black granite rocks.The white surf of an ocean which stretches to distant Aden.There the ancestors had landed in a dhow to make tradesmen’s money. Tall white stone buildings which stood against the blue sea.At night they wore the transparent veil of pale moonlight .On moonlit nights perfumed society people stood against the ocean .Among the rocks where the waves from the distant Gulf beat their city. Dark people sold smuggled tape recorders with whirring tape-spools .The whitewashed buildings had white peace in their upper bellies .But in their under-bellies they had fishermen’s knives and red revenge . A frail old man from the city made white salt at the sea-shore and spun white cotton on hand-wheels and made others wear white.
- 88. 87 Cold The distinguished pink of your nose,a mild river that has sprung in throat strikes head, stuffs it wth emptiness,like hollow sound of wind in wheat.The hum is explained by blood rivers.Just check if platelets are a profusion.Check if you are holding adieu session in the head, where it is all happening. Adieus need not be noisy all the time but just a hum of the cataract nearby or pigeon’s gutar-gu in a window-sill, a soft sound stretching time endlessly. Rivers flood kerchiefs like in monsoon,in tidy streamlets through the nose bridge. We hope the heart hides no murmurs in this holesome hum drowning world.
- 89. 88 Another mountain is dead A little golden girl walked towards me from the hills with the morning sun in her hair . At the road’s corner I see a shirtless man on the scooter , with the sacred thread that hovered on his hairless chest.He is our temple man , our friendly intermediary between us and God.His words were a mere drone in the temple loud speaker in the morning but surely the power of his words before God exceeded the earth’s borders.He has a belly round as God’s earth, with cosmic incantations in them for calling down thirty million gods from the sky.It was his words and flame and water that connected us to our monkey god. Later in the day a lonely worker chipped away at the neighbor’s roof .He was repairing a leaking roof that stood between the sky and my neighbor when the sky poured torrents of rain on his head.The sounds of his relentless hammer-beats echoed in the hollow afternoon air.The sounds were interspersed by a yellow bird’s tireless notes.The notes came from our dead standing tree which was still hosting beautiful yellow birds ,while awaiting its final execution by the municipal Axe. In the afternoon ,one heard a loud explosion in the distance which rattled our windows and set off bunches of cawing crows from the sleeping trees. Another mountain is dead in our neighborhood.
- 90. 89 His moustache is jasmine There is this old jasmine seller whose mustache has grown white as jasmines .In the basket on his head a string of fragrant jasmines lay curled like a cobra waiting to be charmed.He sells arm’s lengths of strung jasmines,one length going for ten rupees.His white shirt and white turban have gone brown with the dust of the streets like yesterday’s wilted jasmines. I pretend everything is fine and there is no ten year time frame for my existence .The lady there says ,when she first came into the new house there were a lot many things to do because at fifty years of age there was no time frame fixed for her. Now at sixty the time frame is clearly visible and so, there are not many things to do,says she. Birthdays are closing spaces between chunks of time,a semi-colon in our life’s sentence.The old man who sells jasmines seems to be pretending that there is no time frame for his existence.Can I not pretend the time frame does not exist?
- 91. 90 Faery tale It looks like you are through with the stock of fairy tales told in the evening hour. As the night’s stars appear one by one to occupy their positions in the hall,a soft breeze will stir in jasmine bush from evening’s wetness of fresh leaves.As to the prince finally saving the dame , everyone shall be duly happy at hall’s end. The hall is empty with the stars coming one by one, as your breeze gently stirs in the flower bush and the garden lizard looks at your waiting for the next move.The lizard is your own word in the offing. Your reasons are a grand abeyance show as the lizard is waiting for the next move .And a prince moves ahead on horseback toward everyone’s happiness of wedding.
- 92. 91 Rain in Bhopal Evening rain glistens on the road as bread is bought and bananas are turned over for ripeness and less ripeness.The rain is dancing on the car roof .From the car the camera tries to catch the wet sun on the leaves of the corner tree .Soon the wipers catch fever and quickly we make our way in a sea of umbrellas.
- 93. 92 Weddings in summer In the street there is an improvised tent with people sitting on hot colored plastic chairs. The tent burst with clarinet music played by a wedding band .Weddings are just some clarinet music and some plastic chairs with people in them. The bridegroom ,in a thick suit,comes out briefly wearing a red vermilion on his forehead and a blotch of sweat under his arm. Marriage is sweat,blood and tears. Marriages are hot ,sweaty and blood-red. Marriages are tents full of clarinet music. Marriages are incomprehensible Sanskrit chants. Marriages are silk sarees rustling as though the spring wind is already here.
