The Painter of Evenings

 

       The Painter of  Evenings

New & Selected poems (1980-2018)

 

                Acknowledgements

The Old Boys’ Silver Jubilee Reunion, Prize Winner, All India 

Poetry Competitions, Poetry Society-British Council

The Mad Man Writes His Sane Poem, Chandrabhaga

Farm Walk, Katha, e poetry

Mother’s Sari Box, Silent River Film and Literary Society

Papa’s Iron Box, Kavya Bharati

The Toy Maker, Kavya Bharati

Rains in Mumbai, Kavya Bharati

The Coffin Maker, Prize Winner, All India Poetry Competitions, 

Poetry Society-British Council

Reading an Old Newspaper, Arabesque, Africa

Black & White, Plaza, Japan

Mumbai Blasts, Short list, All India poetry Competitions, Poetry Society, India

The Suicide from Vincent Thomas Bridge, California, Economic and Political Weekly

Sleeping Pills, World Poetry Year Book 2014

The Chempak Tree in our Home, Orbis, UK

Broken Toys, Short list, Poetry Society, India

Mother’s Pets, Kavya Bharati

Father’s Watch, Quest

Father’s Passport, New English Review, UK, Big Bridge anthology of Contemporary Poetry II

 

Taking Mother to the Ophthalmologist, Kavya Bharati

MRI Brain, Short list, All India Poetry Competitions, Poetry SocietyBritish Council

Lines from the Mortuary, Short list, All India Poetry Competitions, 

Poetry Society-British Council

The Easy Chair, Kavya Bharati

The Mad Woman in the Shiva Temple, Big Bridge Anthology of 

Contemporary Poetry II

The Waters of the Ganges, Chandrabhaga

The Attic of the Gods, Kavya Bharati

War Memorial, Spring, Pune, Kavya Bharati

Graves of English Soldiers, Kirkee, Pune, Kavya Bharati

 These Are the Things We Could Talk About, Special Jury Prize, All India Poetry Competitions, Poetry Society-British Council Memories of a War (1962–64), Short list, All India Poetry Competitions, Poetry Society-British Council

Indo-Pak War Short list, All India Poetry Competitions, Poetry 

Society-British Council

What Do You Do, Death?, Femina

Children Going to School, nth position online, UK

A Poem for my Daughter, Verse, Seattle, Contemporary Indian 

Poetry Special, USA

The Indian God, Kavya Bharati

Green, nth Position online, UK

Grass, Short list, All India Poetry Competitions, Poetry Society-

British Council

The Lemon Tree in the Backyard, Scoria 

Digging, Short list, All India Poetry Competitions, Poetry Society-

British Council

Still Earth, Quest

Stone Cutter’s Song, Kavi, India

Animal Action-2, Short list, All India Poetry Competitions, Poetry Society-British Council

A Man and his Dog, Short list, All India Poetry Competitions, 

Poetry Society-British Council

Horses, Chandrabhaga

Penguins, Bloodaxe, UK & Fulcrum USA

Butterfly Dying, Both Sides of the Sky

The Garden Snail, Mud Season Review, USA

Deep Sea Aquarium, Short list, All India Poetry Competitions, Poetry Society-British Council

The Dark Room, Short list, All India Poetry Competitions, Poetry Society-British Council

Nirvana, Short list, All India Poetry Competitions, Poetry Society-

British Council

The Sharpener of Knives, Arabesque, Africa

The Dark Room, Short list, All India Poetry Competitions, Poetry 

Society-British Council

The Fisherwoman by the Sea, nth position online, UK

Nudes on the Beach, New English Review, UK

By the Paddy Fields, Economic and Political Weekly

Sex Shop, Acapulco, Mexico, Bluefifth Review Online, USA Old Time Friends, Both Sides of the Sky, Bloodaxe UK, Fulcrum 

USA

The Long Road Ariel, University of Calgary, Canada

The Painter of Evenings, First Prize, All India Poetry Competitions, Poetry Society, India

Simila Similibus Curanter, Short list, All India Poetry Competitions, Poetry Society, India

I’ll Not Talk to You Anymore of that Sea, New English Review, UK The Funeral Home by the Sea, Plaza, Japan www. Poetry.org, nth position online, UK 

Contents

The Old Boys’ Silver Jubilee

 Reunion 1

@ 2.15 3

Dementia 4

Meeting a Dead Friend  5

The Mad Man Writes His Sane Poem 6

Farm-Walk  9

Mother’s Sari Box  10

Papa’s Iron Box 12

The Toy Maker 13

Rains in Mumbai 17

The Coffin Maker 18

Mumbai Blasts 20

Reading an old Newspaper 21

Ostro, A Lament 22

Black & White 23

The Talking Graves 24

A New Poet Thinks of Committing Suicide 28

My Daughter Reports a Senior’s Suicide 29

The Suicide from Vincent Thomas Bridge, California 30

Sleeping Pills 31

Houses 32

Building the House 34

The Chempak Tree in our Home 35

The Family House 36

Home Thoughts from Abroad 37

Blue Shrouds of Turin 38

The House of Death  39

The Backyard 40

Broken Toys 41

Mother’s Hands  42

Mother’s Pets 43

The Wedding Ring 45

Father’s Watch 46

The Radio 47

Father’s Passport 48

Taking Mother to The Ophthalmologist 50

MRI Brain 51

The Mad Man in the Ward 52

Man Drowning 53

Lines from the Mortuary 54

The White Van 55

The Easy Chair  56

The Mad Woman in the Shiva Temple 57

The Waters of the Ganges 59

Varanasi, Early Morning 60

The Attic of the Gods 61

War Memorial, Spring, Pune 63

Graves of English Soldiers, Kirkee, Pune 64

These Are the Things We Could Talk About 65

Memories of a War (1962–64) 66

Indo-Pak War 68

Woman Kissing Her Gun 70

John Lennon’s Glasses 71

Devil Woman 72

Caitlin is Back Home  73

What Do You Do, Death? 75

Neo Natal 76

The Lost Child 77

The Dystrophied Infant, ICU 78

Among AIDS Children 79

Among Kindergarten Children 80

Children Going to School 81

The Little One, Drawing 82

The Mentally Retarded Child and His Father 83

A Poem for my Daughter 84

Moss 85

The Indian God 86

A God Rises 88

Tirupati Temple 89

Africa 90

The Ancient Battlefield 92

Replica 94

Morning Drive, Jordan 95

Night Sea from King Solomon Hotel, Jerusalem 96

Green 97

Orchids 98

Grass 99

Looking out of my window 100

The Lemon Tree in the Backyard 101

Digging 102

Not to be Beaten by the Platinum Dawn 103

Still Earth 104

MH 370 105

The Aircraft Lands 106

Clouds from an Air plane 107

Stone Cutter’s Song 108

Bird Dying on the Terrace 109

Animal Action 110

Animal Action-2 111

A Man and his Dog 113

Rabbit Burial 115

A Line of Ants 116

Horses 118

Penguins 119

Love 120

Butterfly Dying 121

Today as I Walked into the Rest Room 122

The Garden Snail 123

Deep Sea Aquarium 125

The Dissection 126

The Smallest Creatures 128

Poetry, Small Beast 129

The Dark Room 130

Nirvana 131

The Sharpener of Knives 132

Fundamentals 133

Psycho 134

Murder 136

The Fisherwoman by the Sea 137

The Back Benchers 138

Apple balloon Waist 139

If We Had Glass Bodies 140

Nudes on the Beach 141

By the Paddy Fields 142

Train No 69 143

Rose 145

Sex Shop, Acapulco, Mexico 146

Madurai Sun 147

The Rains Wash Away Everything 148

The Man in the Mist 149

Old Time Friends 150

The Long Road 151

The Bus Journey 152

Elderly Couple Waiting 154

An Ageing Parent Talks to his Children 155

The Painter of Evenings 157

From ‘Father, Wake us in Passing,’

(i) Frost 159

(ii) Cry 160

(iii) America 161

(iv) Telephone Call 162

(v) Intensive Care Unit 163

(vi) Nectar of the Gods 164

(vii) Lone Ranger 165

(viii) Blue Petals 166

(ix) Gethsemane 167

(x) Gift 168

(xi) ICU 169

(xii) Rocks of Calvary 170

(xiii) The Colours of Pain 171

(xiv) Angels on the Moon 172

(xv) China Roses 173

(xvi) Pigeons 174

(xvii) Sea Crabs 175

(xviii) Wedding Night 176

(xix) Magic Sleeper 177

From ‘Mother Sonata’

(i) Truth 178

(ii) Fairy Child 179

(iii) USG 180

(iv) Birthday Candlesticks 181

(v) Grand Mist 182

(vi) Oval 183

(vii) The Last Night 184 From ‘A Buchenwald Diary’

(i) A Train Arrives 185

(ii) The Bunker 186

(iii) The Little Camp 187

(iv) Bread Thief 188

(v) Wall Hook 189

(vi) One in Hiding 190

(vii) The Wife and Child 191

(viii) The Checkup at the Horse Stable 192

(ix) The Steel-Lined Cart 194

(x) Hollander Shoes 195

(xi) Sounderbau, 1943 196

(xii) Leaving Buchenwald for Auschwitz 197

(xiii) The Night of the Children, Autumn, 1944 199

(xiv) 15 April, 1945 200

Rivers 201

Woman 202

The Ice Cube Girls 203

Cherries 204

Plums 205

Rooms 206

Simila Similibus Curanter 207

I’ll Not Talk to You Anymore of that Sea 209

Love Poetry 210

After the River 211

Nostalgia 212

Adoration 213

Wine 214

What Strange Liquor 215

And I’m Thinking 216

Could You do me a Favour, Professor 217 Torn 218

Underground Flowers 219

Once More, Wind 220

The Truth 221

Who Loves a Moon  222

If Someday You’d Like to Tell 223

Hands 224

And Why, 225

Drop 226

Rock 227

Every Word of Mine 228

Drinking You Tonight 229

Visiting the Institute of English, 40 Years Later 230

Nightingales 232

Lastly 233

Before the Last Supper 234

Death is a Rosary 235

If it is Death 236

The Hall 237

Death 238

Death of A Poet 239

The Funeral Home by the Sea 240 www. Poetry.org 241

Poetry 242

Dash 243

........... ................... ........

 

 

The Old Boys’ Silver Jubilee Reunion

So you have come all the way from Silicon Valley,

Only to attend this? See our greying crony there,

How much the absent minded professor he has become,

Forgetting our names, our faces,

Making sad efforts to remember

The by lanes of yesteryear. Ah, Alex, baldy,

Big shot in the International Academy of Pure Sciences,

I still remember your thickly sprung coiled jet of hair

As you wept in the class dunce corner

Punished for your diarrhoea flowing down your blue knickers In History class, and we called it

‘The Great Plague’. Hello old pal, shaking hands with me, You were our ‘squirrel’. You sneaked that to the Principal, Got me flogged in the hot assembly sun. I christened you ‘ Judas’.

The name stuck.

Those were the days. Those were the days, friends,

When our little sticks would pick up every passing pig tail,

Stiffening up like red needles in hot valves,

Tuning into faintest beeps

Of smiling girl stations. Remember Jube?

Hit by a military truck, thrown into NDE

And calling himself God? And handsome David, Whose sister threw acid all over his face cos he blew up her love story? Where is he now?

Gone? Disappeared with his disfigured face like a sad river leaving A wasted bed of sand.

Well, cheers.

Beer turns topaz in gleaming ice, Held together in cold comfort.

And in spite of his busy schedule, our handsome Rector too,

Is amongst us, off his priestly overalls,

Sipping Bloody Mary, staring at the 3D poster

Lighting Cindy in the nude. Rev. Father, boys will be boys.

Together again, those now left of us huddled together in 

Coloured wreath

This dead of night,

We stab a little harder into left over chicken steak,

Standing upright, never quite mentioning,

Our once bright little pricks become grey haired cocks Dangling inside our over wrung briefs, As burnt wires in long dead homes. 

@ 2.15

There’s a girl this morning

Walking up the street,

Pursing her lips,

Smiling to herself

As though she meant,

Let it be, That’s life.

There’s a young man

On his motor bike

Adjusting his helmet

At the traffic post, As the light turns green.

And there’s

An unknown body,

Police certified,

At the public crematorium,

To be taken

First in the afternoon

@ 2.15

Dementia

What shall we do

With this dementia, 

That is poetry

That tastes of saliva,

Of lost words

Over and over again,

This helplessness 

That needs a woman’s touch

 Always by our side?

What shall we do

With this poetry, 

This dementia 

That milks memory?

This poetry

That unzips its fly

In the middle of everywhere,

Seeing nothing

That everyone sees,

Seeing everything 

That no one sees

That puts out

 Its black ominous tongue,

 licking the night clean.

Meeting a Dead Friend

Yesterday I made a dead poet              my friend. He sang me verses of the night, of bright bones that break just like the heart, of memories burning with a brightness of topaz;

His flesh swayed with the prowess of a Nostradamus

as he unraveled to me the curse of light and the fern curl’d chorus of ashen winds sallied the truths of gumming snails

bleeding quietly in their crackled shells. Reeds of passion, he broke them all;

 We walked together slipping on eyes painted with extinct light; 

we named each coffin after a star, where they  lay human

and inhuman, like you and me. 

For a while my friend was lost. 

But when I turned

he was still there, a half cigarette burning away his finger nails

the whiskey, a rainbow line on his lips; he was there, my friend, forever, he was there,

 the bibles of immortal verse lay scattered all around us like cemetery stones;

River-wet, we breathed resurrection.

The Mad Man Writes His Sane Poem

There is a time when the mad man Writes his sane poem.

He writes his poem, and his poem

Rewrites him. He wears his poem’s crossings

 Like whiplashes all over his body

Until he makes his sane poem glow.

He combs back tenderly, its long hair of water, 

Cuts its breast to the beauty of moonstone.

He knows he is turning into a fine poet,

Setting fire to his flesh,

Honing his bones

For the sparking poem.

He then holds his poem for the world to see

Like a handsome erect cock

Squeezed in his hand, 

till past all semen 

His blood begins to flow. 

He laughs deliriously Into his own pain.

Everyone laughs at the mad man making his sane poem.

But it is this sane poem that the mad man wants beyond all else,

That runs blind, calling out his name,

Over the lifelines in its dead hands

Spread out like falling leaves before him

And he runs jeeringly after

To clutch his poem eluding him like a fly all these years of insanity

That tears the wind, that slaps the lightning,

That parts the seas,

That is perfect union like the phallus in its yoni 

When plain matter becomes God.

Having caught his sane poem

He stands aloft the crucifix on the hill

High over INRI

And asks the world,

 see my sane poem, ‘I’ll read him out for all of you,

Please do not go, I’ll hold you all spellbound with him’.

But in spite of all the redness,

In spite of all the colours,

A thousand ears turn the key that locks all sound

As they pass by, telling one another,

That may be the best poem in the world,

But he is a mad man

And a mad man must not write sane poems at all… .

The mad man climbs down his Crucifix to the earth,

And knowing that everyone has left,

He plucks each lifeline from the hands of a hundred dead

 And wearing them like unquenched roots all over himself 

Talks lovingly to his sane poem.

And the poem turns to him barking, mad man, o, you mad man, 

Why was I born of you?

It is because I was born of you,

It is because you are a mad man,

That I have lost all claim to immortality…, 

And tears away

From his mad heart.

The mad man waits by the pitiless shore

Making a paper boat of his precious poem,

Letting his poem slip away

Letting the water lap him up,

With the memory of a wolf’s tongue when he was sane

And kneeling down among the broken sea-shells

Scattered like the clamped words of a stammering prayer,

Listens once, as the horizon 

Gains the great locusts overhead

Gathering night under the sun,

Their million ravenous mouths of silence, 

Hooded in one green swoop

Reaping the random harvest of his bones. 

Farm-Walk

Long reeds of yellow are taken by the wind. Seeds snap, falling on earth not yet autumn,

 and upon stones thirsting for rain.

Time has a way of flirting with the water, making bubble breasts suck into its skin. 

The water has an endless way,              of remaining calm, before taking over every mountain. 

Another night turns dark stone upon a deer’s lips poisoned in the hidden green. 

Among distances buried in the graveyards between our closing eyes, the blood light spills, 

as I walk the farm, 

the dew slipper’d all over my feet, plucking grey hair like a farm head, ripe apples that belonged to someone else.

Mother’s Sari Box 

I

Mother’s sari box was peacock blue.

She opened it only on special days.

Like, that summer evening when father came home early.

She had her bath spread with white jasmine buds he’d bought from Nur Jehan Flower Stall 

By Old Delhi railway station.

The Regal Cinema near Jama Masjid was playing the new black and white talkie

Starring Dev Anand and Suraiya.

Mother liked me to sit by her side, listening to her story of each sari Tucked closely in like an unroused peacock feather.

The jasmine fragrance had already soaked her hair, as she laid out the saris one by one,

In a semi-circle not unlike a low dipped peacock tail.

‘Which one dear?’ she asked me eagerly, ‘Which one tonight?’

My sleepy eyes dyed down on her Banarasi, Mughal-A-Azam Qawwali, Bengal Baluchari,

And Lucknow Chikankari. 

‘Or, shall it be your father’s favourite Kashmiri Chinar?’

Sure, each had a story.

 Each one was a legend.

‘This, my son’, she whispered ‘is the rainbow sari, a gift from your father, from Kolkata,

On Durga puja night... . Ah, he has now forgotten. And this is the Kancheevaram sari, 

Studded with real gold that your father wished me to wear on our Kerala honeymoon.

He said I looked like... Shakuntala… . And this is my wedding sari’.

Mother kept opening and closing its rummaging silk as though helping boneless wings to fly.

I saw her stare hard at the pair of diamonds pinned on it, 

That had come along with her as dowry.

And I thought I saw tears that she quickly brushed aside. 

We did not choose that.

Mother wore a simple blue that night.

I watched her dress carefully before the long dusky bedroom mirror, folding the blue pleats peacock crown like, just hovering below her navel,

 as though she remembered the peacock dance.

I heard him call her from down below. 

He had already started the car engine.

II

When they came up the stairs to the terrace 

The moonlight lay already unsheathed.

Mother made sure I was asleep, 

(or so she thought),

As father’s hand slipped over her peacock pleats, drawing her close,

Sinking the fangs of the celluloid’s black and white romance into her flesh

With his lips whorled upon her peacock crown.

Her eyes closed. She lay awake, looking through his kisses

At the full moon, thinking perhaps, of King Dushyanta, and his fish gobbled ring.

III

Next morning, father took with him in his office jeep,

Mother’s tousled sari to Maharani Dry Cleaner’s close to Nur Jehan Flower Stall.

The blue sari would get back into the blue box in the evening,

Among the others awaiting their late night show,

When white jasmine buds would once again spread the bath floor.

Papa’s Iron Box

I remember papa’s heavy iron box.

Neat at first and shining in sunrise from the glass window, 

His certificates once bright as                 the once bright gold ring

 On his wedding finger.

Well, we broke open papa’s old iron trunk at last.

The dazed silverfish dived deeper down his interview coat 

Darned before the second world war; As though it knew all the darkness there. 

Eggs of wasps lay fossilized, 

As tiny ancient wounds.

It is  all rust now, the scrap man says, ‘Give them to me. 

The house will get some space. 

What use is a gone man’s coat and certificates?’

The scrap man strapped the old trunk,

Swinging it on his old bike

Letting it cluck like a hen hung down for the machete.

