Okay, computer.

There was a road. 

A country road flanked by little rhododendran shrubs. Their green had washed away in the rains leaving a shabby exterior for me to see.

I am glad I remember all these details.

Every little day I would see the pigeon flock scuttling their heads to and fro into that red soil of a reticent country. It was strangely silent.The pigeons seemed wary of the world order, you know, busy and perhaps happy in their chores. I think they were eating those stupid little worms who climbed out from the darkness to taste the pale sky of our world.

Can worms live in red soil?

This went on for sometime, you know. The pigeons kept beating their heads in the ground. Oh, now a postman would be at the scene. He is the country postman. He rides a bicycle and wears a hat. He also carries a tote-bag. He slows down a little. He stands on one side and watches them eat their stomach full.

Yes, I think I made that up a little. 

Beyond the horizon I would now see the sky lit up in works of fire. Oh well, I don't remember much, but I think the postman's bag was full of love letters- they were anointed with a special aroma, yes I could smell it somehow, it's strange right? They looked all the same to me, those letters.

But I never imagined I would see what I saw next, believe me! I saw him walk upto the pigeons and tie each letter around their feet. You probably think now that they would fly away into the oblivion and into the arms of the beloved, but that shit doesn't happen, they keep on eating worms.

So you see doctor, my dreams mirror my life - I write all these letters, hundreds of them, but my pigeons are grounded somewhere
in the past.

In our Heartbeats.

I wake up every morning

to this blaring sound of an alarm

and my heart races, but 

I don't lose

races.  I win them,

even at the expense of my 

heart. 

I want to write you a poem my love, you know, 

just for old times- 

for those electronic nights 

between our spacebars and 

moon lips. 

It is meant to be beautiful,

this morning-  blue sky

and chriping birds, a little girl

playing Mozart on the other side 

of the courtyard where 

non-chalant pigeons flock together 

in that  immortal music. Yes, 

something like that.

Sometimes I think,

 numbers are beautiful too, you know,

like those seventy eight birds in 

a flock returning back to their 

nests, 

crossing miles of skies, unaware of the

thousand and four brave men 

 marching together against a tyrant king

 in the lands below-

shouting, hooting, roaring, from 

deep within their 

hearts

. 

Rolled over on the far side of my window

is a sunlit pendulum

whose every movement I am aware of. 

It makes me sad, that swinging pendulum, 

that counting machine which

makes me race

every time, when I could have just loved

you. 


Yes,I have believed in measured time, I have

believed in 

calendars and clepsydrae.  

I have believed in patterns that would engulf 

me,but I don't

want to measure time anymore, not in 

swinging pendulums.  

Trust me when I say this, for in

years to come I shall become

my words- yes just that, and that is why

you should know-

I want to touch your heart and 

count every beat, each one-for in this life 

and another,

time and everything else 

must be measured in

our 

heartbeats,

like you

 always wanted. 

A Lonely Planet.

Between the
warm tropics
and the cold poles,

in this blue blob
of a planet
lies the temperate
and the
deciduous.


Sometimes
I think
that place
is a bit
like that feeling they
call
Love, you know-

'smashed between the extremes 
by imaginary lines'.

Calvino's Monkey.

I met a monkey from an antique land.

Last summer, while I was browsing through this book, called ‘If on a winter’s night a traveler’by Italo Calvino, a monkey appeared on my balcony and started drinking from the water-tub. I had left that tub for the frail thirsty birds. It was a quiet afternoon- only jarred by the sound of the ceiling fan and the occasional pixie manic shriek of my landlady.

Suddenly the monkey decided to enter my room- “if there’s water there must be food too”, it must have thought.
Well, what does one know about monkeys these days? We left that gene pool epochs ago. At least, some of us did.
This is what happens when you keep your doors open and invite the natural world in.
Naturally I was cautious now, monkeys tend to be impertinent and monkey like. With caution comes time-dilation. In that three dimensional space of my room the fourth dimension lost its drive and I was stuck with a monkey that was about to carnage my mental peace. I threw the Calvino on one side and tried to look for scary things. My room lacked any metallic object. My sleepwalking habits had made me get rid of anything sharp or remotely damaging. I wouldn’t have harmed the monkey anyway. I was writing meaningful letters to PETA every now and then and putting up a Facebook status from time to time speaking out against animal cruelty, thus doing my share of impact activism and animal love. The monkey remained oblivious of me. Even apes were indifferent to me. Such was the nature of those days. Life and Times of Sounak K.

