Poetry Five

I have words that will touch you.
I have words that will touch me. 
I have words that will touch other worlds
Beyond you and me, where synoptic galaxies 
Wander about humming the silence of diamond
Stars and broken men.

I am armed with words, my friend, and yet I long
For the word, that word, which like the constant
Angel, shall bind and moor our hearts
Forever, and perhaps then this world and 
That world shall become One World,
Like us- 
                 'umbrella struck
In the rain'.







What is that word that
                   I look for my friend?

Oh, who is that word? 

Always you.

Talking with you is like living those ancient days, ceaselessly waiting for the unbridled letters to come hoping it will come, in time, and storing up and rehearsing all the things to say, and then obfuscating all the things that would never be said in paper, but in your head, a hundred times.

On the Darkness of the Mining Industry

While Sidhu Jyatha' evokes upon the material wealth of a Gold Mine to 'Felu Mitter' in reference to an old manuscript in Baksho Rahashya, there has always been a certain darkness associated with the mining industry.

Not so golden are we?

(Sad as it is the big things all over the world always seem to be owned by American corporations if one may recall Che Guevara's epic autobiographical account of his motorcycle rides through Latin America, his vivid imagery of the disheveled workers who lived in immense poverty in and around those (copper) mines. My recent visit to a coal district in Eastern India, although Indian owned, would perhaps echo such sentiments. After all, it's a Profit State, where we chew money and buy sex.)

The Idea of Travel

But the idea that travel takes you to ''different places within'' is surely an old one, so my following words are merely a pastiche. 

I remember watching Alan Watts talk about how if we could dream a life we wanted to live and lived it while sleeping, eventually after we have achieved and done everything we wanted to, we would come back to where we belong, or to our finitely limited waking life and that's what we would cherish most. Something like that. 

So as long as I am young I shall cherish this idea of travel and it's immense practicality, hoping it will someday take me to where I belong. 

Somewhere like this, 
Where I won't look back.

You are Invisible Now

As young guns keep posting photographs of your hometown, of your old college, of all the places that you once inhabited-browsed-grazed, of all the faces you'll never meet again, of all insidious crooked corners that you thought only you could discover- you do not see the chauvinistic dumb-fuckery that you so want to associate with it, you see postcards, postcards from the past, and your heart trembles a little, sometimes a little less.
You so want to say out loud, yes, I was there too. It was beautiful. You want to like it. Comment on it. Rewrite those thoughts, feelings. Banter.

'Hear me little darling. I want to be heard.'

But then you refrain, your ego takes you to that place where you consider yourself brazen and safe, safe from those years of nostalgia and longing-surrounded by the invisible walls of solitude, carrying on your shoulders the weight of time- like a stalwart from the past, like those soldiers who went home after war.

Your time was over long ago. You're invisible now.

Happy Valentine's Day?

Since we hung up last night, it’s been raining cats and dogs. 

Thoughts are so personal.

Yet we love to share them from time to time. Why?

Because we are compulsively optimistic that the other person will understand and feel it exactly the way we do.

Language is a barrier. It disconnects. Sigs, smells, patting an eyelid, a gentle hand movement, a subtle pout – those are the things that connect. Not language. 

Words, yes they are hollow and so is everything else. But we are a curious set. We know this and yet we make that attempt to communicate.

Sigh. I am solving Eigen Vectors. You still punching Kafka?

A minute went by and then an hour. He grew tired of waiting. The still rain kept on beating on the sill with the insouciance of an addict.

 Naa, no Kafka or anyone. I was inebriated the whole time. Even while I was talking to you.

How did I miss that? Do you know what I did today?

Tell me.

No, I won’t. It doesn't matter.  What did you do?

No tell me. As if everything else that we talk will go on to make the great epistolary novel of the century.I’m interested.

Precisely that’s why I can’t tell you.

The word mundane doesn’t have enough mellifluous synonyms.

If you didn’t want to share why did you mention it in the first place? That’s why I don’t like anyone other than me. At least I can moderate my own behavior.

I wanted to coax a reaction out of you. Because in this story, like you said, we exchange places, poet and muse, muse and poet.  Happy Valentine’s Day.

Eh? Not the 'happy' ending I imagined. 

You too. 

Poetry Four (Stanford On Avon)

The old Grecian tunics would rain all over the place.

Anointed and bedazzled with the aroma of an exotic flower

The entire town would come, with their

Coal-miners and fisher-men.

It was told long ago, about today, when

Garbled thoughts would be made

Into words,

Words that would

Enable a thousand league deep pathos

In all of their hearts.

 ‘But this is just a show.

Three pence a ticket.’

He should not go for that.

But alas, the wicked ways of the heart, would pull him in

Hiding him in the veil of the crepuscular crowd,

And he would wait patiently for the aria to burst, when

She would lift the veil, and in

Her secret pout, he wouldn’t miss the wave of fervor.

Her odor would belittle the foreign stylizations

And the remnant fishy smell would vanish

Like an ominous comet.

He would marvel, with the townspeople, forgetful of

The miseries, as beauty blinds the best.

The best of fishermen.

Long ago, in the drunkenness of youth

He had found a good teacher,

An artist of thoughts,

A woman, a mother, a daughter,

A goddess, like those sculptures in Indian temples.

Silently he would ramble through the words, memorized long ago,

In dreams and in theaters, in fishing boats drunk on the sea.

He would hum it now

       No she won’t hear

                    A little louder

                         She would scorn?

Perhaps then, the pinnacle of in-between, when

                      The wave is in midair waiting to crash,

Oh the uncertainty of art.

“I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum.”