And then as he bicycled whistling down the street

I thought I met Papa’s gaze, 

his eyes wet, 

His mouth dumb,

Vanishing in a prehistoric dinosaur stampede. 

The Toy Maker

Once in Chenna Patna*, there lived a fine toy maker.

The children loved his toys; Parents perhaps loved them more. The elders loved to keep them in their worshipping places 

To decorate their cars and even office rooms.

The toy maker was quite famous.

Even the town minister’s wife wished him to make toys for her grandchildren.

There were times when the toy maker used to talk to his own toys.

Tenderly, sometimes even with love.

One night while making a beautiful toy, the toy maker fell asleep.

He woke to midnight noises. 

Opening his eyes,

He could not believe what he saw or heard.

His toys, they were alive, and had even started talking to one another.

Surprised, startled, he uttered a soft cry.

The toys, they became quiet again.

The toy maker was perplexed.

Why had his toys stopped talking, Stopped all signs of life on his waking?

Was he not their creator?

He went over and shook his toys.

They were all dumb, lifeless.

He left his toys there.

He talked with  his friends in town, 

Told them of the strange occurrence Of his toys that had come alive.

They all listened to him patiently.

But behind his back

They said, oh, our ingenious toy maker… Toy making has sadly gotten into his head… Our poor toy maker has turned mad.

But the toy maker knew the truth.

Hiding behind a curtain, he watched his toys 

Turn alive...

He began living with his living toys as in a dream.

And then he had an idea.

He was all alone.

If his toys breathed life, why not create a toy that he could fall in love with?

A toy that would turn alive and love him in return?

So he created a toy, a woman toy.

A most beautiful naked woman toy.

He watched her in secret to know      if she would spring to life.

Imagine his midnight joy—she did.

She woke to life in mid of night.

And she seemed so nervous, trying to hide her nudity.

Yet when the toy maker came over, the toy turned dumb.

Still, he then tenderly chiseled and clothed her.

Every day, every night,

he would hold her.

He fell in love with her.

But he could not ever love her as he thought he would.

For,

She turned to life only in his absence. What use was such love?

Then the toy maker had another idea.

He made a toy after his own form.

He placed it beside her.

He held his breath and watched what would happen 

When at midnight they sprung to life together. And just as he thought and felt 

They both fell in love.

They moved away from the others,

And as the toy maker watched

He saw the toy he had made after his image 

And the lady he had made in his dream of love, 

Make love.

And he grew jealous.

Why had it to be that the woman        he had made out of his own hands

Would not love him, but would love only his own wooden self?

Was he not there for her forever?

What was the difference between him and his wood?

He felt that he had ruined even his last chance of being loved by her

By creating a toy for her after his own image.

So at daybreak, when the toys remained dumb,

He took his own image and burned it down to cinders.

There. Now his chances to love his lady love were so much brighter.

That night he watched the woman toy turn to life.

He saw her gape at the embers and the ash of the one she loved, beside her.

And she cried once, a feeble toy -cry And became silent.

In that deep sad cry, all the other toys that were moving seemed suddenly frozen.

The toy maker waited with deep breath.

Why were his toys not any more moving?

Even in the darkness? Even in hiding?

It seemed forever. The silence.

It seemed the toys, they had forever returned to toy land.

The toy maker went over and picked up his lady love.

She was cold, colder than death.

The toy maker was sad and bitter.

In the market square his friends found him next morning, dejected and sad,

Muttering to himself like one dazed, my toys, my toys, they do not talk anymore... .

Why don’t my toys talk to me anymore…

And his friends, they told one another,

Oh, our toy maker... . Thank God his madness is at last cured...

Thank God our toy maker is talking sense again.

 

Chenna Patna*, in Karnataka is a town famous for toy making. 

Rains in Mumbai

It was here, last year,

That one monday morning the school boy 

In neat white and blue uniform got soaked in the rain

And was sucked under. 

The police waded in,

Pitched a red ribbon with the sign Danger

 While water whirled around

 Spiral as Andromeda.

The overhead telephone wire

Soon fell, and with it, the rusted electric pole

 With all its wires tied like tousled hair.

That was when the mad woman

Who lived in the Mahim drain

 Came out because the rain

Had flooded her home. The rains.

It left a hundred dead. It was worse Than the bullets Kasab sprayed all over Chhatrapati Sivaji Terminus.

And the sky grew bright on Juhu beach again.

The sun came out with Amitabh Bachaan’s beard

Glowing white. And the mad woman of Mahim,

She changed her home

From the Mahim drain pipe to the rusted lid

 Atop the dust bin close to Mumbai Central.

And in the new sunshine she rode 

With the air of a Cleopatra, wearing

School blue knickers for her brassiere, 

And a white Monday shirt for crown.

The Coffin Maker

The coffin maker is a happy man now.

More and more orders keep coming in. Soon he’ll able to marry off

his daughters who have just attained puberty and keep pretty Angela happy on condoms strawberry flavoured and chocolate ice.

Of late he painted his house bright chrysanthemum red ordered teakwood beds and never cared a damn what the neighbours said.

 Atop his showroom the great cat- lights came on and his name glowed in the dark whenever passing lights hit it.

Now he’s not wondering any more,  he knows he’s the best in town.

What about air conditioning?         That would lengthen the life of coffins. Now he’s struck with a bright new idea that would revolutionize coffin making 

for all time. Electronic remote controlled polymer coffins with microchips and inbuilt flash units that brought home to your PC screen your dear dear departed along with up to date information on the state of decomposition that you could activate or slow down much like a video game. An idea, he knew would catch on like wild fire making him a billionaire overnight.

Now whenever he kneels down with Angela to pray,

he can only think of this;

No one else can help him raise such funds so hi tech

which of course secretly meant more and more accidents, causalities, fatalities… .

But of course, work was worship, it didn’t matter what you did you just had to put in your best, there could be no wrong asking-

and for all this (if his dream came true) he would keep his wood and bury his god in a coffin of gold. 

Mumbai Blasts

I’ll not write about the Mumbai blasts. I’ll only write about the 50 pigeons that died because the fakir who used to feed them grain by the  

Taj Mahal Hotel was blasted away, and they all died of hunger and sorrow.

I’ll only make a passing reference to the paupers, the begging children,

the hawkers, the sex workers out on an afternoon stroll and of Boxer,        the handsome stray dog that used to come for  his snooze 

at about 1.00 p.m. daily,

his head stoned upon the lap of Gateway of India and who now, has vanished without a trace.

 Thank you, godmen, for your afternoon shower, and for the embryo still bleeding in its small pool of blood, up the hundred stone steps, at the lit feet of Mumbai Devi.

Reading an old Newspaper

It was before the great blasts of 11/7. 

The monsoons had not carried away our laughing children then.

The couple in love had not yet committed suicide.

It was just December, but the paper looked yellow and strange as I pulled it out from my drawer, curious what news the earth had held then, and was struck, the way things pass us by and we enter days unknown to us, going into the history’s hunger, taking life for granted. It did not yet look

as though there would be a Tsunami for a thousand years. But here, in this lost ocean of yesterday’s words, a father had raped his own blood, a neighbouring country had sent home neatly packed in a coffin, the slaughtered flesh of a soldier from the loc, while Time sat, a frozen priest fossilized in lust’s blind confessions.

Ostro, A Lament

 

Ostro, your face was calm.

Wrong appears more wrong,

That they took you away for no reason, 

And with your hands bound,

Chopped off your head,

And carved your chest with their imprint 

As though you were a poetry book. 

What really does the Holy Koran say About knifing an innocent human soul Like a halal lamb? 

Near that mountain river,

Those night buds must have closed their eyes

When their petals were about to open,

As your blood,

Turned flowing to water them,

And your severed head became a riddle

Of the nature of man

Reddening the newly misted grass.

Ostro, what a sad dawn,

That they, in the name of their faith and country,

Lurid for terror fame, hacking, hacking,

That even the Prophet 

Would look away

As they painted the going moon red

With your life

Falling, helpless, on snow.

(Hans Christian Ostro, Norwegian tourist, slain by Kashmiri militant group AlFaran, 1995)

Black & White

He made black.

He made white.

 Oceans, iguanas, City lights.

He gave our buds 

A taste for flesh. Apples, tits, Marihuana, 

Whiskey, and mess.

Under flaming trees

Beside growing peace

 Shone candles

 Of blood.

And so,

In between 

Our prayer books,

In dark forests of pubic hair

We hold love 

To ransom;

That’s where

We still hide

Our slaying guns.

The Talking Graves

The newly elected Government decided to go ahead with its grand new four lane Highway project.

An entire forest would be cleared;

It was a mega project that would cut through mountains.

There would be kilometre long lit tunnels through, and through.

It would be state of the art in the country, the first of its kind,

But would run through the revered city cemetery where were laid to rest a thousand people.

The church protested.

The graves would have to be saved. So many kith and kin of the city lay buried there.

The town people took a march to the cemetery protesting against the new move of the Government.

But change was inevitable, said the minister’s spokesman.

Great changes meant greater sacrifices of the self

By the people

For the development of the society.

The people’s march ended in the cemetery.

They sat upon the graves and decided the future course of action.

‘The graves’, the leader said, had to be saved at any cost.’ Let them build a fly over’ over the grave...

Thus the century old cemetery would even provide tourist attraction for foreigners and bring in foreign exchange.

Why cut and destroy the timeless graves?

Why disturb the peace of the dead for the living?

Evening fell.

The city people departed from the cemetery.

The night came on, and it became dead of night.

And then it was that the rich man’s grave spoke.

‘How can they do this to me of all graves?

I was the richest, the most revered in town. How can they level me down just like that?

Am I not the only one here to be inlaid with precious stones?

And who else has a gold lining in his coffin like mine?

How can they cut across me or level me down?’

Then it was that the second grave spoke with a woman’s voice.

‘Was I not the city star singer? They all used to swoon and croon every night in the bar

At my feet... . Even the minister used to be there who passed this bill...drinking all night, staring at me hoping I would give him a second glance!

Now he wants to lay his macadam all over me and wipe my memory from the face of the city!

Is that not a cruel despicable act?

Can they not bend the highway a little so, I can be saved?’ There was silence, followed by the cry of a werewolf.

And then the small grave spoke, that had not even so long been recognized by the others as a full grave, as it was hardly a grave at all... and had no mound on it, and even the grass upon it was dry.

‘Let them’, it said sadly. ‘Let them do it... No one ever cared for me... As in life, so in death!

Let it be, let it be,

Let the world change... What does it matter to this earth that I am run over? 

Who cares for me after all?’ 

The other graves pretended not to hear. They felt it was beneath their dignity

To even have it among them, that was hardly even a mound  of death.

But another grave a little farther, felt pity for it, And was compelled to speak.

Sure, it looked a very polite, sensitive, fresh grave.

Even in the middle of the night,

The grave had the fragrance of wet roses upon it.

It always had.

All the other graves in fact envied it for its abundance.

Surely, it was the most beautiful

And fragrant grave among the thousand odd graves there.

And as it spoke, it was clear that the words almost choked in gaining sorrow.

‘I don’t really want to be here... I would not mind that the road comes over me,

But it makes me cry when I think of her, of what’ll be.

You have all seen her daily, haven’t you? 

Ever since the day I was chiseled here in stone,

This lady of mine,

She comes with seeds, she waters the grass tufts,

And lets flower upon his name on earth

All these fragrant roses... all for me, ever since the day I came here... .

Though the long years have come and gone,

Every evening she comes,

She waters the flowers, plucks the weeds, keeps them abloom, Fresh and undying upon my name.

You would have noticed, how she even sits by my side,

Telling me

These daily words of comfort,

You are not alone... I’ll not let you ever be gone, As long as I am there, I’m there with you... .

I’ve been to her the mirror of love and time,

Her very life breathes here upon this cold marble. Tomorrow if they level me down, I shudder to think, It’ll break her sad heart.

I would rather crumble now or burn away... .’ This time in the silence that swept past, There was no werewolf song.

And then it was that the tomb of the Holy man spoke.

‘How do they dare say this when I am here?

Have they not seen how I was proclaimed a martyr and a saint?

If they mow me down, there will be a revolution.

Innocent blood will flow in the streets

The rivers of this city will turn red... .’

The moon then went down,

In the low distance the werewolf slid back into his grave And a sudden darkness came upon the skies.

A strange towering wetness lashed upon the earth, As the tsunami swept the entire city Into the sea. 

A New Poet Thinks of Committing Suicide

(After reading K Satchidanandan’s poem)

All around me

The cicadae of my unsung words Break the silence of the heart.

Who listens to my song?

All around me, the witness of fire Burns up the mercury of stars, 

And the queen love moon.

I’ll play with my words.

I’ll play on with my words,

The rainy wetness of her lips

Shall water these seeds taking root,

They’ll rise to the blossom of morning sun.

And to me, these words,

Tied with the black ribbon of her long plaited hair,

Let them burn,

As you search me all around that fire, Which you do not yet know

 Is my funeral pyre.

My Daughter Reports a Senior’s Suicide

Why dear, I ask her.

In my mind, somebody fallen in love Has been jilted.

But things are simpler.

‘Her parents had strange diseases... .’ That baffles me.

I think of AIDS, of nothing in particular,

But drift to the silent body 

Of a young girl, and her puberty, 

Laid among the freshly done roses.

Don’t lose focus dear, I tell her,

And end the conversation with a telephone kiss.

Back in my mind, a young girl,

The poison she ran to,

Lips gone cold, on thresholds of beauty, 

And a mind cut inside salted flesh,

Baked in sprouting alphabets of love.

The Suicide from Vincent Thomas Bridge, California

(For Tony Scott)

LA Bridge. This is familiar.

And I think I’ll stop my car here.

It is a time to hand over the car keys, Remember one’s beloved

While the going’s good.

Location is not important anymore.

The Second coming is.

A small walk in the darkness to the open, 

Where the traffic upon the bridge has a noise 

Of birds being born elsewhere.

But, this is going to be an all time hit.

The scene?

Only back lights.

This time, keep them farther away.

Character, step closer to the lens. You’ll be seen there, 

The way you are.

Remember, we are shooting night.

Below, the water is thick lens.

You’ll go into it like light, 

A prayer of stillness

Will scatter the Gods of thought.

Without betrayal,

Just the perfect view 

As though of blood lit wine.

Go on.

Now, that imperfect shot.

Action.

Camera, roll.

As light into water.

Sleeping Pills

They lie huddled in together warmth. Gentle as babes, their whites shining with innocence of milk. 

How peaceful, you think, how precious, that a couple of them,

 in the palm of your hand can blow you quiet, like a petal falling into time’s disappearing mist. 

Houses

See that house? That house, painted white,

With a few white roses at the steps? That lady opening the door. 

She is a widow. She lost her husband in the war. 

A lover of white roses, 

she clips them each day 

And takes them to lay on his grave. Everyday.

See that house. 

The one maroon

Beside the tall lone elm tree? See her by her window rocking In the easy chair? 

She is a widow too. Her husband died of colon cancer.

His last days were terrible. 

She still thinks of him

And cries. If a guest appears,

She quickly wipes her eyes, and smiles.

And see that red house next to it?

 The old couple there.

They eloped as a young pair in love. Now she is blind.

But she still holds his hands in hers, as though nothing was more precious,

Who doesn’t remember a thing except her name.

And see that old brown house upon that hill? 

There lives a nun there, a kind old nun. 

Though wild creases now etch her face,

The photograph on her wall shows a beautiful woman.

Once she was in love, but the man left her. Even in her prayers to Jesus, Love’s death slivers her eyes.

And so from this far, in these houses, behind the roses,  the elm tree 

In the tossing breeze, as the lights come on, the lights go off,

Silent in a silence that from this far,

Is not silence at all,

 but voices moisturizing Time, painted upon muted wailing walls. 

Building the House

My house is all about home grown grasses.

My dead brother’s hand that tenderly clutched me,

Waves its green filament in the corner of the garden.

He was buried here, where the last foundation stone ploughs.

His closed eyes stare. I can see him as I build

Brick on brick, my home here, because I have no other.

The stone walls rise, cutting across the bridge of waiting years

Shrouded with wet ghosts of a childhood’s torn flesh;

As I tell my children the tales

Of what is left of me; The dumb silhouette of a brother’s hand

Clutching the dead eyes of my mother, the cries of a father

Calling after a dead son,

Heavy among the bridled syllables of a breaking dawn. 

The Chempak Tree in our Home

Father used to say, don’t climb the chempak tree and break your little bones.

The stems are brittle, the milk will hurt your eyes. Mother used to hover round saying, ‘My mother loved its blossom.

She used to make such fine garlands with them for my hair. And she called me the chempak lady’. 

Father and mother.

They both went past the chempak tree in beautiful, frightening ambulances.

The house has been sold to the undertaker.

The doors of my childhood are being stacked in lorries that take away the fingerprints of a hundred years. The undertaker hangs a placard in bold that says ‘To-Let’, with a deep cut above the chempak bloom. So much milk overflows, tonight, that my eyes hurt.

The Family House

Walls that crumple cannot hold

Voices of a young woman’s lullabies for her crying child.

And it is night. The black curl of her hair 

Once a perfect octave, has turned the bend 

To its forest of blackbirds.

Nothing moves here. 

Or if something does, it reminds of a hand

Undressing a body, breath dipped in love making’s silence

Before it turns torrent, tearing cobwebs of the bleeding flesh.

A last fruit bat sucks its honey

From a fallen chempak that is a ghost’s cheek in the moonlight.

Even the rat snake has turned sepia, 

Curled upon mother’s abandoned wedding photograph on the floor. 

Home Thoughts from Abroad

Upon the mossed wall the casuarina still,

 Lets fall its dried fruit on sure cat feet. 

The new rain has just called and left

Its misted memorabilia by the front door. 

Upon your lap, as you fall asleep,

A faded album simulates my vanished face. 

Your hand, always an antenna of care Has now reached its reach of station. Someone knocks, it could have been me

 But is only a fine tuning of the wind.

Home. How soon it made me a man Whose face has turned into faraway mountains

 Quietly filling up with snow. 

Blue Shrouds of Turin

The grasshoppers look up from the low hedge with their glass shield gladiator faces,

then return delicately

 treading the green stemmed stalks as if to tell their great grass king about strange arrival.

Light colored butterflies with sliced bread wings emerge victorious over the touch-me-nots.

Memories burst cashew nuts in childhood’s fire,

cindered with father’s frozen lips 

and mother’s dripping blood.

Over the hollow of chimney-cold darkness, smoke-clouds knit in fine myrtle lace their blue Shrouds of Turin.

The House of Death 

It’ll be prudent to switch off the cell phone 

Or have it rather, on vibration mode.

The rain outside the car windows

Will help for a bit for tears that may not now happen.

This is the house. 

The police have locked it from outside. There’s a lot of blood inside that you can even now see 

From the glass window. 

If you really want to look, that is.

What passed last night, was bizarre.

A woman, the symbol of love is pushed outside, And a man drinks. Luckily, he doesn’t count his pegs.

He thinks of his daughter, 

cherry angel, now become big.

He thinks of her, and of her, and of him, 

Reaches out for the blade, 

Bites the time capsule.

He watches the blood, dark red, thinks the night bats would have loved it.

He puts the good night pillow

With its pair of green parrots Comfortingly over his eyes,

That he has donated to the blind. 

He then turns to a side,

Forgetting locked doors.

The Backyard

That’s a place for old oat tins, and bread wrappers.