I finally found a vuvuzela like object and yelled ‘Monkey. O monkey’ (must have been some acoustic device that was left by my scientist friend) trying to garner the attention of the ape. It was looking through my stuff with the curiosity of a knowledge-hungry child. I even started marshalling my thoughts in suspecting the governments’ hand-
In its’ totalitarian scheme even apes had started breaching the privacy of my abode. Perhaps they have switches hidden in their brain, you know like the Manchurian Candidate. Perhaps they have designed ape-spies to crack down any dissent.
It also reminded me of a line from the book I was reading,

‘nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as the police states do.’

What if it found my poems on Che Guevara and sent for the Hitman who would take me to vacant lot and put a bullet in my brain, worst cut open my jugular and make it more painful and arduous. There’s always the easy way of poisoning me and making it look like a natural death. I should have taken those Karate classes seriously.
I started panicking just when the monkey looked at me and now it started to jump up and down. It found the book I had thrown away earlier and held it up as if it were an armor. Books were indeed armors in the society we were living.
I had to bring an end to this trapeze show. I stood my ground and took the posture of a warrior. I announced to him,

“My name is Ozymandias, the king of kings.”

The monkey looked transfixed. Did my authority made him calmer? Or was it Shelley’s words. But then it went back dancing. We kept shifting places and the room was our ring. None of us would give up their vantage point. It took me a while to realize I was dancing in accord with the monkey. I had no control of my movement.

I was waltzing with a monkey and it was leading me on, and I didn’t feel bad about it. 

I was rather ecstatic.  

Yes, I was dancing, jumping and fighting gravity like I had never done in my life. For a while I felt I was flying, yes I was flying. I was free. It was a cosmic dance like that scene in Solaris.

My entire existence shuddered when I realized that I had grown a tail and there had never been a happier moment in history.

The Humid Metropolis

I lived my childhood in a humid metropolis. I’m sure you folks sitting on this side of paradise have heard about my hometown so I won’t name it, because I want you to imagine a very sticky place- richer than your imported glues. A place with perhaps so much gravity that everything gets stuck badly, except for the glues beneath your skin. The pitiable sea-close tropical clime makes you all drowsy, even in the night.

When I was young and evil, my mother used to cook us rice in a steel pressure-cooker and it surprised me that even after eating a fair amount of that soporific fodder my father always made it to the local government hospital to cut people open with his shiny scalpel-
and mostly save them.

My childhood remains a big scrapbook of rice induced drowsiness coupled with sweat-stained mischiefs which we fondly called 'dushtumi' (this was adulthood?).

My city is poor. Everything’s cheaper you know, fancy restaurants are cheaper, transportation is cheaper, private tuition is cheaper- except for maybe human life but it’s in the best interest of the world that perhaps people fail to notice that. I agree with poets, who say it has a large heart.

Sentimentality without action brings ruin, but I am leaving that out for another chapter. When I was young, I used to torture kittens estranged from their mother cats. I fondly remember this one kitten whom I immersed in a bucket and helped it embrace hydrophobia. I was an evil child. I was perhaps an abomination to the larger order of my city you know-

bigheartedness, sentimentality and all those anti-boorish camaraderie.

I told you about the sticky weather of my city and perhaps it was the reason for all our sinful dallies- all that involved rubbing and getting stuck. It would surprise you even more, if I told you that the tortured kitten got stuck with me and became a cat and never wandered away. I have always been wary of my city-
it makes impassive cats get stuck with impassive evil human children. (Torture doesn’t induce emotions of passiveness, I surmise.)

I love my hometown- sticky and lovely.
Perhaps lovely because it’s sticky.
A place that never lets you go is a place that is never worth leaving.
My parents would know this better.

Propaganda is a written word.

Comrade Mao says 

that

my auburn shotgun-

three feet long with an 

extra range

is 

a friend of mine,

but I loathe it

in the day

when

it kills pretty birds

so as

to stack quills

with which

they 

never write.

Abattoir. ( Poetry twelve)

Metals.

Tinkle. 

Hordes. 

Bleat! Bleat! Bleat!

Silence. 

Gore.