- 94. 93 Seeing is for the asking Seeing brims over our things ,storms our teacups, fills anchorages,balconies for a night, sunlit spaces in tall trees ,corners where a mom meets a shadow,a lizard on the wall. Seeing is yours in my words. Seeing is water not spilling from a child’s hands clasping the glass with both his hands moving 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. Seeing is yours for my words. Old woman is emitting light ,a camera’s laughing at death.Seeing is her skin’s wrinkled cloud drained of a future rain. Seeing is a word on this keyboard.
- 95. 94 Place Place is its loose dust and red powder, all over the road with iron ,for shipping to far lands in deadweight for money.Place is blood money, revenge on hills. Place weighs down ships by its redness and looseness of soil, a rubble of body granulated and pouring in bag chinks. A shrub blinks at redness and is covered in eyes at the opposite hill, entirely nude as hill competes in redness with sunset. Sun is not place ,only time for bleeding. Place is man-altered landscape of color when green changes to red, red to gray. Water changes to land boiling for men to change their dresses, to eat breakfast and fuck their women in shades of gray.
- 96. 95 Metaphors are many I collect my images in the park ,put them in the empty canvas here I people my canvas with images A metaphor within a metaphor Just not one image within another but onion-peels of several images some of them bearing another image within themselves. Canvas is one image .People the canvas with images is another within this image and images themselves are metaphors for people ! The possibilities seem endless ! Other images An old bald man realized the blue infinitude of the sky in his toes Two girls flowed together on the jogging track their ponytails swinging in sync. The water flowed from the tube in the grass like sound Keep alive witnessing the yogic death of a man on the grass Beyond him, above the wall are the coconut’s standing silences That was all my rich rakings for that day.
- 97. 96 Dirt Not finding dirt we went on to find only chunks of butter that flitted before eyes.Where is the dirt was then carefully asked ,to move away from our dirt, in isolation behind the finger nails, where we all go. Not finding dirt in the little god’s mouth its mother saw a whole universe of dirt. Dirt flowed from excess butter in veins from buffaloes calmly chewing their cud over troughs of sticky rice husk porridge.Their lower mandibles moved on to night.Below them was rain dirt feet squished in. Excuse me ,we talked of dirt against dust .As if there was difference in biblical terms. Dry dirt can be dust we are a handful of.We collected it under varnished fingernails after carefully filing them, with tiny whites now visible from under them like old stars emerging from a night sky festival. While we were still awake ,the nail whites were softly flying birds from Siberia seen in the eastern sky over houses and trees.They would drop down under our fingers as we waved little fingers at their wings.They went back soon after their nesting .
- 98. 97 Images We have other images of ourselves hollow men, fleshed out of our bones, poor nightly creatures of fluorescence roaming the empty wastes of minds. We have our original men in rolled shirtsleeves staring from ancient space, not yet knowing my coming, that meant his own going from all space in time.There was space only for one of us. All our images are shadows from past that are cast on our space even after real things are gone except in sleep.
- 99. 98 Skyline With distance of time ,what had looked white turned gray by growing years our wading in knee-deep muddy rain waters in the streets along white walls missing in places ,the men who tucked white lungis in the waists,the coins that felt round to fingers in pockets, the rivers dancing round heads of mountains.Strange birds sang in the sky deaths of lives. With more distance of time our eyes slowly fell and the body hurried past closing our spaces.The distances are now small, the skyline close.
- 100. 99 The window pane The man sits in his shop with a pair of glassy eyes.He has no time to fix a see-through window-glass that is deeply in love with the sun in our kitchen.The pane sits there tight ,basking in the sun’s glow .Our women love the sun but not when making tea. There are trees in the pane waving in the wind.Their birds chirp at dawn, their speckled throats heaving up and down, as we calmly eat breakfast.It is not winter yet and the fog is yet to blind its eyes. Later when the sun turns angry, he will beat it down ,on its smoothness of cheeks ,gate-crashing kitchen,invading our women’s privacy as they make our tea. And the gas-flame will lose its blue face in the glare. It looks like the pane has to embrace its dark night.
- 101. 100 Dying of excess life It was as though I was not ready and it might slip away in an unrecorded moment. Life would slip away that evening. Because of excess life, redundancy in cells. Dying of excess life. The lady would collect frost in the cellar : her death would go on, till the next day when she would embrace fire. In the meantime life would go on. The music would go on in the street temples of the elephant-God linking her death to our life. We shall die, when our turn comes.Like her we may die of excess life .Or of excess death
- 102. 101 The 70’s man He floats around the park like a creature from another time ,another space.He wears the 70’s clothes and listens ,as he floats in the present space ,to the 70’s music which emerges out of his left pocket and spreads like a rain -puddle around him In the blue clouds and over the waves of the wind I hear the song you sing He is the 70’s man who wears the 70’s side-burns and thinks like a 70’s man.Those were the days for them.Those are the days for him.