A place to hunt, seek adventure,

Perhaps a quiet snake with its tongue out on a wet brick,

Or even for a salamander, surprised at suddenness of sun. 

It is where once mother threw away my dead brother’s dresses 

After crying the whole night into them. 

Where her broken bangles still shine as if to say 

That somewhere, she’s still there.

There, a coiled tendril curls,

 clinging to the matted touch-me-not, 

And it isn’t bothered. 

And that’s where white periwinkles Spring up in the rain, their petals whiter than washed bones, 

Alongside sudden milk mushrooms.

It is a place that breathes spontaneity after dark.

Little ghosts of lives that left

Without telling why or where

Still ride the green leaves, and sit invisible

Upon the stones; 

It is in the backyard that the twilight stains

The last light of sun trembling upon a broken piece of glass; 

It teaches you much more than the Bible and Sunday mass.

Broken Toys

Pushing open the old shelf I throw away the broken toys.

The small faded train without wheels. Half a hare,

the drumming bear with a missing hand, a caterpillar without its head,

 & Barbie with her blind hazel eyes.

But just a minute.

A misty breath upon them holding on close; A small tug of earth,

warm, unsure, clutching fingers, gripping, breaking everything.

And,

tiny hands growing.

Mother’s Hands 

Mother’s hands once threaded pink white oleander flowers, showered leaves of the holy Bael upon the glazed black Shiva linga whispering His thousand names, Namasivaya, Ardhanareeshwara, Sankara, Mahadeva, Nataraja... . Her hands would lovingly

smear sandal all over the wet phallic mound, as she perhaps did,

 father’s face with her night kisses. The linga would look sensuous, setting aside every twilight of earth,

and hold pride of place. 

There would be the fragrance of fresh rose, lotus petals sprinkled with ash, and in the sprinkling turmeric atmosphere,

all other gods, even her fever’d child asleep in the next room could wait.

 It was all for her Lord. 

But now in the same old corner, a saffroned third eye is barely visible among the cobwebs. 

Dry leaves that the monsoon winds roll in slap the black face,

 throwing in a little left over rain. 

A long snake skin beaded into a forgotten prayer curls close tightening round the unwashed phallus giving away heat, 

much like love in mother’s once young hands.

Mother’s Pets

Perhaps she loved them more.

Not that it hurt, that was her way.

The bright red parakeet that died, looking at wild green berries,

 not pecking the plantain half 

she held out to it all night 

till its ringed eyes lost all light. 

Are you angry with me, little green one, 

Mother would ask it tenderly, keeping awake all night, but it said nothing, turned to a side and died. 

And she cried in the morning. 

And so did her rabbit in the rains,

 her peacock that sped away in the floods and, 

her most dear deer, that crossed the road to a hit.

At home her little ones went away year after year from her womb into the pits, as she sat upon the kitchen grindstone watching them go,

 beating her breasts 

Overflowing with milk. 

They too were kind of pets, 

and she asked them one after the other, why are you all going away, dear are you all angry with me?

Then, the one who used to hold her tight

Each time a pet died,

telling her, ‘ how can anyone ever

 Be angry with you, my pet, they are only leaving, as they all have to go’

He too turned stone.

And when he left, turning every tomb into a rain cup, 

She would not even come up to the door.

Because, that was the way they all went.

Past her big door, 

The things she loved,

That she kept in cages. 

The Wedding Ring

Years later she lies upon the bed alone, with the portrait upon the wall where she can see the ashes of a young man’s smile.

In her ceramic eyes, her whites tremble in suddenly charged waters. She holds her hand before her 

like a mirror, 

and upon her finger that stroked his curls,

turns and turns her wedding ring 

as though a genie would now appear sailing father down 

a curtain of smoke

 and back into her melting arms.

Father’s Watch

Climbing the almirah’s top most shelf I fish out my father's Orr Lion watch. Its blood red second hand ticks on Lapping up time like a wolfling.

Memories-coloured pieces

Fall-form-emerge-

Now in the distance,

 Father’s hemiplegia,

His left hand is a lion paralyzed.

From across the heaped up calendars

In the attics gathering dust, 

My eyes search among cobwebs, 

As my child cries.

He cries for my watch.

I reach out for the top most shelf,

Let loose among darkness

 My fluorescent quartz

Lapping up time like a jackal.

The Radio

Long ago, my dear children, 

There was the radio.

Little birds lived in them,

They ruffled their feathers and sang.

Lit worms in syringe bottles inside

Made cities of colors;

All said, the radio, was a big house,

 In a town you could take shelter, in sun and rain.

Every morning, it was like the sun rising; It was even like putting 

Our shirt buttons on.

And then the needle moved across numbers,

Slow glide, as lips over newly unwrapped breasts.

And then like a kiss,

A station clicked,

And like love, the music flowed.

Long ago, dear children,

There was the radio,

 Like fiery red ants 

All over earth.

Father’s Passport

The blue cloth hyacinths 

father brought home from Bangkok stood heady on the carved round table in the black earthen vase.

Father said, Bangkok is heaven.

It was the only outside place he had been to. Perhaps he had also been to the blind prostitutes, pushing their pubic dark canoes into the night river in Damnoen Saduak.

But if that, he did not tell mother.

Edge purpled, his kind of heaven,

they blossomed in a dream of coloured fireworks, 

lip wet khlongs, 

and the great gold leaf Buddha

 lying like a fallen New York skyscraper, billowing smoke. 

Father had earned all that for himself, at last.

Every night he was at the carved round table dreaming back Bangkok,

or those lily stalked hostesses in Singapore Airlines mostly, 

the sad breasted one

who served him coconut chicken rice in coriander curry

 with her baby tomato smile, 

that never left him quite.

Smoke curls from his Player’s cigarette chainroped 

the hyacinths in thick mist.

They reeked entirely of tobacco dust.

Father adored his hyacinths.

 He watered them with that longing look in his eyes until, they closed in coma.

As he lay in the hospital, 

turning red-yellow bitter gourd,

 the blue petals back home began to lose their shine, 

thirsting for the water of his eyes,

 his tobacco mouth. 

They seemed quite prepared for what would be. 

The day death encircled father

 in Easter mist, 

mother glued his best looking photograph among the hyacinth petals, and laid his passport below, in one last signature of love’s quietening meridian.

It was as though, mother, she knew it all.

Of purple edged hyacinths perpetual in father’s watering eyes, 

and of blank pages,

 sailing lost winds back home to where the pubic dark canoes 

pushed upon night rivers

 of the blind girls in Damnoen Saduak.

Taking Mother to The Ophthalmologist

I see the doctor moving closer

To those purblind eyes. How can he,

Ever test them? The times they cried

Silent tears, perchance

Turned to quivering fish

With father’s first kiss: Now there,

Strange lips almost meet hers 

In between the Dali-like crucifix 

Of the ophthalmoscope.

Those blues are tired.

Tired of father’s death,

Among the freshly strewn flowers,

Woven once so carefully across her long black hair.

A nurse switches off the lights. 

In silver dark,

I see the quick blaze of the fundus

Circle yellow, simmering

Upon those gently receding waves Then sink down into the distance, 

A perfect pearl.

MRI Brain

She’s leaving him her gold lace, Bangles, ring, waist chain that he kissed 

Upon their wedding night. 

Now it is getting time to leave these precious gifts.

Soon the dimly lit AC ante chamber

Will throw up blood flowers

Raging their bright pink roses

In her secret garden-in contrast dye

Giving her kind farmer hell

Plucking them.

And down hard nights he’ll remember

Her smells of waist chain

Cold upon his kissing lips

That first night of surrender,

Her life braided upon his own,

Among the black slates

Where the rain writes a reason, Rubbing dark blood stains,

Off fine pink secret china roses.

The Mad Man in the Ward

He looked like one of us, 

Ordinary.

He smiled like one of us,

Kept quiet at times

And kept calm if someone asked him If he was mad.

Until when the doctor took out a cigarette,

And struck a match,

And he jumped at it,

Crying, ‘I loved her, I loved her’

She deceived me,

And rolling on the floor 

Burst into flames. 

Man Drowning

I saw a man die, and looked on.

The sea hung like a glass rope

Tightening about his neck

As the water smothered him

Under the weight of its kind breast. They hauled him up bloated, 

Like deadwood.

Sharp as rotor-blades

Chopping my brain,

There came from the distance suddenly

Cries not yet born,

Of some woman in some kitchen garden

Nipping fresh vegetables

For his favorite evening meal

And a child in the front lawn playing, Dreaming of the bright new toy In those big dead hands.

Lines from the Mortuary

The doctors come in neat white overcoats,

Their steths dangling like oversized hookworms 

Across their necks,

 straining hard at the scenery

 Of skeletons, and the ghosts of malignant x-rays.

A fly sniffs up the incinerator smoke of burning scabs, 

Dried blood, and all our bandaged pus.

In and out, slapping doors of quiet upon our faces, 

The trolley men go; fresh clots on their braces, 

Pinned as polished medals.

They tuck one into a black box,

taking all his clothes away.

They dab all that talcum, so fresh through mourning, 

He’ll stay. Outside, some are shaking;

Some still need to cry.

 Some who think they’ll choke up,

They just close their eyes; 

And then they realize, 

That the only ones that always long for the dead 

Are the falcons encircling the skies.

Beyond this, there is no device; 

no light in the black x-ray. 

Beyond this, the doctors with their coffee mugs 

Have nothing to say.

So they shake gloved hands, 

lay down their gloves,

Say hello into their cell phones and nod regret, 

Then get back like us in that one long queue 

Among Shakespeare and his fools.

The White Van

The white van passed me by again.

I looked in thro’ the rear window

Where the silver cabrioles gleamed

In thick maze of gold guilloche

Upon the cold glass box

In which once not too long ago

Father lay, 

Quiet as a plucked feather.

It pushed to a side.

I remember falling,

My hands clutching

The red wayside forget-me-nots.

The white van once again sped away

Simmering upon hot black macadam,

Closing in to keep its time

With ashes in another home of rain.

The Easy Chair 

Leaves make a dry heap of huddled birds on it this wet morning.

A few raindrops march upon its dry couch, looking for a river bed to fall. Everything is as usual, where it stays.

The pendulum in the cracked wall clock 

looks every inch a prisoner

 who has slipped into a coma.

 There, from a termite eaten frame, school children we no longer recognize,

 smile back from a hundred years.

This morning, in misted breath, 

the easy chair in the verandah 

opens my cataract eyes

pouring into them, 

fables of my father dying in its arms.

The Mad Woman in the Shiva Temple

She is tantric with her young hands

Erect for a grief between her Shiva and her eyes.

 For hours she has been standing On one leg.

Her saffron robe dusts 

His third eye In the shape of Agni.

She knows a man who seized her lips, Who ripped open her breasts like a purse 

Digging away its gold.

Now, what is love, Shiva, my Rudra? Is it all about stealing the body?

Is it endlessly spearing the cleft

Between my growing moons

After that hangover 

Between parted thighs?

 You know it all, Rudra

Then why do you not speak?

 Between you and me

There’s nothing left to hide. 

The one who took away all my gold What did he gain? 

What do we all gain, my Rudra

 Except six feet underground?

The priest goes about his way

He doesn’t even see her

As he fills Shiva with fresh bael leaves Covering his third eye.

But Shiva sends her his gift,

The small white snake upon his matted hair

Gliding upon the hollow of her cheek Taking her six feet beneath, 

Into new moon darkness. 

The Waters of the Ganges

Have these waters of the Ganges

 Been flowing down memory 

For small change?

In these dry bones I see the winter

 in a dead man’s eyes: He

Could have sailed my blood.

Have these ghats burned their dead in waste?

Ashes blow in the air,

 fall in the eyes

Of spread peacock feathers 

Searching first rain;

As a lone boat drifts ashore,

A white flower floating on the water Is a translucence of God. 

Varanasi, Early Morning

No one has yet ventured 

To satiate the dead souls.

The Ganges in spate

 Scatters the hustled boats.

Dung-brown mendicants

With thick matted hair

And unkempt beards

Sit around

Lighting fiery chillums 

Stronger than Shiva’s third eye

As a body draped in red,

Jostles down to Manikarnika,

To partake of the fires of the primordial dead.

The Attic of the Gods

I still remember the attic of the Gods.

I had to climb the wooden stairs up

Where the step once broke and fell away,

Bringing down grandmother to the bottom floor,

Dead. Careful not to slip,

The climb led to a childhood’s serendipp’d

Waking dream. 

The colored window glass 

Interned with playing card aces brought the sun in

Like tiny drops of blood upon pain’s tranquilized stain.

In the silence, low bats waded in brown ocean waves, 

A thousand close, 

but not one touching the other,

Their red eyes battled with counts of the night dead.

Nothing could stop that motion,

Not even a funeral pyre,

While I glided beneath

Under the fanning of the simmering wings,

Graceful as peace beneath an earthquake,

And reached out for my long haired one,

His celestial bow hung on his broken shoulder

And chaste wife fused upon his breast,

About to set out to Chitrakoot.*

Now it was a time to wipe their tears

And I, in hot bat weather under the sand rain

Sat all night cradling my Aryan God,

Like a new born upon my lap

Who would set out on the morrow

For fourteen years of exile

To keep his dying father’s word, Helping him find his broken arm.

 

* The forest of Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh, India, is famous for its significant role in the exile of the Hindu God Sri Rama, the avatar of Sri Krishna. 

War Memorial, Spring, Pune

Spring is in marigold flower

Bright as the reflection

Of that last camp fire

 When they were around, 

All, together. 

Graves of English Soldiers,  

Kirkee, Pune

The Pune dust is heavy 

upon these snow white crosses 

laid out in turfed rows among the dry Deccan flowers. 

Death could not have been made to appear more beautiful or painless, though sadder than mushrooms

 in the breaking rains are, 

these wounds that have turned from red to green across their carefully crafted names. 

They, once brave as Owen, 

mad as Gurney, Gentle as Brooke. 

These Are the Things We Could Talk About

These are the things we could talk about for instance; Rising prices-inflation

non-availability of food grains

things we could build our theses upon: Poor children down the street, hunger’s acid burning down their parched tongues. 

Our green country

far gone, the morning sun weeping out from somewhere 

among the denuded trees,

 like love betrayed. Other things

happening around us. Flung breasts of our raped women slaughtered 

and hung

 over the thorn walls of partition.

So much more.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. But we would rather look away, 

give a god to ransom, & quietly forget,

a bloody country with clipped wings flying out of Nehru’s hands.

Memories of a War (1962–64)

Soldiers marching,

Lie dead upon the front.

Father, mother and me

Are glued to our gold-laced Murphy radio

Listening to All India Radio,

Broadcasting the big list of them stated missing,

Or dead, before the advancing Bamboo curtain.

Mixed wounds anoint

Earth’s winter body,

As ash bleeds

Spilling over our stone gods past the loc.

How many times we switched on Mohammed Rafi

In our round Murphy radio

In between the war-

Its faithful green grasshopper light twitching

Faint signals of intermittently dying frequencies.

I can still hear in the wind,

Chaudwin ka Chand ho

La jawab ho…

And the slow rise of a country’s tears

Carrying Nehru’s hearse

Past India Gate,

And in the memories of a Murphy radio

Breathe the silence of those young girls,

Their bindiyas sparkling on their foreheads

Waving to their young husbands riding into the mountains,

Then turning back,

Wearing the snowing Kailash over their bodies, 

Where they buried their Brindavan, With mangalsutras dyed in tricolor.

Bindya-Saffron mark worn by Indian women, suggestive of marital bliss.

Brindavan-the garden of amor, of Krishna-Radha Ras.

Mangalsutra-Wedding chain.

Tricolour-Indian National flag.

Indo-Pak War

(A Tele wire photo of Indian soldiers marching to war)

On the peanut wrapped paper,

Are the handsome young faces.

The mountain road winds away as they go up smiling, 

With the blue lark of sky above them.

Around them is the ceaselessly falling snow. 

Going to war. The real picture.

The one holding his new gun,

Tenderly as upon a bride’s hands, Will soon turn a bloody killer.

Never looking left or right,

He must pass the test

Of raped daughters and blasted skulls,

Drink from sudden springs of blood

Beyond thinning lines of control

To quench his country’s thirst. 

Now,

The one behind-

The ones farther behind,

They gather together in the darkness

In diminishing togetherness in candled winds.

Tele wire, more than twenty years ago,

When twenty came just once, Handing them down,

Chocolate-coloured guns.

This bit of paper rolling in the corner,

After the unwrapping of salted peanuts,

And no one in the party caring,

Among the drinks,

If the one who stood smiling in the falling snow

Ever came back,

To hold once more his young bride’s hand,

Or to laughing children,

And warm breasts,

Breaking between a welcome drink, By quiet firesides in the cold rains. 

Woman Kissing Her Gun

It is the victory

of the perfect shot: 

Her lips soften on the bayonet 

as a slug softens on a wet bough streaming with rain: 

Death is her last petal. 

John Lennon’s Glasses

Oneof them is crystal, 

washed clear in the bright pool 

of his poems. The right one. 

  The one on the left,

still grows its ikebana of blood of that night he stepped out into Dakota entry way;

  And pounding rain.

Devil Woman

(In memory of the singer, George Jones)

I thought he hadn’t left. But he had. Already.

It was not winter, not yet autumn. The cherries still hung 

Red as lips not kissed, 

the moonlight sliced on them 

Like a bite that kept dreamers dreaming. 

The night

His kidneys had split like beans: 

I still had him crooning to me

‘Devil Woman’ and in the middle of it,

Thought of him, once in a late winter night, upon his lawn mower

Racing five miles an hour to the only open pub away ten miles; 

That had its last light still on

Knowing he would be there, 

Even if it had to be on grass cutting wheels. 

Caitlin is Back Home 

(Recalling the life of poet Dylan Thomas ) 

I

Laugharne did not expect this, 

The way things ended.

Late night fights,

Sex, and more beer. Hazy 

Fire-fly meanderings 

And the smallest cigarette stub Crushed by the last flickering post.

II

Bright bricks swim to view, as first light

Bursts to blood. His pug fingers already squat on cork

 Drowning in early beer foam.

By the blue bay,

The Boathouse is a crab stink,

 its closet tittering 

By the old faucet that howls for water.

(Love is crushed on the unwashed bed Where Caitlin sleeps drunken Without her knickers on).

III

Through small burns under the Swansea sky

October birds, the things of light,

Whirl bible-black into the overgrown child 

Whose coat pocket drips salt,

Of bright sea ferns washed ashore.

So, when she comes in stomping the crucifix

To ‘Is the bloody man dead?’ 

The snail horns of his coma in quiet vapor 

Have shut the chained mouth of the singing sea.

IV

And he waited, glowing white upon the hill,

His small curls growing wild under Until they caught and wound the lost bitch 

Fused to his waiting bones.

It was not to lie at all to each other again

But just to lie face to face 

Beyond poetry and other lies,

Among a dozen slugs 

Waking blind to darkening clay,

And he no more asking to get back to Browns For one mug, 

Or for Caitlin, with no more hops in her hair, 

back home, her cartwheeling done.

What Do You Do, Death?

What do you do death,

 With this body?

When it can no more

Turn around, as it used to;

Does not anymore seek faith

In a woman’s arms

That used to embrace it in sleep?

When desire

Stops its climb of water,

In the ever green stems of love’s Richter?

Whatever you do,

You deal it square,

Impaling it in thorns of fire,

 Running your maggot legs 

bull dozing,

 Tearing it all to shreds.

Craftsman, poet, that you are,

Chugging uphill on a railroad of pain,

You strike a deal with the easy heart Taking it with you to your night lit bar

 Underground.

Let them wait, let them rip apart, tear, fall asleep, 

Leaving the door open. 

With you here,

It’s a long drink.

Neo Natal

In the pram-like incubators

Fed with ultra-light they lie, 

Pedaling the new found earth.

A little of the parting they have not yet tasted 

Is damped violet, 

and here’s the first of the great lessons 

That flesh will wither up and dry.

The morning sunlight from the window 

Sends in a ray finger. 

It touches one.

The effect is ET like. 

The flesh begins to glow. 

A lifted hand hops

 Its butterfly of blood.

The eyes open.

The search starts.

And between sleep and waking

In maternal orbit,

Love, a naked breast, 

Swims into view.

The Lost Child

At times the lost child still comes

Wading through a bounty of mist leaves,

Waking me. What do I do

With one little memory, 

Running behind those small hours

Waving cold pink hands, 

Touching me untouched,

Playing hide and seek,

Bringing on an abandon of sea rain

As I helplessly watch him 

Drowning in the home aquarium 

Of absent years? 

The Dystrophied Infant, ICU

Such a small body

She keeps returning to

During visiting hours

To hold pressed to her face 

Among her tears

Across the cradled crucifix

 Of her loving hands;

He is snug in her arms,

His fading flake of muscle

Shaking with the beauty

 Of a maple leaf,

Falling. 

She returns

The small body

To the waiting nurse,

Who plugs him back

To his green tubes

As she watches

Through the hole

Of the ICU,

Her face, now a small tsunami.

Back in the lung machine

In the ventilator bed,

He lies motionless,

As inside her rushing breasts, 

His milk turns ice,

Breaking to pieces.

Among AIDS Children

A bridge across the river 

Of love will not touch these shores, That lie waveless upon the earth. 

Here, flesh carries its dim lights

Into mushroom-ribbed prison bars. Sunk eyes with lit flames

Search low wet lights of love. 

Huddled together, 

another wagon shuts. 

Another journey begins.

Pressing pale flesh to flesh

They move across the country reeds That open like god’s eyebrows 

And shut without them.

Among Kindergarten Children

The painted blue window

Up the hill road

 Is a clear camera eye.

A bouquet of tiny faces

Packed close, is strung

 As prayer beads

In early shaft of light.

The morning bell rings.

 Hundreds of small hands 

Fold into moth wings.

One among them,

Is the loneliest,

With his father dead,

Mother dead,

In a bike fall.

His small hands tremble

As in the loud prayer

He secretly sees

His father, his mother,

Rising in a storm

In God’s green pasture,

As upon his cheeks 

Frolic

Clear tears,

As summer sheep

In newly shorn pleasure.

Children Going to School

The trees above them darken 

with green. It is summer. 

The birds have flown away

In search of grub. Hot buds break with puberty.

With sunshine on their lips, 

the children,

Holding hands, are off to school. Soon,

They’ll bring home strange lessons of earth and its motion.

Of God who hid Adam among curved boughs,

Of Eve, who got beneath with Satan’s red apple.

The children will wear their hair long,

Before they wear away, mirroring their teacher’s words 

That nakedness is sin. 

They’ll know why.

And, when the children return late,

Running for shelter away from the night rains,

Treading on dead petals strewn in the streets,

The buried roots clawing up their castled blood 

Will have turned the trees,

 the leaves, the flowers, All red.

The Little One, Drawing.

One cold night,

In crayon rains

I watch the lights you make 

On the drawing wall, 

Your small trap of happiness.

The small trap,

Where birds overlook

 Their migration.

The lamp posts shed

Firefly lights

And darkness turns 

Its eyes to god.

There’s a train

Just about to leave,

Beyond the scenery

Of our parting and farewell;

My child,

Let your train run,

Over these shackled bridges 

Across the longest river,

Safely among the milkwood trees.

The Mentally Retarded Child and His Father,Walt Disney Studios, USA

In the strange look 

in his father’s eyes, 

Tears have chiseled to stalactites.

He can go no further

Than the sand circles that swamp

His child’s gazing azure,

Glazed in the blue skies above him,

At the balloons overhead, 

like coloured gods in heaven.

His son goes up the escalator,

He comes down the elevator,

But in that small face, 

the dolphins of laughter 

Do not swim.

They that pass them by are polite,

 not to stare 

At the open tomb of mouth,

 the grave stone teeth,

The sprawled numbness of crippled fingers

As he yawns to sleep. 

Here’s a softness of the human self,

Betrayed for reasons beyond all karmic belief, 

Trapped under the growing stone of flesh.

In the blue perambulator among the garden flowers

Is the sound of the father’s river turning to quiet sea, 

As around him,

 in shrill circles of childrens’ delights The grand roller coasters speed on.

A Poem for my Daughter

Your footsteps come up the stairs

Treading the heart’s loose sheaves

Among a bouquet of blood coloured

Roses, where the falling light

 Breathes love among the stones.

 Seeing me you break to bloom,

Your smile meteoring all over my face.

But I prepare, that one day,

This flowering must take leave of me

To hold strange hands

Of one coming indoors with the rain.

So elsewhere, 

past the dancing peacock years

Shot down in pain,

Your wet kisses roll down 

the deserting winds

 Blowing their sand flowers all over The whitening birches of my face.

Moss

Once upon a time,

There was father and mother

And white flowers all done upon the raining terrace 

In between the missed bird calls.

Butterflies romped the white roses, and upon the green 

Carpet of the tenacious climber, 

small flowers 

Lit up their molten gold.

Our school bags filled up with clean slates, colored wax crayons, book labels,

And toffees that mother

Tucked inside a note book, in a tiny chocolate box, 

For teachers and friends.

Once upon a time, in spring’s flower weather,

Father’s holler, don’t stay too long in the sun,

And mother running behind with the half open

Umbrella in the rains,

And as the horn

Of the school bus skied down the church slope;

How we ran, not turning back to see, Two pairs of lit lips, waiting by the wall, 

Waving goodbye.

And now, sometimes in dreams,

As the school bus runs down the church slope,

Down dream hills, half awake, I still run,

A school boy,

Making the same mistake,

Not turning once to see,

Two pairs of lips

By the old wall, quiet,

Waving goodbye,

Sunlit, among the golden moss.

The Indian God

Our climb uphill was slow in the afternoon heat.

Moribund, we steered up the cock pin curve

That brought us eye to eye with the black Indian God, 

In death’s blue stare under the lowing azure sky, 

Brooding quiet among the scattered rocks.

He was magnificent. But his one eye hung, a crushed yolk

Over his face, his blood dribbling, and he could not move.

 Upon the hot macadam, 

his burst urine sac 

Trickled into the cast away jewel- weeds.

We blasted our horn.

All of his three feet, and the one twisted and flayed,

He feebly tried to lift, but fell down    a deadweight 

On his own horns, splaying motionless, 

Pumiced and grated to veal.

But he would not deter from his celestial gaze.

Even a truck could not tow him out now. 

But he had to be out of the way.

So, one heavy muscled whom we caught

Sweltering drunk until half past one,

Fastened heavy knots around his broken leg, 

Then tugged and dragged him belching torn 

Past the mist haze of thickening pink grass 

Downhill, and out of sight.

Back in our muted climb up gear,

Silenced by the poltergeists of humble acceptance

Of simple beings that put to shame

The throttles of our human terror,

I saw that night, the heavy roll of stab horns hunting the sun’s eclipse,

Burning the seas red, 

In Time’s quiet abattoir. 

A  God Rises

I saw my poor god rise.

I saw Him rise to fame and riches. The days I had passed him by in my school bus

 He was no more than a sapling.

He had no shelter.

I have seen him being bathed in the rains.

I have touched him hot in the summer sun.

But now all that has changed.

One day a wandering sadhu came over, 

And put a red brick over his head.

 He tied a bell to the nearby tree.

And he let my god grow.

Today I can’t tell you how rich my god really is.

The hermit who put a red brick 

and tied the bell

 Shuttles between India and New York.

The sapling is a now a banyan.

All I know is that all the year round

A hundred lepers, and a thousand beggars

Now vie to lie

For alms on either side of His interlocked street.

Tirupati Temple

The bright red bougainvillea bloom

Falls with its ribbons

From the Lord’s gold crown.

We pass by the child with no hands, Dropping him no food, no coin.

A dog runs past us; its open lesions

Bombed every second by fat blue flies. Upon the hill is our rich god

Cast in magnificent black stone. 

We tonsure our heads,

Lay our hair like flowers at his feet.

We strain for the perfect darshan,

Wondering how any woman’s breasts

Could fill the 24 carat brassiere 

Sparkling diamonded, 

upon His hundi.

Africa

We children used to sit

Around the red teak table

With the Book of Knowledge 

Open with its picture Of Africa. 

That’s where we were soon going. 

To the country that stood out like the cat muscle

On Cassius Clay’s shoulders.

We would get there, 

As soon as father’s office papers

 Came back from New Delhi. 

For days, months, years, 

Africa was our mulberry bush. 

Africa. In all weather,

the book would lie open

Upon the teakwood table. 

We would sit and dream of the crown of Pyramids 

Or of our feet dipped in Uranium. 

The pygmies came out of the Denkali forest 

At night with their poison-tipped arrows

But there was always Phantom, 

With his skull ring

And we woke up without sweat. 

Every morning we returned before breakfast to Africa

Turning brown among silver fish 

in the sunlight from the window. 

Decades later near a soccer field in America, I saw Boko on film. 

I saw a black youth’s red blood

 On the dark long white patrolled streets of Africa. 

Now I know, 

Africa is no open book. 

The Ancient Battlefield

Tall grass overlooks the full sea.

We pull uphill in hard gear,

Our tarpaulin flapping in the mud rains,

For the best view of the ancient battlefield,

That glows with a shine of spilt green peas.

‘See the tall mounds? They first withstood the slings, When the horsemen came riding.

Then came the long guns’. 

The guide told us stories 

Of not just wars, but of kings who summoned war widows 

Struck by their beauty wading in grief. 

Of others who were hanged for refusal to entertain, 

With jasmine and myrrh 

Upon the slayer’s bed. 

‘The sea knows it all, sirs, she’s the mother of fable’.

My eyes turn far and wide, hoping I’ll find

A piece of shrapnel, or even a rusted sheath 

Mossed with the centuries. 

And find one.

But I know that I am sniffing up now

The smell of the fallen dead brought up by the rain. 

‘Ah, yes’, says our guide, ‘there is an emperor’s ghost here, One slain, trampled over by his own chariot wheels. The war kept going on, nobody knew, His body wasn’t found for days.

That was the last battle fought on this ground’.

Its’ getting dusk, and time to leave.

There isn’t enough light for another twilight shot.

A few feet away,

Upon the stones, the broken lemon twilight drips,

Just as the blood of men with slashed necks slipped,

 Their closing eyes remembering 

Their women all wet, back home. 

Replica

(Keats-Shelley Museum, Piazza de Spagna, Rome)

I look up at the ceiling,

 at the painted daisies 

That made Keats say, ‘I can feel 

The daisies growing all over me’.

So, he lay somewhere here, the curly haired lad, 

Looking up at the ceiling 

crowded with yellow daisies.

I imagine that blood drop,

The one he stared so hard at, as into a mirror 

That reflected slow, hard truth. 

There is the distinct voice of water, 

From the Fountain of the Old Boat, And the wind, blowing in the kind of air Keats breathed in, to ease his shredding lung.

Here, Severn must have sat,

Pressing Keats to his breast as he gasped, ‘Lift me up, Severn, …I am dying, hold me awhile… I shall die easy…. don’t be frightened, thank god it has come…’

But it had not yet come.

It kept him waiting till early dawn

Like the last unopened letter of Fanny Brawne,

As quietly, his friend kept painting,

 A fever, that posterity

Would not willingly let die.

Morning Drive, Jordan

I open the newspaper, 

and my eyes drive over

Hundreds falling in a war,

 in this distant land.

As I keep driving down for breakfast

I shall not turn to see blood drops falling, 

But only turn to you asking,

What happened love, last night?

 All of them, falling over earth like wet kisses, 

Falling in a war, like rain. 

Night Sea from King Solomon Hotel, Jerusalem

The quietness 

Of a million lashes

Upon a lone footprint, 

Walking the sea Of Galilee. 

Green

The first day of spring. 

Upon the rich tree top a caress of morning flowers.

And from deep within, 

A sudden burst of parrot bloom. 

Orchids

Hugging dried husks, charcoal lumps,

The neon tube roots warp stealthily all over.

In pillowed dark, in moist rush,

A light green periscope shoots high,

Spurting its riot of colour

 Spilling spring in a dark wind dance Transcending beauty’s trance.

Atop damp walls, greening mango boughs

They loop their brightening heads

Waving their kaleidoscopic flames, Bringing down the sun to pieces. 

Grass

That which happens next to us is grass. Growing thick, 

grass keeps the rule of spreading gently over us. 

It is the wind we breathe that dusts it, that it catches, following our smell

 till it hounds us down to the last blade. 

We know this must happen as we tread their brightness fleeting past us like some sad cherished thing, 

stroke it along our hands,

 feeling in its waking calm a softness of fresh maggots climbing us before the storm. 

Light, neat, grass.

Waving in green symphony all over dark earth, 

dragging us with its green hair across the slow blinds of the moon.

Looking out of my window

Out there, is a loneliness of trees.

Each one, rooted to itself, alien to the next.

Keeping their distance,

As the breeze enamours their leaves

Emboldening them to touch one another

And feel the cold of time,

The sun upon their pores.

But it is not here, open to sky and air,

Where they keep to themselves,

That matters, but hereunder

Beneath us, unlike us who stay away,

Once death makes our distance stronger,

Hereunder, where we can no longer

Turn to earth to recover our lost loves, 

They keep running into one another,

Their roots, more than the shapes 

Of our holding hands, or night kissing lips,

Taking on earth together, 

Weaving into that sodden darkness,

Flesh upon flesh 

Breathing in one deep breath 

Their blossoms of dawn.

The Lemon Tree in the Backyard

The long boughs darken

 in sun and rain

Pythoning into the air,

Sending rich green scented shoots of leaves

As among the leafy hideaways, 

breast

 round green lemons 

Bailed out from among the rich white flowers.

Inside its recess, is my childhood Sleeping, shaded from the rains.

The boughs huddled in slants to the skies,

Make for my tree bed. 

The smooth thorns around,

Do not know yet, to hurt. 

The red ants filing past, 

Do not seem to mind. 

The wind blows into the leaves, 

As kisses into a loved one’s ears.

But one day, as I return from school,

I see only the Judas sun. 

The air is a riot

Of departing smells of lemon leaves, mowed, and sheared.

The long soft wood that held me hiding, 

Lies naked, open to light, 

as one raped, 

Awaiting her beloved’s return.

As night shuts down its praying stars,

An agate moon razes the darkness,

And the last white flower on it closes,

Magnificent in the entombed lemon air.

Digging

The soil I now pick contains fragments of my dead.

They once saddened and happied themselves here turning to sun 

and moon, quite puzzled, then taking things as they came, for granted. 

This hard brown laterite I turn,

to plant a few periwinkles stolen from the mound of one long obscure, dead. They should grow well here. So I turn out the millipedes curling up ashamed of sudden expose, into dark rings of topaz and sapphire.

 Pinned to sudden light they have all coiled up in abject surrender. These, I bury back with the pushed out soil, strange roots crushing in, 

lurking deep like soft nerve fibers sending messages of thirst to secret destinations. Each scoop of mud brings more life to light, lost like death underground, doing odd jobs, ordained like saints salient in dark recess drawing salary in kind.

Mud-work is a kind of worship.

A silent thanksgiving, for a home, called earth.

Not to be Beaten by the Platinum Dawn

Not to be beaten by the platinum dawn

The laburnum keeps putting out its gold.

The night rain has slivered its left over silver,

Balancing Time’s dolls upon the edge of every leaf

And left like a late flight

To catch up elsewhere on arrival.

 A new rain pulls up over the breasted hill 

Trailing night dew all over its face.

It pulls to a stop by the wet eucalyptus tree 

Gathering among its sun flamed branches, 

Coloured mountain birds, 

like poetry. 

Still Earth

Still earth.

On the museum walls of night

Are masterpieces of sleep, 

And the wind painting timeless trees.

The grasshoppers here are eminent authors. 

Sometimes,

One strikes upon an original idea.

Together, they make it 

A good poem. 

MH 370

Hello,

239 lives.

Hello. Hello.

Maybe it was the pilot

 Flying too low.

In love with water,

Is as far as you can get 

Making the simulator, 

The simulated.

Hello.

Ok, Goodnight.

Window panes shut for landing

 Seat belt sign off;

239 names writ in water 

Afloat a quiet night sea.

The Aircraft Lands

Things familiar turn new 

as good poetry does. 

A river turns the size of her palm folding in yours, 

as the front wheel 

dips to a forehead kiss. 

Clouds from an Air plane

Foamed beauty up here

 piled one upon the other 

like breast upon lesbian breast

 upon breast in nude song.

Dappled, sometimes crimson-bitten

 at the tip;

Making a memory stay,

 entering a continent so blue,

 the sky, a wet dispersion in love’s lonely island. 

Stone Cutter’s Song

Rarer than bird song

From morning to night,

Is the music those hands make 

Upon the gravestones.

Stone-song in joy and sorrow

Upon yesterday and tomorrow,

Rakes in bread music

As the hands break to wake 

Tombs and altars 

Among the stones.

Stone cutters song,

Rarer than bird song is,

Not among the shades of flowers 

But in the long sun,

Where the music bred,

Is all blood and bread,

That fathoms high altars

 Tears open tombs

From among

Cold, dark stones.

Bird Dying on the Terrace

What has it done, for this long last undertaking?

The shreds inside the feathery wrap

Of small fragments that explode inside, without voice?

The first quiet of sudden tameness

Of the wild. The look of distrust, 

and then, 

Submission, too close to knowing, That no trust, or tryst mattered.

The feet beginning to claw in, 

in the slow rigour 

As blood begins its break; 

From words 

To strayed alphabets.

That it came at all,

As though to tell us that there’s for every one 

A time to stop flying.

It surprised us; 

That such a wild thing

Should glide down to the terrace,

As though it would peck out every grain of pain

From our hands,

Degranading in slow implosion

 Its splayed feathers.

What it has done, for this long last undertaking,

The other end of our common engine

How of an airborne thing

It makes a scampering spider,

A wringing worm, a ripped frog,

Strung bloody whippet,

Before turning it to fog stain of last night’s rain.

Animal Action

Every morning the sound of hooves coming down

My mountain of sleep,

 keeps the rhythm

 Of soldiers in the early morning mist 

Marching to an unequal war.

They go down unwritten in bleating chapters 

Past the pink pages of the rising sunshine.

In the valleys below where I ride to work,

There is a smell of dank redness hung to dry

That never leaves. 

Between midnight and morning.

I am so used to this. I forget what I’m passing through. There’s a great wall that prevents me from seeing my own execution, 

That disables my cries among its shocking pores.

 So used to these chained soldiers tied neck to neck, I watch them now for the last time.

They bend down to their knees,

Licking cowpea for honey, seconds before dark lightning

Strikes down their dappled flesh, Raining beeps of red all over

 For another leftover night.

Animal Action-2

Soon, all these goats 

Will vanish for Christmas.

Surely we’ll betray them all,

Be party to their pain 

That for the sake of our taste buds We’ll not mention again.

Now, we have tied them all firmly

To our tall trees

So they cannot escape. 

They are now happily chewing

 Their last supper.

Is the knife ready? 

Blood must flow smooth,

 So the flesh tastes good.

We’ll also pray,

As the body jerks and cooperates, Letting the blood through.

Ready?

Take one from the nearest tree.

Remember.

No cross sprouts 

upon the hillocks of their blood

 As their eyes blur out

On our closed Bibles. 

No men in long white robes

Or flowing beards

Shall stand up to pray

Or show them the way to heaven.

And our gods,

Perhaps thinking it awkward

To look on

Stand with their backs turned, Talking to us

Of deliverance. 

A Man and his Dog

Down the black slopes of hurt,

 Of wounds, they go,

Man and dog together.

Human love leaves us.

Left alone, we stand under the last tree shade 

Blowing its desert flower.

The woman much loved

Leaves without saying good bye

Careful her hands are not too long in the sun.

The children overseas send love

In cellophane wrappings,

Their kisses turned dry as bird droppings

That do not remember,

Their own little cries

 Still wet upon your shoulder.

Pull that chair closer, 

say cheers to the table,

Fill the iced glass

With endless night. 

Paint that void with cries

Dripping slow twilight.

But they go down well, have gone down the ages, 

Both man and his dog.

He is your light

When you have no eyes.

When you are lost he can lick you all over, 

With a wetness of stars in the rain.

Imagine. Everything you loved

 Has said goodbye and gone.

But only this-

Stays where you said stay-Then secretly,

Comes up the moonlight with a bone in its mouth 

To sleep with you when you are dead. 

Rabbit Burial

Bibles in trembling palms

Render the Lord and His giving ways. Outside, the hardening grate of shovel Rips earth’s crust in rough terrain.

Another prayer ends. The organ falls.

As ancient doors shut, the roof bell tolls 

Peals of terror of our closing eyes Upon its weather beaten bronze.

The prayer folk trundle past in holy belief

Still unreconciled why death must be Time’s thief;

Passing by a jaded pair of long pink ears,

With blue irises turned black upon its round white bouquet

Canine-ripped and bloody,

Swamped in a camouflage of fire ants.

Small beast, he heeded no church closing; No burial weeping in his torn sleep’s loafing.

But how now he quietly flares our secret fire

That triumphs each morning,

Flaming us into that non-returning night.

A Line of Ants

A line of ants

Is more than the Triad

Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva

Is a rosary

Without Christ in the middle

Wormy, trajectory,

But

Is a bond,

A line of control

War and peace

Suicide squad

No beggars

No untouchability

No flag to hoist

For a country’s independence

No oath to take

No allegiance to prove

No traitors

No brigands

Just

Food chain

Highway

Ground for feelers

And,

No talk of love 

No infidelity

No temptation

No waiting to back stab

No talk of sex

No dreams

No poetry

Just the wet wall,

The infinite traverse,

In the line of duty 

Horses

I’m tired. Let me sleep now. 

These poems will stay 

As horses upon the hills.

Bloody horses that have smelt

The dust of wars, whose splendid manes

Have been kissed by Cleopatra and Nefertiti,

And are now blindfolded,

Because they have seen the lust of queens 

Making love among the stables 

With stranger crossover kings.

All for dust, for desire that flows down

The wine barrels of night 

Where love lies betrayed, 

Crucified without sighs.

The horses. Let them stand.

For they have galloped

The sands of destiny,

Stared at the deathless eyes 

Of The Sphinx

Drinking the sacred waters of the Nile.

I’m tired. Let me sleep.

These poems, restless as Pegasus upon Helicon, 

Adrift as Alexander’s Bucephalus, They wait in the hills of destiny.

They’ll stay for me.

Penguins

Down the grand slopes in monastic treble, their feathered arms conducting church choir in the air, they turn up at the riverfront waiting,

like souls in the sky in expectation of grand heaven. Always in pure black and white, they climb up one by one in gifted queue the steep kingdoms of ice; then from the steppes let themselves fall,

perfect swimmers into the wetness of fishing seals; This is pure god, 

the flowing water, as around rising foam they build the circle of love 

as about Him, the nuns build 

their rosary of earth’s ice.

Love

Love wears butterfly wings.

The butterfly does not know,

It has to go away in a day or two. What is celestial to her

 Is just flying.

No one told her

 To enter flowers.

No one told her

That she was love, 

That her wings were etched 

With God’s imagination.

No one told her,

That soon one day

She would no longer fly,

That the passing wind would drift her

Tearing her down slide,

And she would lie,

Unable to lift,

Her wings,

Folded together.

What if in them, was all leftover

As if in a prayer,

As though God came down and told her,

As in now, your helplessness,

 As it was in your beauty, 

Here is my hand... . 

Touch me.

Butterfly Dying

Now, each to its own breath.

Every time it happens, 

there is no one else.

The beatings of shred wings

In a diaphragm of pain,

Mute, in a language of inability to lift into blue air.

This trying hard. Still trying harder. God, see this.

Appear now

Light as a common flower,

Before the proud coiled tongue stiffens.

Do not stop or look. This blind flutter.

Or, if you stop by,

Please do not stare. 

Today as I Walked 

into the Rest Room

Today, as I walked into the rest room

 I saw a butterfly lying on its wing, on the wet floor. I looked here and there, because an officer should not be caught picking up butterflies,

 and let my palm to it, 

holding it like water in my palm.

For a moment it stayed-dead

or so, I thought, till it shook like mercury spilling over me, circled me three times like a halo, sat on me as though I wore a halo upon my breast, upon my- then it flew high, so high, 

I thought it would tear the sky 

and hit the sun...

Wings that could have died

 if I hadn’t been there, I could feel my heart sink down ages and be part of Christ’s coffin without its myrtle thorns, without its nails,

 but just the truth of flesh and blood.

My, some way to go.

The Garden Snail

These past three days 

He has been hanging around the room 

Having come in

Through the cold water faucet. 

He is around, big, scrotum brown, 

Hovering in peace,

Unaware of what I am thinking, 

His house, upon him, perfectly washed, 

The whites in between the zebra brown, 

Gently layered in clear lines, 

Like independent traffic lanes, on interstate.

He hovers quietly over 

Like a satellite on its axis in space, 

As though he was receiving clear signals of his movements, 

Quietly pulsing within from elsewhere,

With the poised energy of a calm delightful erection 

Warming on the pared flesh of a woman in love;

At first I thought I would crush it like an egg

Underfoot, sending its pieces like myrtle thorns all upon it,

And it would still endure all that with its peace of silence

As now of its wiping movement,

And I would flush it down the closet, For there are things we must keep on killing 

To make our appearances clean 

and pure.

But then I let him wander,

A little into the water, 

A little onto stone,

His antennae bulging out 

With all the love for the earth

With the wetness of a licked fawn;

And as he kept fanning out his being into the open,

Stuck like vanishing glue to the ground, 

He splayed as big as the violet underside of a lotus leaf

Browned in the mud, 

His flesh blossoming into a bright mushroom umbrella 

Into which all creativity and imagination ran,

Seeking shelter,

And he was still, so still,

As though he knew time waiting upon him,

Because he was the perfect poem of the universe.  

Deep Sea Aquarium

There are beings here beyond all our known flesh. Densely yellow,

 the zebra clown fish jabs its mouth into the vulva of the anemone, oval, open, in white fox-glove coverings.

Huge lobsters pile upon razor rocks, their long reeds tipped in luminousness meditating with the tenor of controlled hands caressing stoned breasts upon hot nights.

Too blue to fathom the glitterati,

 part of the secret loop, in deep eternity swimming the ocean lights, shot in colour without sun,

each, hand painted by God,

 then lowered gently into earth’s trembling waters.

The Dissection

We knew for some months now,

That there would soon be frog-cutting classes.

It thrilled us that we could take control

Of lives leaping among dark leaf and shade,

Breathing with heart and tongue much as we, 

And thirsting for water with bruise or pain.

(There were other things we did not know).

In the wet sack that still peed lake water in the school lab corner 

The squeezed muscle packs jostled and fought

Beneath the heavy knot for air, salivating in the dark

 Crammed as prisoners taken to a winter camp in a war 

And kept waiting to bleed to readied knives.

The school bell rang. 

The guard in khaki 

Uncorked the chloroform beaker

Onto their jubilantly springing heads. The thumping sack untied,

Went quiet as a tubercular lung.

There was one for each of us.

I saw my neighbour envious

That I had one bigger, 

a more handsome one.

We stretched them

 unconscious on their backs

Upon the wooden slabs in the water tray 

Pinning each leg and hammering,

Until we had them all neatly fixed.

The cloaca was finest to slip the scissor edge in, 

And to work upwards. 

I tore off the fluorescent green-lily-leaf skin

That simmered to my touch 

And cut through the middle.

The raw breast plate parted. 

Inside,

Life’s bloody ruby, small and luminous,

 Pulsed in secret space to its magic tree 

Gushing forth blessings of red.

A jerk made me turn. I froze,

As ripped of its origami of flesh and blood

One suddenly rose in mid-air, Unleashing unearthly power

Slapping the face of its sinner,

With lit wounds 

of The Resurrection.

The Smallest Creatures

God’s small, smaller, smallest, creatures

That do not utter a weeping cry,

But lie upturned, overturned,

All day, all night

Awaiting patiently, death,

Not even knowing that it is only to die That they thus lie.

Those that we brush away to death with our hand

Or stamp under our feet,

Even the life forms we breathe in;

God’s small, smaller, smallest creatures

Giantly beautiful, perfect, in wing, feet, eye,

Or symmetry,

All born, not knowing,

Their own beauty, or their spirit of life,

Or their seemingly eternal wait that’ll soon one day

Turn around in the helplessness of their deaths;

Yet born but as one, part of this great loop,

That connects the universe, the earth with starry sky

Yet given, each to its own short lived harmony

Its enduring pain, each a lesson, however tiny;

How God wreaks his sublime treasures

Through that one great truth,

As he works through us,

The truth of the universe, the mystery of earth’s lives,

 That He shreds everywhere, 

Unanswered, 

in His canon of pain.

Poetry, Small Beast

Poetry, small beast,

Climbing your hands,

Feeling your face,

Nibbling the nipples of your breasts

Right up to the heart,

Knowing, love must be there,

A small beast that trembles,

Bites, 

But doesn’t hurt,

And looks with doleful eyes,

For your cuddle,

Your warmth,

Telepathic all over you

Not to leave it,

But to let you hold it,

Infinite in your hand

As a gently

Rising breast, 

As love, that fills

With night’s secret blood.

Small beast,

That in your caress

Has turned into a pet

And hides, and hides,

Deeper and deeper,

Burrowing, into your nights

With her hair weed, her flower,

Blood clots by the hour, 

Shadows and light,

Making a home 

Its home, your life.

The Dark Room

A dark room haunts us.

 In the heart’s raining shadows, bats flee flinging themselves blind across attic twilights. A fragrance of rising dust settles the acrid smell of centuries.

A fear of snakes uncurls in the dark room. 

There’s a fragrant taste of bones where we pressed each other

 for the sip of love

 bending to each other’s salty

 buds of flame, 

having lost along the streets of desire, the memories of our shame.

 Upon cold walls

cheeked with the flaking eels of yester years, the lizards patiently wait for their tails to grow. 

In the secret chamber, mummified, the sun lies in peace.

Here, light is a killing wound.

Nirvana

What is this light?

Snakes unroot from great trees

 Upon the dense brown falling leaves

Among millipedes uncurling in the dark.

From the birth of burnt stars,

 years of light

Fall upon our swollen days and nights

Browning as spiked bats hanged electric

 In hacked meat across boughs of pain.

Sentenced to hard love is this kind pause

Behind bars of flesh lit with match head ecstasies 

Burning between a woman’s thighs Opening, closing, butterfly wings.

Wriggling through a small hole of night

The Buddha escapes like a worm

Leaving a woman’s breasts half-fondled, a crying river, thirsting secretly for his wand.

Past the leper, the climbing hearse,

The wounded and the dying,

His feet graze  grass blades

 of nothingness 

That cuts into the darkness.

A lost sun rises

Chipping away morning birds

 From its wasting flesh.

The Sharpener of Knives

Who sharpens the knife with his back to the sea

On his grazed wheel?

 So many fish heads wait

To be sliced by the wharf;

This must be done with precision and skill.

Who pedals the wheel, 

holds the strumming knife to the sun, With sharpness edged to a Beethovan note?

Give one to the murderer, one to the butcher, one to the lover 

Whose wife lay last night with a new sailor from the East, 

One to Cain to murder his brother. Choose one that is blunted, dip it in salt, 

Bleed it with a kiss.

All knives know the truth of infidelity

Of shaking fins of beauty draped in lust,

Purple gills red with the sea’s betrayal,

And the rim, the silver rim of the fast wheel 

Spitting slow fire, turning full circle.

Fundamentals

Our little pleasures rise from killing.

A taste of blood steamed, camouflages.

There’s a need to cut the brain,

 for neat collapse. Heady flowers we pluck for fragrance.

Give sweet names to the scaffold and head trays. 

The killing ends. 

Our little pleasures, 

They start all over again. 

Psycho

A part of me 

Is always 

In Bates Motel.

That bit of me 

Always enters

The bathroom.

 And keeps me waiting 

Behind the curtain.

That bit of me

 Watches the woman undress.

The audience sees

Only a part of the breasts

Where the shower falls;

But I see it all

And my knife won’t wait;

And here I am.

Stabbing her

Even before I care,

On her back,

All upon her breasts;

As her cries go down in water

 The only eyes I see

Are the eyes of the sink

That drink her blood…

And I am already running,

Running home 

To my

Stuffed mother. 

Murder

Murder has its bit of desire. 

It tastes of apples

And fascinates, like no other.

It rakes the flesh, sends scents

Rending across the sleeping night air.

Rubs shoulder to shoulder

With wet tongues of wolves

Moving quietly, that’ll drip,

Drip, tonight. 

It has  lust that turns in sleep

Showing secret bruise,

Of breast, cordoned away in the low

Sailing moon. It’ll move you quite;

And as a cat wading into the watery kiss

Of the wet grave in the ruins,

You’ll go round and round

 Crushed with its silence of red stones.

For deep within, you know the truth; Murder;  It has in its heart 

The trajectory of love.

The Fisherwoman by the Sea

Her dead fish cling to her

With the closeness of pets. But her black scythe, sharp, 

Cuts off their heads, as blood

Most human, fills the twilight.

She waits. In the roofless hut beside,

Her naked child moves in slumber with a quietness Of uncaught fish in the ocean.

She looks up at the moon

Praying for another no rain night,

As the howling wind plays its game

Entering the dim holes of her lantern, Masturbating to darkness

Its thickening yellow flame. 

The Back Benchers

We were the back benchers. 

Whistling in between the class parallelograms

Sitting on the wooden bench, sketching the heart

With an arrow through its center

Playing cut and paste with juvenile kisses,

So the world would fill with cinema posters of our love.

We then painted our sides with charcoal sideburns

Drew pencil moustaches

And wondered about the naked saplings in Eden.

Our eyes glued as tattoos

Upon the soft bell curves in love’s green alley

Entered windows where the young girls sat

With green joys of their long secret cucumbers

Fanning the air with their purple coloured nails 

Letting their laughter plume into open peacock tails 

Letting us ejaculate like rain.

Now, who brings a tray filled with foam

Of the sea, everything white and beautiful,

As cataract in blind eyes? 

Who sits there in front 

His back turned to us 

upon the horizon’s melon shores Blocking our sight, our view?

Apple Balloon Waist

Twenty years ago she stood there

By the yellow bus station

Sprouting sunflowers and marigolds My dear pink apple balloon waist.

Her cheeks were Nagpur oranges

Her lips raindrops of September

Her eyes were kind of irises

Arranged in the wet brown vase of earth.

I could feel love falling all about her peaches.

Now the shadow trees are falling autumn.

A wanderlust of coral fills up with rocks.

The soft white hyacinths of her hands are turning blue

The tears in her eyes have dyed dew

As coloured chemo capsules spill

Like a tractor tilling the red earth of Mars,

And in the wreath of her long hair falling,

I watch my love among fine white peach fall

 Rage naked in the crying carbon air.

If We Had Glass Bodies

If we had glass bodies 

we’d always be

 watching our blood flow through.

 We would always be looking to see

 if our hearts stopped; we could never kiss because we would break; 

never make love because we would shatter. We would have cared for beauty less 

because our entrails would not paint a beautiful picture.

 The only thing still certain, would be death;

How easily we could be crushed to pieces. 

Nudes on the Beach

Wet to their pink tips the golden women

Sit staring at the tossing blue waves

Frothing spring foam; their fine wet

Symmetry slumped upon twinkling ilmenite

Under the lengthening shadows of the phallus

Rocks. Bright nipples glint like rose studs 

As they sink them deeper into the crested sands

Among the shine of pebbles and colored dead shells.

Upon dumped footprints

The nudes breathe

Letting the bubbling foam rush quietly deep into the deepening twilight zones of love.

They then gently rise,

Running down to the sea

Flaking away the tiny eels of water all over them,

As the dying sun strikes light

Upon the wet rosary of all the held back tears

Of our living and longing by the crying seas; And holds them lit 

in dying orange hands awhile, 

Upon the suddenly darkening waters.

By the Paddy Fields

There’s a solid woman in the mountain hut,

 Her husband is a drunk and deaf

 And she gives her mound away secretly.

She likes boys.

She is famous for that.

Just fifty rupees and after the act

She’ll serve rice gruel, mango pickles, and smoked fish.

She’s famous for that.

Sadly, today is not our day.

The woman has gone to town.

Her sister is here. She won’t give away just like that

But she’ll let you hold her buttocks,

Stiffen her tits, and she’ll hold it in her cold hand.

She’s not married.

Sometimes the drunkard climbs on her

 While her sister turns the other side.

Now we hold her soft buttocks 

that feel like country snails

Quietly slipping,

Her breasts of smoked tapioca, 

Her hands smelling of carp, 

She’s just been cutting.

Well, the sun goes down.

It has been a beautiful day.

That night, among water snails, 

toddy and smoked tapioca, 

A solid woman wading past the river lilies

Grabs us boys by our faces,

And we all go down, as she cuts us all down to pieces 

And eats us up like country cane.

Train No 69

In train no. 69, 

I keep walking

Compartment after compartment, Right through the erect thing.

The women are adrift,

Their breasts partly revealing,

As usual pretending, that it  isn’t

Anything. I see in the AC cab

My father, my mother, already tired,

Fucked up. I come to the pantry 

To look at the red meat

 Dripping  from the Sistine walls.

Someone’s stirring up pulp

Someone’s stewing head rolls. 

Late night in 69, 

It is simmering 96.

I enjoy myself really,

Singing La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

That’s when the EXIT swings open And God barges in 

Asking for my ticket. 

Swell ticket collector

He has earned a bad name already. Incognito as ever

And grand inhuman flurry.

 He’s heading towards me 

And I haven’t a ticket. 

No 69 climbs a New moon 

Shredding light to pieces.

I pull the emergency chain.

Death is a small fine for ticketless travel.

The dog is all knowing

And He is licensed to kill.

Outside, is the smell of mating snakes again.

I push him out into the rains. 

Rose

Inhaling deep into a rose,

My lips upon its petals as upon wet lips, I enter misted cubicles

I didn’t know, were in store.

The wet sense of parting, 

of softness along the way

As though it felt,

 that someone had discovered 

Its inner fray; 

The pollen all golden, well hidden,

That had to be that way; 

jeweled honey

For the bee’s bowel, 

Its feelers and wings,

All that, for a day. 

Maddened with perfume,

I push in my lips deeper; 

And as the petals part,

Even a rose; it feels that parting power 

And petals me in it, 

A woman’s kiss.

Sex Shop, Acapulco

 (Mexico)

We climb the 39 steps.

Melting wax cocks poised on either side 

On their balls, lead us.

An elderly lady points out to one 

She thinks fits hers;

She has it wrapped up carefully,

 like red candy.

The young man in a sombrero 

Works up a dildo like a mouth organ.

A little below us, 

the cover girls come down

On steel poles, skating on their red hills as if on ice

 For two dollars, Coco-lo-co, and a tequila tip. 

Madurai Sun

In the hot Madurai sun,

Behind the closed school wall,

Broken gypsy, she,

Lies upon the drainage pipe

Her crow black nipple

 peeping out of her shred blouse tatter, 

Sucking the hot sun, like fish.

Her gypsy man, the beggar, 

He brings her a handful from the waste bin, 

And feeds it into her mouth.

He then kisses her, helps her,

Picking and eating,

Lice from her hair like a monkey.

She turns and kisses him.

His mouth pounces upon her black nipple

 Sucking sunlight like fish.

They roll together on the hot mud like dung balls

Raised in a dust storm

 As he parts her wide,

Wide, wide as delight,

And she closes in tight upon him,

 Like night.

The Rains Wash Away Everything

The rains wash away everything.

 It makes the road look clean.

It makes mud a bit of a heaven,

Like love things

You want to hold in your hands

 all night.

The worms delight,

 as though God just spat

Wet. It is like lips, lips to flower

Petals, this season, in water riot.

It brings lost things to focus

Almost like Alzheimer’s

That plods back to childhood;

Bubbles, wet hay smells,

Grass where the lit grasshoppers hide Like mildly growing thighs

Under pretty, rose filled skirts.

Much rain. 

It has washed us back

Looking out of windows,

For those bright rainbows

That bangle the earth

 in one splendid bangle.

And then the rain stops. 

Almost as though

To show the way

To the dark snails coming up one by one

And are everywhere

Like sticky bulges showing through moist under wear.

The Man in the Mist

So, what began

as a wild desire, 

a wetness under the forest leaves, turns cold, the sun takes on the words spoken by the lips of rain.

Each whisper turns over to a shade

love cannot hold beyond the secret words of the night spoken,

 lover to lover, 

laid upon the bed of desirous lips. After the earth shakes away its seasons, who weeps upon its crusted stones? 

Hold awhile for me 

this marmalade of flesh,

 that believes all of love, yet doubts, opens the door as it vanishes

 into the dark. 

We light our lights, go searching, 

for one who has gone searching for love.

He hasn’t returned yet.

 One after the other, our torches incandescent, 

we all go away into the mist, 

never missed, 

looking for that man in the mist.

Old Time Friends

Perhaps this is after all, a season.

Friends die. 

In strange unfamiliar rooms

They turn over and become so quiet,

Their painted wagons rolling off the long wet sunsets

Jolting us,

Sometimes making us cry. 

Just how easily they peel away,

One by one,

Each face going out like a wet balloon

And all its bright colors

Nowhere, 

in the center of the carnival, 

Under the big floodlights,

Beside the playing children. 

The Long Road

This is the long road.

The wind snipes across the long road.

From under the sprawling armpits of trees,

Dust blinds the eye as far as it can see, Setting off the sun among the stones, Hiding rain like puberty in its dents.

This has been the road to the future, Blood drops washed in the rains, 

In acres and acres of pain.

This is the long road unfolding light

That grips its darkness in our hands

As it lets us pass

Past the gnarled black viper fork

Ending in the tip of god’s tongue. 

The Bus Journey

The rain just stopped. 

The green wore 

That look of permanence

That shakes you quite with an abundant density,

A play with sunlight

Till everything is nothing

 but chlorophyll splendour

 Of God’s raiment hung over the earth to dry.

By the far road bend, 

the old railway track

Still has the old overturned steam engine upon it to its side  

like an epitaph,

For which no flowers now wreathe, that does not now remember

Those it flung with the great power of God one dark night on all its sides

With cries of blood, all dead.

There are certain yesterdays 

this sifting light among the green

Would want you to keep, 

all secretl to yourself. 

Some dust that’ll not let us

 Into its stupor; they still must remain all over us.

The bus hits the water. 

A small boy, almost naked,

Flying his red kite, mimicking turbulence,

Does not want the rain to be back; the slow

Flood recedes like a whale’s tongue back into the rice fields.

The bus changes to high gear. 

We keep climbing the dark mountain.

Here the ghosts of men that changed to butterflies still wander 

Looking for fine leaves to cover their souls.

Such things; such things sinewy, gentle as vine stalks that climb

Blind to its own happenings,

 into a forest, that can be cut away

Without emotion, 

And there, the first board, 

Among the wild dark grapes

Advertising a hospice, ‘Virgin Mary and the Blood of Christ’,

And further up, upon a rusted gate 

Where no crow’s wing circles yesterday and tomorrow

 Glows the second board, 

‘Old Age Home’ in a hide away 

Of leftovers from an unnamed crown of thorns.

The small berries there are a deep dark red.

Everything is wet, as though, 

The rains know,

One must know where to stop. 

Here. 

Elderly Couple Waiting

(New York Penn. Union Station)

They do not kiss or caress

 Like the young ones who sat here 

A few minutes before.

He lets fall the bag

Tenderly over her worn shoulder That brightens with a little blood

Like fading pink, upon a periwinkle.

Around an island of cast away alphabets,

They sit holding hands beyond the origami of flesh

That the young ones left behind,

 in the name of love;

 In a night lit with tender mercies

Of the bruises of their left over stars. 

An Ageing Parent Talks to his Children

In these, our final days of living,

My children, know this,

That we now only wait

Awaiting nothing in return,

 but only to be

Embalmed in the fires you make 

With our drying bones

That now will easily catch flame.

When you have wept,

We too have secretly wept

Upon your pillows

Turning our hands into cradles 

for your sleep;

We sucked your ooze of blood,

 So your bleeding wounds

 Would stop at our mouths.

Now we are old and grey,

No one will buy the growing silver on our heads;

We have turned to artifices in the wood shelves

Where among your priceless antiques 

That take the pride of place

We only seek there, a darker place to hide.

You who have gone far away, we do not

Ask you to stay back, but only to take care,

Not to fight for the blade of grass upon the breaking fence.

You do not have to return, until perhaps

When we, placed among wet flowers in societal gesture

Your kisses could turn us to wet butterflies upon our quiet faces;

 We’ll always remember the small taste of bread

Buttered, or of apple jam when we kissed you upon your mouths

As you ran away saying goodbye to school;

Those mornings neatly ironed and packed

In uniform of white cloud and pinafore skies

And kept away in secret rooms where we hide

Our love’s sad longings afraid to take them out

Into the light of another day;

And where, in memories of you, we are still warm,

Remembering those ponds of yesterday 

Where you used to eagerly fish for our love;

But now for the convenience

Of our left over flesh that gaze with departing eyes

At the near fire sharpening its plumes

Burning closer,

Let this deed executed,

Lead us to that dark night, with its brilliant day. 

The Painter of Evenings

Your young hands haul me up.

Together we climb the stairs,

And now as I stand upon the final step, Goodbye has the quietness

 Of distant waterfalls.

A small light limps across the hallway

Throwing away

Its crutches of shadows.

Here,

Silence curls its own tongue.

Gold mohurs in the park 

Have suddenly turned dark.

To me, 

And to my room.

Tablets in foil,

The Holy Book,

Beautiful sons far away,

Smiling from across their gold-rimmed frames.

In the corner,

The low catheter, 

the gift of a daughter, 

Rubs shoulders with the clotted Crucifix.

And, I find a window here.

A window, magnificent as a Dali painting 

Seamless into the near night

Where the calm painter of evenings

Gathers unto himself tethered lambs That stare, and patiently await;

 There, I take my place. 

From

‘Father, Wake us in Passing’

How did it feel when a time came,

and our shaking hands 

and watering eyes 

couldn’t keep the torch steady?

  Suo Doro, The Father Poem Two

Frost

This is not In Memoriam

 This is not an elegy.

Look, I’ve come.

I’ve come across the seas for you,

Cried alone in single rooms

To forget the last frozen look in our eyes.

While I climbed the plane.

Just open your eyes.

The doctor pounds your chest

As though you are in a boxing ring.

A nurse whips the blood out of your lungs.

The shut blue clamps of your eyes burn open

Closing back to frost

As my voice cuts into you like a knife And the waiting sea rushes in, Rubbing salt.

Cry

All night you cried out my name.

All night you said,

‘Call him, there he is at the doorway,

Why has he left without coming to see me?’

You pulled at the ECG wires on your heart

Plucking them away ‘these damn telephone wires Connect me to him. Give me the phone.

Do exactly as I say,

I must talk with him now.’

And then your voice turned to December mist,

As upon your tongue,

You buried me alive in your heart turned to breaking tomb. 

America

Did you say

I would come to your arms in December? And in the phone you asked me, ‘Son, what is there in America?

Father, in America,

The Fall is now breathless beauty.

Tall cypresses draw crimson upon their leaves,

The boughs bend low

Looking for the beauty of blood

 In their own reflection 

By the water’s edge.

Maple leaves fall

With a redness of cheeks

 around the blaze of strange funerals Holding mist with a wetness of tears.

And this Fall,

 in America,

I hear the bat wings of your voice on the wires

Shredding to pieces, 

Dripping every ray

Of the topaz shedding sun.

Telephone Call

There is a telephone call.

It comes from across the Atlantic ocean.

You talked then, oh, you tried, 

Your voice slurr’d

Dropping to a side.

It wasn’t a bit like you. But you said, son, I must sleep now.

Then you turned over

Late that night, dipping your head onto a pillow of stars,

Your brain entangling the milk way,

While I walked out into a misted Fall morning

On the other side of the earth, 

The rain pouring entirely

 Out of my empty hands. 

Intensive Care Unit

This is the kindest prison house we have.

Satin white beds.

There, on that one, at the far end,

One sleeps like a log,

With tubes pushed in

 through the holes in the face. 

There again, one pulls at the drip tubes 

With a memory of guitar strings.

That’s where pain penetrates 

Like Sappho said ‘Drop by drop’.

Strapped and tied to our walls of pain Is a sleeping child.

In this kind prison house

Flesh makes no sense. 

And here is father.

Love laid naked

Upon tips of weathering bone, 

A darkness,

Of abandoned light.

Nectar of the Gods

The nurse hands me a sealed bottle.

‘We need a spinal fluid examination on your father’.

 I keep the small bottle

 In my right pocket.

In the lab they check for final payment, 

And I unwrap the cover

 On instructions.

For the first time I see your cerebro-spinal fluid, father.

Clearer than tears,

Pure as deep mineral springs,

I hold in my hand,

Stare, 

at the secret nectar of the gods. 

Lone Ranger

The television goes on and on.

The Sunday newspaper with your favourite Jiggs and Maggie comic strip lies in a corner.

On the teapoy, your spectacles lie open

Like far away twin stations

Awaiting the slow train of your blank eyes. Remember, you once said,

You would never need such things?

That was before 

Words began to fade in your eyes.

The pills that you kept rolling in your hands

Just as your meninges rose inflamed,

The phenobarbitone tablets you thought you had popped into your mouth, 

They still lie under your bed.

The stills of our smiling gods are everywhere on the walls.

Your bedpan is a white dove of peace,

As you dip alone

Into late streams of silence 

Riding far into the sunless hills,

 Lone Ranger.

Blue Petals

Occasionally a sister appears.

She comes with a torch that is shaded with nights, 

Flicks your eyelids,

As she would, shrimp cans.

All the light in this world                         has turned to dark. All the flowers have lost their fragrances. 

But your pupils are still bright 

blue petals

 God forgot to pick. 

Gethsemane

‘Do not tell us in the end

 That he got his bedsores from us’.

He had them when he came here 

To the ICU. Once they start breaking out, 

There is nothing we can do’.

Thank you, God.

If all that you have done

On his body you chose as your Gethsemane,

Breaking father into violets of pain

Is not enough,

Grow upon him tenderly

The magnificent flames of your forest. 

Gift

I have now set out to do the things You loved most about me. 

About a gift called poetry.

 Never wrote like this before, Perhaps, never again must.

Writing about pain

 Is cruel.

I have set about writing,

What you perhaps would most love me to do

Write about you.

I am doing that, father.

But it is a kind of way neither of us

Dreamt we would ever do;

 For you hold my hand 

And I write on.

Though you cannot now lift your little finger, 

Through me, 

You flow.

ICU

If I must see you, father, again,

I must peep in through the glass hole of the ICU.

Our second home.

How many such homes do we have to cross? I go back to your room.

Sit by your empty bed,

Where your dog sleeps

 by your mattress 

Wondering where you have gone. 

I must go to mother

To pasteurize her tears. Read together ‘The Buddha and The Mustard Seed’.

I must open the Bible

Heavy with hammerings,

Driving iron nails 

Upon Golgotha

 Past midnight.

Rocks of Calvary

You were so fair.

Your colour attracted you to the birds.

Now, all the birds have flown.

As you lie there,

Quietness curls you in its silent prayer.

You are calm as the blue shell being tossed ashore by the sea, 

On a slow wave drawing you closer home. 

Drenched in the waters

 Your body has turned dark.

Dark as the rocks of Calvary. 

The Colours of Pain

The way your flesh is now pinned down.

The have cut through your spine,

Aspirated your bone marrow,

Sucked your leftover blood

Like benign bats, looking for this and that.

They now say you are worrying them too much.

Take for example,

 the atrophy in your brain.

Your sensorium-

That shows no sign of return.

Your body, the reminder

Of an Auschwitz clip,

Your flesh that covered me once

In fine cool flannel-

Your mouth that called me son

 Now sealed off and banded to make room

 For the ventilator.

The nurse stacks your blood specimens

By the window,

One upon the other,

As the morning sun warms tenderly The distant colors of your pain.

Angels on the Moon

Father, you belonged to the black and white era.

You roared with a drone of a world war 2 plane

Over our childhood sky,

And shone like our brightly laced Murphy radio. Now you have turned into a dark catamaran drifting alone across the tsunami 

Of our star-crossed waiting.

Remember once,

When the two of us went out together In the cold night rain?

You lit your Players

Sending tiny curls of smoke

Whiter than the small white roses

In our night garden,

Their petals shining like shed wings Of crying angels on the moon.

China Roses

I do not want to write these poems.

But you don’t seem to want to make me stop.

You put forth your suffering

Like china roses take on the earth every day,

As I dip my thoughts in the ink

Of your bedsores that burst

Upon the white hospital sheets

With their clotted blood dark as honey.

In the long sketches of your nights,

Reflections wade down the cold river

To me, waiting here for you,

They float down with a caress of paper boats

Drenched naked in our last prayer

With blessings of torn light

From the lost lighthouse of your wafering eyes.

Pigeons

You have made the final sacrifice for me.

The finest one.

It was you who first prodded me on,

Saving my poems on your shelf, 

As though poems were pigeons

 And needed a home.

 You carried my poems on you 

Like colored feathers.

Now you lay down for me

The pitted scallops of your flesh-

A carving of your bone

To hone these poems upon;

You set afire with your sleep

The golden cornfields of your love

And let me rise,

Flaming

In your ashes.

Sea Crabs

The night the two of us

Walked the late beach sands.

Dark waves hit the inland rocks

 That withstood the water-slaughter With an inner calm.

The moon was polaroid, giving us instant memories.

Tiny bubbles played flying saucers Landing on alien planets

Before drifting back to sea.

Deep into the water holes on the ancient sands, 

Dark crabs that the sea cast away went scampering to hide

 Like running griefs of night.

Tonight after all these years,

Those crabs we then chased together

Have come out of their holes, father,

And are running wild,

Wild, wild, all over the lone night beach,

The moonlight hung dead upon their blind eyes.

Wedding Night

Tonight is your wedding night. Mother is trembling to fire.

Ashes blow down my face

With the speed of birds 

Flying past church bells

Fearing a funeral storm.

Ancient crosses uproot

Spilling over to bleed,

Past this simple tryst you made

Downhill,

Where I fall down to rest,

Beside your crystal salts that press

Hung in great white palls of yesterday and tomorrow

In silent flow,

 past the half-awake sleeping hamlet of your face. 

Magic Sleeper

This morning, they brought you out on a bed on wheels.

I called out to you to wake up.

It was as if your red eyes that opened, blood-nipped, 

Was a third eye of god.

Did you try to move them across to me,

The tiny boats of our sad living, caught among the reeds?

Do you hear me? Do you hear?

God’s sticky fingers between us,

 stir up the yolk of my tears. 

Your face has crumbled into a slashed spider 

Shrunk into its white egg of pain.

Pain has returned to you like the prodigal son

 Drying down the silent streams of tears 

Across the riverbed of your face.

Distant though as Mars now you are,

Our redness is still the colour of your blood.

Our dust storm is all the precious dust we want to keep.

Be our magic mountain, 

magic sleeper,

We’ll keep our lesson,

That pain is all the treasure we have here on earth.

Go back in now.

We’ll wait here where we said, 

we would.

We’ll keep our word for you. 

Come back,

And wake us, in passing, in paradise.

From ‘Mother Sonata’

Truth

We haven’t told you the truth, mother.

Each day passes, a frame of horror,

A flame sans wick, 

As you keep walking along the shores of the dying

Dead. Maybe you have sensed the bone collector

Cutting through your flesh already,

Dancing on the pin heads

 of your falling away tears.

You, who taught us not to lie,

Who made bright paper boats for us

To sail down the summer rains three score years ago

Seated on your lap,

You have shut the Bhagavad Gita

That speaks of the truth of the universe

And your quiet eyes say,

Come on my son, dear daughter, 

Tell me once more,

That bitter sweet lie.

Fairy Child

You were so good to lay my fairy child-head on.

When I put my arms around you

You cradled me with misted clouds

 As upon lost mountains blues.

Soft was your spring flower flesh then To press my cheek in.

Autumn played upon your lips

 With an opulence of love’s coral.

Now past the broken window

Where time drips melting shadows

On your wooden bed,

I see you float, 

Just a speck.

Your silence 

Chips a little leftover rain

From forgotten rain trees

As I search a prayer,

To shed for you a little flesh,

To clothe your shouting bones.

USG

The doctor says, 

‘Try and keep her happy, 

Satisfy all her wishes’.

A farewell mounts bright purple 

On the ultra sound scan.

 Along her bed we light camphor, 

And let her fall back in amber. 

As I watch her, her stare quickens.

 In her eyes break,

The falling ice of the Himalayas. 

Birthday Candlesticks

Your head, a small sunset 

Casts its twilight

 Upon the pillow.

You lie down, 

Quiet as a burn.

Your birthday hands

Flare up their candlesticks,

Bending

To rain blown flicker;

As waves draw closer

Of pyres in the distance 

Lighting up, dust storms

Grand Mist

You turn to me.

Ice bergs thaw your eyes.

 Your words drip

 Washed ashore on my face.

I’ll die,

There no escape, is there, my son?

I look at you. 

As you look away.

Pain-tipped,

An unsure foot print

Drags 

Hemiplegic

Into the Judas dusk.

Oval

The rain continues to pour.

Down the stairway

 I listen to your puppy whine,

A solitary sonata

Of whimpering fear.

What are you staring at, mother?

I see none upon that ancestral step Leading to our room 

But you stop.

Silence 

Turns oval.

You take a bow,

Frothing blood all over.

The Last Night

Late in the night, mother, 

I have come to your side.

Knowing, I’m too late.

The nebulizer over your head,

 With its sound of a big bee 

Drones indifferently.

Your cheeks grown back to tiny seeds

Don’t need their soft pillow anymore.

Across your face,

My hands shutter your eyes,

Envelop your half open mouth,

As my kiss

Upon your womb

Keeps falling,

With no tongue to lick its wetness,

No earth to be buried in,

In such quietness, 

Sailing the smooth razor 

Of the late night moon.

From ‘A Buchenwald Diary’

(Buchenwald Nazi Camp, East Germany-

Buchenwald, Weimar, Eastern Germany : (Concentration camp in Eastern Germany, where over 2,50, 000 prisoners including the Jews and Soviets were held captive and tortured between 1937and 1945. More than 50,000 were put to death in this camp. Blood-Road: The road from Weimar to Buchenwald is known as Blood road, which was built by camp mates undergoing extreme torture and forced labour. Karakho Path is the path between the railway station and camp gate, witness to tortures, dog chases of prisoners and deaths).

A Train Arrives

It is that late night in Buchenwald.

A low moon hangs about the cold blue sky 

Like a slaughter hook;

As the lone late train chugs in, 

its smoke, 

A dry bat wing scurrying into the dark.

The guards take positions 

with loaded machine guns. Others click whip-lashes. More of the SS

Run sniping their steel chains in the mist, 

the dead and the dying, falling through 

suddenly ripped open doors

As we, the living dead, rush trembling over them,

Trampling. And then the great hounds unleashed,

Pick on their night chase,

 barking down Karakho path, faithfully dragging to their masters

Parched bits of left over flesh Bleeding over the beaten stones

 Of Blood-road.

The Bunker 

Past the heavy black gate, 

Jedem Das Seine, 

The long narrow aisle breaks to view.

Arrest cells stacked close,

 huddled together

 Give no gift

Of compassion.

The first, the Administrator’s room, Fills with his pleasure tools.

Iron rods, fist lockers, flesh strippers, strap chairs,

And those fine razored whip chains

That shine luridly at the winter sun.

After the death-flips

Of floggings upon the strap chair

 all night, 

This morning comes the dreaded news 

That strips our souls.

Father Neururer*,

The priest with the radiant look

 Has been executed.

Another face has turned to his benign God

Breathing the power

Of human will

Unbroken before mortal terror.

 

* First priest to die in a Nazi concentration camp who was beatified by Pope John Paul II.

The Little Camp

Down in the green forest grove,

 a little away from the wishing dandelions is ‘The Little Camp’ 

where the countdown has begun.

The wide bodied lieutenant

 at the entrance watching us,

 gets his mood again, this time, 

for the game of numbers.

His eyes rove over our writhing faces his steel whip lurid, behind him.

“Over there, get into line,

Fall out, fall out, every second guy”.

He stops and jeers. The head count falls upon the little gypsy boy, 

but the elder one musters courage, holds him tight, refusing to let him go. “Please, spare my brother, let me take his place instead”.

“Oh yes? Oh, yes,”

 The jaws of the lieutenant grow deliriously wide.

He comes over, staring, his face curving to a bloody sickle.

“Then you fall out with him too. Let’s share your brotherhood together”!

The big one and the little one, 

stand stripped, facing the stone wall,

while by the slow hours the steel lash bleeds, the darkness

closing its bat wings 

into the night cries of Buchenwald.

Bread Thief

Someone kept stealing the tiny piece of bread.

One night the fellow mates caught him.

They, human and hungry,

Angered, that

One of their own had eaten a friend’s bread, 

Turned him over to the SS.

They flogged him naked

 on the ‘Bock’ all night.

There were soon rumours

That he would be turned into the quarry. 

His friends heard no more of him thereafter, 

Their simple bread thief.

But one bread-time broke

With sounds of blank shots 

from the watch tower. 

They heard,

Nine stray shots.

It was their simple bread thief

Struggling upon the barbs,

The shock from the live fence flowing through him 

Open in death’s half-shut door.

Wall Hook 

After they ordered him to enter the cemetery,

They took him down the stairs

 and asked him to strip. One hit his shriveled penis lying starved

 to its side, 

Knocking its head 

with his threaded baton. 

The SS men laughed. ‘ Bring a cup of boiled water, 

Let’s see this dying fish jerk’.

Two of them hauled him up

Ploughing his skull onto the slaughter hook on the wall as blood jerked, flaking down his spine.

They left him there, 

closing the door behind them.

When they next returned,

He was ready for the Oven, 

just above. 

One in Hiding

“Quick, Here they come, Hide, hide”.

The sounds of heavy boots squelch the muddy floor. 

In sudden quiet,

shaven heads come out from under the soiled blankets, as though surprised at the boot belch in the late hour.

The voice is cold iron.

‘Who keeps a child here’?

“Was that a child’s laughter”?

The head guard moves past each wooden bed rack, suddenly pulls away a sheet from one, and then from another.

There is silence, hyphenated by the sound of heavy SS boots. 

A wet kick wakes up a sleeping face, that springs up in terror. 

“Any of you hide something...?”

He turns around, gets back out into the rain.

The young Pole at the other end looks in secret tenderness 

at the bread basket by his feet, 

where, inside, 

a tiny covered softness turns, innocent, 

snug as a croissant.

The Wife and Child

Four steps away upon the lawn 

grow the daisies and the wishing dandelions.

The grass is fresh as young blood.

In the corner cell 

is the mother and child.

She’s been hiding their little one 

for sometime now. 

Every time he cries, or she hears the heavy footsteps close in, her heart rends to shreds.

Yesterday from the window she watched her tall lover, marching alone to the Pathology.

His head was shaven again.

And how sadly had they thinned him in such a short while.

 She saw him turn faintly in the direction of her window, 

crouched in silhouette, a dimming lantern in the misty dark.

She held their soft one high, 

 as much as she could 

 so he could, through the window, glimpse their little loved one again. But it was the strange look in his long gaze

 that broke the frozen river in her eyes.

Maybe one night, 

she’ll hold her beloved in her hands again, 

when the flesh comes in, distributed cold and dry, but softer, and cured,

 to be cut into fine lampshades.

The Checkup at the Horse Stable

“You”. 

The thousand shaven heads turn

 as though the call could be for someone on the other side.

 “You”, the guard comes laughing deliriously into the eyes 

Of one nearly turned to bone.

‘Step out. You are sick, and need a medical examination, 

we don’t want any further contamination’.

Others watch on tight-lipped, some fold their hands in prayer.

Some other who left for the medical examination a few nights before,

had not yet returned. 

“Taken to the quarantine” 

was what they then heard. 

From the bed racks of wood, living skulls stare down,

 as though watching a funeral.

Outside, the sounds of a storm gather among the leaves of Goethe’s oak tree, 

to the creaking of wheels of the steel-lined cart, 

carrying the uncovered dead in the rains.

In the community hall, 

one reads out a poem, 

to the slow drift of the tubercular accordionist. 

One secretly passes round a pencil sketch of the Führer's black cap.

In the Pathology hall, 

the kind looking doctor smiles 

To the captive in front.

‘Soviet, aren’t you? Put your clothes in here,

go stand by the wall. Let’s now check your height.’ He smiles again.

In the dark narrow cubicle, the attendant pulls the scale marker over his head.

A point blank shot rips through the long slit on the measuring stick, 

from behind.

Later the body, washed clean, 

is laid upon the porcelain,

 for nail plucking. 

The Steel-Lined Cart

At sunrise, the old Jew from Fürth

Carries the steel-lined cart

 from the barracks near the bear park, 

Up the high road of the crematory.

He is luckier than most others. 

In a way.

Dying flesh is softer to carry,

 even though there are more than a hundred

Upon it, some with mouths wide open among them in lisping gasps ,

Piled one upon the other, 

in the dead of winter.

The old Jew moves past

 those staring at him from ‘ The Rose Garden’

Exposed to open night frost,

Enclosed by steel thorn barbs.

Stopping awhile, 

he comes over to the fence 

To push the dead frosted upon the stones. The exhaling skulls

Look on. But they are past all human envy,

They just watch him, thinking him lucky,

To carry the dying down to the Crematory burners 

Where death’s heat will be warm              to cover him, 

And warmth is all that is needed in winter.

Hollander Shoes

Each morning, before sunrise,

 after turning about on our bones for sleep to take us away, 

we hear the siren ring, the wakeup call for us 

who have no more need for bells,

 as our eyes never close.

That’s when we get into our Hollander Shoes. 

Wooden shoes that crush our feet bones in, as we walk in them

 to the quarry to rope in the boulders. Rocks tear apart our backs, 

the wood shoes on our feet               clot the blood stains drying inside them as they pass on, as gifts to the dying,

turning large in our silenced nightmares, 

long enough to cover us dead.

Sounderbau, 1943

Himmler sat in the shade of the lamp light laughing. 

No camp brothel here?

“How do you then ensure the peak efficiency

of the men?”

Now that was a point to consider.

16 girls were brought in from Ravensbruck CC 

under promise of release

 and left at the Sonderbau.

 Each woman would take five men a day. 

The Gypsies, the Jews and the Soviets

were debarred. 

Dying Poles could represent to the SS for  

an opportunity

to be with the girls, and the authorizations would be announced at the evening roll call. 

But no one would be allowed to fuck when the great Lord of the skulls beamed the air.

Leaving Buchenwald for Auschwitz

Outside, covered in the dark green forest,

The rail car waits for the chosen among us. First the able men

 who must please their future masters, the Auschwitz SS .

 Then again, those who’ll work in Auschwitz but have been finalized 

for extermination in the Buchenwald Extermination Transport files.

 Others, that have qualified for the Euthanasia Program.

Oh, yes, all of the coloured triangles, the Jews, the Austrians, the polish inmates, the homosexuals, 

the Dutch, the Czech, the Soviets,

 the POW’s and the Sinti and Romani gypsies, the pregnant women, the children... . 

The SS Buchenwald watch on,

 their loaded machine guns, ready.

The forest by the rail station is dark. Tips of breezeless beech trees, moonlit, glow green. 

Will this be the last? 

Soon each left over flesh crumbles in, scrambling at first for a place to sit, till the heat of stifled breathing swells to howls in the darkness 

and turns to muzzled voices 

pushing and tearing off, 

past shaven skulls and wasting flesh. The gasps for air get heavy, in breathless swoons as whip cracks burn the night riot to bleeding silence.

The iron door jams shut, sealed off from the outside.

Everything looks calm again,

 as the iron box of sorrow 

patiently waits. But the wheels,

they don’t move out for Auschwitz until another night. 

The Night of the Children,  

Autumn, 1944

The loaded men pluck away a child from his mother like feather

 from a shred wing. 

Another runs terrified,

 deeper into the maze of the barb’d ring of the broken living. 

But the strong guard is quicker.

 He baits her out, pushing with rifle butt deeper into the singled out herd of the crying tots.

 This time the top orders say there must only be children.

 The elders watch, grief-lipped.

Soon tiny feet march past           Karakho path, entering darkness,

bolted into the rail road car waiting at the forest end

 like a blinded famine mouth.

And then the engine begins to move, in night rhythm to Jedem Das Seine upon the falling snow,

the slow iron wheels chugging to Auschwitz

tearing alongside, long pink lifelines upon small crushed palms.

15 April, 1945

After the rusting wall hooks, 

the blood hounds, 

the transportable gallows, 

the naked singeing on the “Bock”, after the howl for bread, 

the breeding of the typhus, yellow fever and death by phenol,

long after

 the belching smoke of the dead 

rising up with flecked wings,

the death of all hunger upon the sentry lines,

the thousands of urns empty,

 with the guilt of ashes on the slopes of Ettisburg Hill, the time has come for the Mauselmanner.

It is 3.15 forever 

on the clock upon the wall tower 

of  Buchenwald, on 15 April 1945.

A time for the lost man to come out

 of his painful wooden Hollander shoes. A time to stop,

the ghost trains coming in the dead

 of night to the salivating mouths of the blood hounds of Buchenwald.

 A time for red roses to turn white, crying, deathless in the quiet ash, lying cold upon the crematory ovens of Tops & Sohne.

.......

Rivers

Rivers tell of love.

They know no other story to tell.

 They speak of mountains,

 their strong men, with weak hearts. they tell stories to the bathing girls with full breasts, that love is not love, if it lasts just one night.

Thus the rivers flow.

You ask me, where do they go?

 My dear, they cannot go to the handsome lovers they left behind. They flow . They remember the curse of the fragrance of pink flowers that stood by them while they made love and all the while, their love was dying. 

Rivers tell of passion. Just the way you held your eyes where they met the thresholds of my eyes,

 burning it all down to ashes.

 Let us not talk of our love anymore. Let us only talk of rivers,

 flowing, knowing no return.

Woman

Of the oceans she bathed in,

 The islands she caved in, 

No statistics remain.

The dim lit bars

Beneath her skirt

Hurt,

Where desire waits

For one more glass

Before closing,

Swooning by the table tops 

Of her breasts

 Cleaned for the night.

She carves the hours

Into shut midnight doors

Where distance sits star-crossed

While time overflows

And absence sheds its bat wing 

Upon the stained rose.

 She has not said a thing,

 Not so far.

But beauty bends to love

In the haiku of her smile.

The Ice Cube Girls

(Or, The Barman in Caesar’s Pub, Rome)

The bar man belongs to the kingdom of vice. He juggles ice cubes of the wet arm pit girls 

High into the night skies.

And after the glasses turn empty, After the beer fountain is done,

Each girl, kissing him goodnight

Knows hurt will still be in the same place.

His cheek turns cold and hard

 As a fresh tomb in the night,

 left alone after its crowded rite.

Tomorrow evening, different girls.

His ice cubes, all ready. And his cheek, a green turf,

 preparing for another funeral.

Cherries

You’ll not realize.

You’ll never know.

Every moment of your breath

 that transformed it to stone.

Why? Because your heart,

 made of love turned mine

 all to wounds. Because the deep colours of your little light

 was enough, and more.

You have gone, long after you pretended you would go away, 

where rains meet mushrooms in oblivion’s caress. Still. You have gone, where time bleeds into a smile

 as it drew our blood to test in it, a symptom of love. 

Plums

I want to wear you 

As plum trees in spring

Wear their small  plums.

All the trees, 

 their small red plums

Of you,

That make spring so beautiful. 

Rooms

A room is a room.

But each one is different.

The smells are strange.

Some have cold mosaic, 

some get slippery,

 Some get harder than stone.

In dark rooms murders breathe Under pillows, the knives sleep.

On soft beds, the cats sleep

Knowing they should not be sleeping there.

Finally, rooms.

We wash them all clean 

Lay roses in pink circles,

And fill their nothingness 

with strange perfumes.

Rooms are all we have 

To make love.

Simila Similibus Curanter

She thinks She’s alone.

As she grips rock,

 A sharp splint razes her thigh

 Where her red ribbon ends.

She stares at the bloodline, 

Spreads her fingers upon her bruise, As though upon strawberry ooze.

Pushing past the sun blazed stone

She breaks a basil twig,

Squeezes its juice upon her newborn wound

Like feeding it, Colostrum.

The blood blushes

Like love’s first kiss.

She steps into the flowing river

In between two mountains

 That spread wide, 

revealing the garden, 

So chaste, so perfumed.

Now, upon the long red tongue of her mountain God

Secretly dripping ceremonial blood,

She falls on her knees. 

And with her hair

Spread and wet as a fountain,

She rises, her body stripped into love’s naked flame,

And she dances,

Dripping,

Breathless upon her dripping mountain God,

She dances 

I’ll Not Talk to You Anymore of that Sea

I’ll not talk to you anymore of that sea

Or of mighty things that overpower us with such lightness.

Perhaps that blue cannot be explained. It has a density Of the salt of kisses, that comes back again and again 

With its circling memory of fishes. 

I’ll not want you to dance to that tune

Of rains that want the rainbow to bend,

And yield her naked fruit like a woman in love.

It is better to hide, it is better to hide,

What I have for you that you know

 I have

And pretend you know you won’t know, nor will ever find. 

Call it what you want to, 

call it a covered flame,

That burns the heart and pretends 

it was just a game.

But I’ll still call it the sea, the blue sea, the sea I’ll no longer

Talk to you about, 

nor wonder if you’ll even care

For you have put me down with the salt of kisses

Covered me in flames,

And set me in that sea,

In the circle of your quiet fishes.

Love Poetry

What is it about you, 

I still do not know.

It is not in the books.

It is not in the poetry of love

But what is it about you

That won’t let me go

Or even let me know

As you climb,

Turning your lips 

To night jasmine 

Falling red all over raining snow?

It is not in the books.

It is not even in the poetry

Of dying in bliss,

In sleep,

What it is to be,

In the wilderness of your hair

As sheep, in forests deep,

And the shepherd bereaved calling For love to return, 

In the dusk air.

After The River

After the river, the sun lies basking.

The slow grains in the wind spurt him with kisses, over and over.

He’ll not wake up, the rain’s just gone,

Left, with the memory of two bright sunflowers

Upon his face, and there’s enough time before she’ll come again.

He isn’t waiting. 

And if she comes, he isn’t going to ask Who tousled her tresses, or shook her breasts again, and so soon,

 On the other side of the mountain.

He’s got gold now, the way he sips

The grains of the wind. So many. 

So many.

Each with a taste, that is different from the other.

There is a reason, but he isn’t thinking why. 

Now, His hand, a small boat

Grows in the still waters of my groin. 

Nostalgia

There are other things dear for nostalgia

Just like her heart; the old college radio that was your pillow

That fell down and broke,

With Toni Willie and the pussycats still singing

‘I must get you, take my heart.’

Flowering trees cut down,

Their berries like raped breasts crying alone with the night dew.

The new born butterfly drenched with morning rainbow 

Waiting on the clothesline for its wings to dry;

The dark room in the underground filled with poetry and broken drainage pipes

Where you secretly took your undelivered love letters to hide,

And the spotted hand mirror that knew all, 

Where her face always came in

Whenever you were looking for yours.

Adoration

After the wilting petals of you

Have blown past the desert sky,

After the flowing rivers of you

Have burnt away in the sun,

After the rains

Have stormed our adoration of each other

And laid bare the fleece of yester night’s pain,

How you still put forth your bright seeds of red

That fall upon coffin cracks,

And burst open in midnight rain Turning me back 

To you again. 

Wine

Let me make me some more red wine tonight

 With your heart’s vintage flavor.

The wetness on your lips has come back without you

 Trilling the darkling air.

So I will make the best of you,

Keeping awake,

 by the small flowering night grasses Where your long hair just cascaded past in its rabbit shake, 

Taking my sleep with it, 

as its undivided share. 

What Strange Liquor

What strange liquor

You distil secretly in me

So I’ll cry out your name,

To the distance

And the vineyards upon the night hills?

What way you brew it

That my tongue is lost to me

Curving in your origami

In the distance you wave away

With your eyes,

And make believe I’m lost in you,

Drowning in the night fog of your wanton fame

As upon an abandoned wall,

All torn with you,

I taste your brew

 Bleeding me through 

Our crucified names.

And I’m Thinking,

And I’m thinking

What I shouldn’t be thinking,

Pages and pages of you,

So you have become a book,

An epic

In the amirah of my mind

And yet it is all so light,

It’s like

I wrote you on a feather,

Fluttering over the sea

In the horizon out there,

Red as ink

Entering distances where

Blowing in the sea wind, 

You hold your hand

Over your hair

 And turn,

 your eyes in that side glance

Turning, sweet ice,

As your face

Refrigerates,

 To love.

Could You do me a Favour, Professor

Could you do me a favor, professor? Since you say we have solutions and can fix 

Everything in terms of Statistics. There’s the parabola of her eyes

Now here, now there, now never there. 

Take the first position from my heart Clearly no better place to start.

Her hands of rosemary,

 her lips of bliss

That make my life uncertain as her kiss.

No one knows if she’ll call

Brooding in beauty she’s walking tall.

I would have liked to catch her red Her body music that rises in bed

Her spell, how I fell, I cannot tell.

There’s no finer product-mix

Than her bosom that throws up soft bags of tricks.

I’ll commission a wall size paper for you, professor,

 Plot for me there from X to Y axis

A simple dancing curve of her love.

Torn

Torn between you and madness, 

my only martyr is sadness. 

What you made of me,

 what I became,

ask the sea, 

if you have only done to me

 what it cannot tame,

the sea, that talks all night 

to the naked moon,

 then gathers the morning sun, all red, all fresh, in its never dying arms, and all day never speaks of the moon to the sun, but lets it speak

 with its day long birds burning kisses everywhere,

 and I, torn like the sun,

 quiet like the moon,

 quiet as the sea,

 in love’s ageless martyrdom.

Undergound Flowers

The things we throw away.

Faded photographs,

Things we believed 

we would keep with us forever.

When things begin to fade,

To grow old,

We makes excuses to defend,

To abandon them. 

To set them on fire.

Some things we like to keep.

Like time likes to keep awhile,

Our nails, our hair, growing them,

Like when we killed our love together And kept it growing,

Like underground flowers. 

Once More, Wind

Once more, wind, 

Blow her to me.

Though she’ll say it was me

Knowing too well it was she,

Let her lie;

Among the flowers that pretend to live

But die,

I’ll take her as she was meant to be.

But blow her once more

So she’ll know,

Once again to hide

In mountain mists that she herself denied.

She’ll still be what she has been to me,

Monumentally,

 Love’s epitome.

So blow her, my wind,

Still let her be

The grand pride she was,

 A sweetness of transience, 

For eternity.

The Truth

Sure I’ll tell the evening sun

To spread its sunset on your hands

And I’ll speak to the morning rose

All about your lips last night

That turned me to colors of its light

And I’ll tell me another hundred times 

What I’ll only tell you once;

The truth that sheds all lies like leaves

That upon you my sunset must not be;

And like late orange on your hands

Must turn me back to blood

Till I turn into that sea

That in its wave shall lift me quietly

And taint me in the small dark of your eyes.

Who Loves a Moon 

Who loves a moon

Loves a woman;

She has your nights in her eyes

 Who asks you to stay

 Knowing she must go away.

Who loves that woman 

Loves the moon,

The late nights starring in her eyes.

Though she is the distance

She’s still the nearest in light years,

Who is as far as the merciful flower

That blossoms in midnight hour

In a celebration of light

Of all those gathered, dying stars.

If Someday You’d Like to Tell

If someday you would like to tell how the waters of your heart rise

 and swell 

only to fall back like a ribbon of moon into the quiet clouds that befell, pregnant with love’s brimming solitudes,

If someday you would like to share your secret, so you’ll let me be, happy like you in love’s mourning,

 a secret you could share with the earth as well,

so those in love, will know the art, how the heart, must fold and depart one by one, and learn to shed, 

such that love’s pretense, 

turns as your face,

 into time’s lost transcendence.

Hands

And you opened my hand

In your hand,

And it was as petals

That opened to a dawn.

What they spoke to each other,

They did not tell us

But left their warmth linger, 

Over our leftover life.

Your hand in mine, 

And the falling over 

Over a kiss.

Who would not have loved it,

Turning her

Into love’s dream

Turning touch

To poetry,

Making him

An immortal poet?

And Why,

And why, these days,

Why do you turn them into nights?

And these nights,

Why do you make them days,

So I must stay awake,

As you drift,

All over me, 

Your hand upon your forehead

Settling your hair,

With the wind, the wind that blows,

What through the centuries

It has blown,

You and me again, 

Back together,

Into that deep night sea.

Drop

Take my rivers,

My seas,

My breath

That searching you, 

Must cease.

Take it all, 

As you leave me here

With this drop of you. 

Rock

It is as though,

Lights suddenly dimmed. 

And when I turned,

Everything lay upturned.

All that, all that,

And strangely,

The smell of your hair,

 Sways as a bewitched palm

 In the night air. 

What beauty gone, 

Is not my loss.

Even if you come back to me again,

I cannot wake up

Because I am already gone,

A sea wave waving in mighty splendour,

Falling, thinking it is shore, 

Suddenly dead, hit 

Upon the twilight rock.

Every Word of Mine

Every word of mine, 

Seeks to be a mirror.

Yours.

Every drop that gathers

In my heart,

Is pushed down,

Because the heart must do

Its duty to keep me awake,

 While it can, 

Searching you.

You. 

You know, now you are even in my blood, 

And why my blood is thicker than water 

Is because it fills with you. 

Drinking You Tonight

Drinking you tonight,

As though there is no tomorrow,

As though you’ll never 

come back to me again.

I’m drinking you raw, 

but not being foolish, 

Just a sip each time, 

so you’ll be part of me 

All over again, all night. 

Yeah, I’m drinking you tonight, 

As though there should not have been yesterday, no,

  Never yesternight, No rain. 

I’ll not now talk of pain,

 that which I am past, 

And I know that if I rise now

Trying to reach out to you where you’ll no more call, 

I’ll fall,

Where love, unlit, 

my love,

 is the greatest drinking night Of all.

Visiting the Institute of English, 

40 Years Later.

Nothing much has changed.

The walls, the old walls, they still hold

The dust of our gone voices,

In memory flakes, we still secretly own, 

But will publicly disown. 

I go out and photograph the red date palm seeds. I remember them, 

In my dreams they came back

 As her red ear studs.

The same wooden steps, that at times, Seemed worthy, to be made noise of, But mostly were tip toed by.

There, upon one of them,

Where I intersected her

And gave her my first love letter.

Nights and nights of mountain heaps of her,

In that closed envelope, that she took, Saying she would not read it, 

And would tear it.

But she held it as she ran down the wooden steps, making noise,

She held it like she never held me

In her mulberry hand. 

The same steps, 

That she climbed daily, 

In and out of my life. 

And that hall. Where Dr. Paniker,

Read out to us, from Dickinson,

And Robert Frost, Because I could not stop for death,

Or,  Of mending walls.  How he went away,

His lungs choking him in,

Oxygen, oxygen, all around,

But not a whiff to breathe, 

Cruel, like a tender poem, 

That clasps, and never leaves. 

That bright lad, Gopal, with the pig tailed girl

Following him, who topped the Civils, our secret hero,  who died of kidney failure. That calm professor Valentine.

That handsome Mohammed

Who thought all the girls were after him 

As he lectured to us on Tristam Shandy. Well. The same trees. 

The mangoes 

Turning ripe in another spring.

The young girls, the new boys,

Playing truant with time and goodbye

Secret love letters wet

In their brightening eyes,

Time that never stops playing,

A dying Keats and his Fanny Brawne

A dazed Dante and his Beatrice, 

The wisteria, still pretending to die to its side,

That tsunami, still a hundred years away, 

As we gathered together one afternoon,

Not thinking, then, that forty years later,

I would look over the walk,

Looking for that garden, my secret spot

Where I wished only to by her side

 Or just behind her tadpole hair,

 for that one last college union photograph.

Nightingales

Why have all the nightingales

Gone to sleep,

As though you poisoned them,

After you let them weep,

Showing your compassion,

That they should no longer reap,

What you and I have sown,

Because you know that truth,

That I have nothing to keep, 

But you,

Death long in my arms. 

Lastly,

Lastly, who’ll be there?

You?

You who smiled from among the waving green leaves?

Shaking the petals, all, all for me? How my eyes like camera lens, 

Froze your smile then.

Lastly, who’ll be there?

By my bed, where I’m tied, my ECG, Making collage in the winds? You?

Will you be by my side then?

We spoke so much,

We did so many silent things for love.

Lastly,

You, lastly me,

And my hands tied to the bed, 

That you’ll not wait to hold

Because the visiting time is over.

Before the Last Supper

What’ll burst within 

Or even without, I can’t guess.

What has been faithful so long,

One of them

Must certainly betray me.

So they sit around me

Asking ‘is it me,

Is it me’, while they go about

 Their supper.

And I’m not even sure

If that’ll be before the black rooster Crows thrice or after.

Whatever raises its hood 

A polyp, an aneurysm 

Or a piece of blade,

Everything will settle For a Judas kiss.

And so I walk down 

Wearing motley, A different colour for each foot.

Death is a Rosary

Will you recall,

My lips upon yours,

When death is a rosary, 

And beyond call?

And all your laughter,

And the hurt in your eyes,

They’ll not cause, me to fall, 

Never again, not at all.

But before me if you stand,

I’ll not ask you,

For a river in your eyes.

I’ll not seek in love, 

Any more disguise.

But, 

If you can,

Pause, And once more, hold my hand in yours.

If it is Death

If it is death,

Do not disturb it.

Let it come,

Taking you under,

 On the rocks.

It’ll paint you,

In its own color.

It’ll tame you,

Until you long, 

To live, 

Its pet.

Is it turning you blue

Is it making you black,

Is it making you hide,

As though you would hide,

Beneath every root, 

Throwing up blood

Of every heart,

To be, 

To be at last, 

The hardest stone.

The Hall

The hall is empty. 

Nearly everyone has left

 For dinner.

There was much laughter, here,

Much shaking hands,

And so much applause 

That courted the air.

Now, the chairs,

They are empty,

As hearts that filled as though

 They would stay forever, 

And abruptly left.

The dais, where the couple sat

Smiling for photographs,

 Is bereft.

The silk. It still dazzles.

The ribbons, They still rainbow.

The fresh flowers,

The bouquets meant to conquer it all,

Their perfume, 

Like the heart,

The beating heart,

Once everything,

Now forgotten

Trespassed upon,

 Is beginning to depart.

Death

I kept watching death tonight.

 A real life film.

In that glass bowl,

She went down, she who kept swaying 

This far, golden, 

And red tailed.

And then she came up daring,

Darting,

Till death’s dying, pressed her,

As love, presses night breasts,

 To subdue.

She went down, turned over,

But then shook herself back again,

Floating, two rounds,

Upon the bowl brim,

Before death,

Caught her again,

In his pleasure of pain,

His first night with her,

And she, as she let herself be undone,

Shook her fin

One more time,

Going down, her small lipped head

Hitting glass, 

Her colors turning still,

In that invisible bleeding, 

Quiet, last night.

Death of A Poet

When a poet dies,

Not that the fields of clover in bloom will close. No river will stop, or turn towards that undying thirst that was the poet’s. He knew what it was to hold a flower and to sift petals and yester years. That was his life.

The train upon the tall suspended bridge aloft the mountains will not stop its journey, just because the poet died. The vultures will carry body meat as before, the girls will all be sleeping, who claimed they were all too moved, reading his poem. 

That’s about all.

That’s about all, and no newspaper running after fame, will perhaps even carry his name. But as the poet burns in death as in his life, 

Birds of another time, will find his name 

And build for him a bird-nest in the air.

The Funeral Home by the Sea

There is neon light hanging there

In a new moon tangle upon the well-laid grass. 

And in the tree shades white as ghosts The lampshades sprinkle their evening stars.

Inside, shut faces sleep.

Birds in the high nests do not weep,

Of the vanishing, no count they keep, Laid out among the grief of flowers.

Clocks unwind numbers, in candle flame,

Grief wrecks the islands of living flesh,

That too will return to this silence, sans shame, 

To be bathed and clothed, with roses afresh;

Fine maple leaves fall reddening the roof,

Of the funeral home with its ikebana of tears;

Slow mounts the voices of those gone hooves, 

In a memory of shaken lambs sheared;

Now in the storm of the hurrying breeze,

Time’s tearing feathers freeze;

As the shut faces push deeper into the sands 

Under our waving hands.

www. Poetry.org

This morning I looked up the internet

Looking for poets I used to read

When young. And found,

The common factor among them all

Staring out of their photographs

Was that

Most of them were dead.

James Wright, 52, with a small boil on his tongue 

That turned out to be cancer, 

Or Eberhart, who hit his soft 10p1.

Something stood out of them all.

The lines I knew, I always knew,

After all these years of wear and tear,

That came forth with the freshness of red bleeds 

From a whiteness of the buried heart

Of the dead groundhog in the hot afternoon sun, 

Or a wasted hammock in the shade.

Poetry

I have turned to poetry,

Because it is an invisible bliss.

Because it makes me rediscover,

Perhaps, the mist,

The tragedy of loss that in blossom, Enhances, spring, winter, and autumn,

 Before the fall. What bliss?

Show me your lips and let me kiss, Where love sinks, though it knows to swim, 

But lets itself drown.

That bliss, that lets me hold your hand 

And ride that quiet boat together Parting the snow in your eyes.

And when you are not there, 

perhaps yes, 

Poetry is an evening drink,

 That must bring with it, 

Your scent of blood.

Dash*

(The periwinkles upon us)

Now it is a time for dust 

and bright wind flowers over us.

 How beautiful they must grow,

 the periwinkles all about the crucifix upon you or me, but must end up dying; because like we did, even here, we’ll have love’s uncertain weather; with no one to water us and perhaps a tourist will come his camera hung upon his shoulder and standing before us wonder 

if he must shoot the young flowers upon you or all over me, 

or just give up, 

after the reading of the parenthesis, comparing for himself

out of curiosity, about the dash in-between,

 how long you lived, or I did,

 after the first among us had left;

 and then;

how perhaps we might have loved, whether in life we were ever this close as now together in our stones; or will he really contemplate 

of what you in your pride held back; All those years in that dash 

when you could easily have given 

the one who rode on your dream’s horseback right up to your wet lips wondering how, ever, to get across your bright red parted river; 

but now it is over dash, 

and we must forget, the short hide and seek we played, and just know,

this is once again wind flower season;

There’ll be bright periwinkles soon all over us again, or perhaps,

 if the mud is not just right,

 just the parenthesis of us naked, staring stone hard, in the rain,

and the tourist crossing over

 thinking to himself, no, 

there’s no beauty, nothing original

 in us for his frame, 

and we let him pass, his feet over us, his mind still jingling our parenthesis, his camera hung upon his shoulders enjoying his vacation.

 

* Dash-The blank space between the years shown in parenthesis upon gravestones, denoting the years lived on earth.

About Gopikrishnan Kottoor

Gopikrishnan Kottoor is an award winning poet. His prizes for poetry include the All India Poetry Prize, Poetry Society, India, the All India Special Jury Poetry award, and awards in all categories of the All India Poetry Competitions, & All India Poetry Society, India, and the British Council. Kottoor has also won other mainstream prizes for his poetry such as the WingWord Poetry Prize, and other  Firsts. He has published both in India and abroad. He has attended poetry residencies in Europe, and attended the MFA (Poetry) of Texas State University, USA. As invited poet from India, Kottoor read his work at the University of Vienna, Austria. His poetry has been translated into German,  (Father,Wake Us In Passing) Spanish, and the Chinese, among others. For a while he was a regular reviewer for Indian poetry in English with the Hindu Literary Supplement. He founded the poetry journal, Poetry Chain. His oeuvre includes novels, translations, and plays. 

Comments on Gopikrishnan Kottoor’s work

Your poems are exceptional... . My admiration grows for your poems. 

Jayanta Mahapatra

Kottoor is a poet who has discovered his own voice distinct from that of his ancestors or his compeers.

Dr. Ayyappa Paniker

I earnestly believe that you are one of the most committed and ardent lovers of poetry. At my age (92), I would like to say---God bless you! With deep affection and admiration.

Shiv K Kumar

Gopikrishnan Kottoor is one of the most exciting voices of the 90’s.

Chandrabhaga

On ‘Father, Wake Us in Passing,’

This book ensures his place in Indian English Literature.

Commonwealth Literature

Gopikrishnan Kottoor’s poetry comes of age in this sustained polyphony of his own voice: His poetry in the making gushes forth as the floodgates open. There’s no letup in the intensity of the pain or in the intensity of the poem... . The lines break into a splendour of silver and gold…

Dr Ayyappa Paniker

Here’s proof that the best of poetry does not fly away from the face of realities, but tries to come to terms with them.

Journal of Indian Writing in English

Your book, which I think, is one of the finest long poems I’ve read in recent years.

Bibhu Padhi

An extraordinary accomplishment.

Verse, Seattle, USA

I found the book gripping and was unable to put down the book until read... . The book is also a fitting tribute to one who nurtured both the poet and his obvious gift for poetry.

New Hope International, UK

Kottoor’s poetry is powerful and touching. The use of everyday language, strong visual imagery, and controlled pathos, make the volume distressing, and therefore, effective poetry.

Chandrabhaga

Thoroughly localized, yet universal.

The Quest

Sombre, yet alluring poems that delve deep into the last vestiges of the soul... . That these poems travel so well is a tribute to Kottoor’s abilities as a poet.

The Hindu Literary Supplement

On ‘Vrindavan, The Coloured Yolk of Love’

Only a poet who has imbibed the magic of those moonlit nights, read the Ashtapati and then lived it, can deliver such brimming lines... . If you can dare to classify poetry, this could be one way of doing it: staccato, sensitive or sensual. Rapid-fire, isolated words dropped like rocks, suggesting, stuttering, throbbing, often hurting... .

Shreekumar Verma

On ‘Tell Me, Neruda’

Gopikrishnan Kottoor is a magical poet. The poems represent the essence of the poetic craft; deft, understated, yet conjuring landscapes, where private agonies, as well as sensual dreams become universal.

Chiaroscuro, UK

On ‘Reflections in Silhouette’

Gopikrishnan Kottoor’s ‘Reflections in Silhouette’ is a daringly original collection of ninety love poems. They reassure us, that neither Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda, nor Yannis Ritsos have completely exhausted the regenerative potential of love poetry, and that fresh metaphors, novel phrases, and evocative images - ‘laughing fire’, ‘lips breaking into mushrooms’, ‘bright seeds of red falling upon coffin cracks and bursting open in midnight rain’ , ‘rabbit quietness’, ‘memory’s coloured fall’, ‘the (lover’s) tongue curving in (the beloved’s) origami’-can revitalize the romantic tradition and make it truly contemporary.

K Satchidanandan

On ‘My Blue Alzheimer’s Sky’

‘My Blue Alzheimer’s sky is a must read for anyone who believes that poetry is rhyme and reason, pain and passion, storytelling and meditation-all in one.

Journal of the Poetry Society, India

…One feels grief dripping from the lines of a master poet….

Kavya Bharati

‘In his short illuminated poems, the strange and the sacred combine in unexpected ways... 

. ‘This is pure god... the flowing water.... As about Him the dark nuns build / Their rosary of ice’.

Jeet Thayil (The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets)

The Painter of Evenings

New & Selected poems

(1980-2018)