Limbic

In this dreamtime 

which we have 

no words, calling, manifesto for,

invocation is a kinetic shift – metamorphosis 

from human to leaping deer, escaping bird, flowering tree,

but this time moved perhaps by something other 

than visions of conquest: 

leaping, flying, flowering, not as resigned pursuit of red-clawed desire,

but something denser, greener, more accommodating

of other than human, of even 

the rot, and poison and things long await 

in serpentcoil and fire.

This spectral mage leaping —

across playful voids —

inviting me to shapeshift along with, 

dark presence that our immediate ancestors 

could not conceive of, the endless bodhi

possibilities of air/mineral/water/sunlight/sap,

shaman 

of my grandmother's dreaming and passing,

incarnated anew as the kaleidoscopic tesseract of worlds beneath worlds, 

turning 

on the cosmic spit,

knotting 

itself in this glimmering vein of hard planetrock,

rushing 

the sap in my blood as I run, 

through 

an infinity of trees.

[20 March 2022]

The Anthropocene

In the anthropocene,
We have each other.
And it ain't enough.
In the anthropocene,
We blasted our heavens,
And the blasted ruins shall hate us
In the anthropocene,
our gods roam town, naked
Black, and the police shoot them dead.
In the anthropocene,
We killed us all,
And our children never had a chance
In the anthropocene,
The cross is made of molten gold,
While Jesus cries, why did you abandon me
In the anthropocene,
Our bodies turned into nuclear money
Radiating infinitely into the black cosmos
In the anthropocene
There is a multiverse hiding
In the large Hadron collider
In the anthropocene,
We died, of causes too obscene
And we never learnt our reasons,
And never atoned
For the anthropocene.

Indraprastha

The rains came early this year, surprising the billboards

crumpling beneath the advancing columns.

See the sudden multireflexes –

Empty silhouettes of trees, waving forlornly at the dying traveller.

gulmohur jewels, now pasty and pastelshaded on splashy roads.

A momentous roadsign, hidden under fraying

exhortations of political thievery, stands like a wet old man

leaning on battered memories refusing to budge.

HEATawesomechildrenexamscomputersphotosharingcoolstuff
networkingcowsmarketsdesikohlsensexcondomsmusictelevision
collegesmsmangoesbitchHEATchaifoodpaisacapitaldudedhanda
sexmetrotrafficmurderpigeonshitmmshornscitizenblaringsaala fuckheatconstructionrapeschicksfingerprintsbloodmoneyheat heatheatheatheatheatheatheatheatheatheatheatheatheatHEAT

The earth of this doomed city rises up in smoky suburban curtains,

settling on the silver earlobes of serrated glinty women,

on the dismal burdens of streetchildren and the yellow halos

of rail workers digging up mournful treasures,

even as it refuses to let them take root in its scalding veins

where the blood runs thick and dark, like wild trails of bitter chocolate

almost felt on the tongue,

in gritty kohlweary eyes,

in the air, whispersmelt

on flapping wings

brushing the threadbare expectant skin

with the burning droplets that dropped early this year

on archived greypixelated screens.

la petit morte

The morning will always appear beautiful
too briefly,
and lose its sheen in the heat of experience,
turning into
tired bodies
sweaty palms
and hot faces
stripping beauty from us in order to appear
more beautiful the next day.
But why should we succumb
to charms as these so readily?
why not keep those secret small loves,
the unsure romance of knowing
oneself everyday,
those vanishing momentary happinesses,
in order to
lose the day
and regain the night?

smoke

what does this

immersion in your world

give me, except for your losses

and the things that couldn't leave you

I could not, cannot
make you change your mind
but I'm still waiting for you
to find the road that leads here

Folk Tales

all the old stories
my ancestors sang in the light
and etched on the stone rock by that tree
have waited to come true, by the edge of
this day
and shall continue to sing
of freedom and love
haunting my dreams with the smell
of jasmine

by the fading light

the day got entangled in

the colours of green and red, which

swirled and lost themselves

in the cleft, the space, the line

that runs between rocks and mountains

dividing day by night, and so we follow

it out to the open sea,

where all lines run out

The Dreamer

You seem like a child
with your eyes of the morning sun
and your laughter of the summer rain

You tell me you have come from faroff places
where desire has fallen away
like the bark of the cinnamon tree
which now comes in search of me
with its fragrance,
staining my page
colouring my eyes
permeating my skin.

Why does my heart with its color of Krishna's body
and the throat of Shiva
look for more grownup desires
and their attendant questions?

This body-temple which I have inhabited
for ten thousand years and more
now whispers strange things
in my ear.
It tells me of mountains
beyond the ones I have seen
It tells me of underground rivers
that course beneath my feet
and meet with the rivers
of the sky when I sleep.

Who can show me the form of
the thousand-petalled lotus?
Who can take me to the place
where the sun gently smiles
at our human and inhuman follies?
Who dreams me in her sleep, and
forgets me in his wakefulness?

"the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."---- Samuel P. Huntington


River Churning

A young girl from Brittany
stands on tiptoe as she learns to pirouette
on her ballet shoes.
She loves icecream, the circus and the Champs-Elysees.
She watches the children laugh
And wonders why.
She did not yet know about freedom,
But maybe
in time she will learn that some mothers are
Happier watching Clark Gable on TV,
And that not all shoes hurt
And not all of them turn into Parisienne symbols
Of an unliveable life.
Why do you cry for her?

A young girl from Trang Bang
Whose name meant golden happiness
Who did not know of nations and nationalities
Of war and napalm bombs
That make for good photographs framed by golden lava
Stood with her brothers and sisters
Under a cruel sky
She ran alone
way back in good old 1972,
No brothers no sisters
As the molten gasoline burned a tatoo
On her Vietnam skin.
Why do you cry for her?

A boy from Karbala,
He loved kebabs and Bollywood,
And kites and cricket and freedom
One day the tanks rolled in
One by one, and the boy stood and watched them come,
They promised him some fun.
The boy stood under a blue cloudless sky
Watching the great planes swoop down,
And knew in that moment that a pilot he would become
Smiling down at the world, conquering the skies
And watched a world erupt around him
And painted the Iraqi sky a dirty red.
Why do you cry for them?

They paid for a multitude of sins, that were ours to make
And for the children in a fawaway land
Where they make Ray-Bans and Barbies and
TV commentators comment on the sun and the sand.

Will you cry for them?

why does it rain on my heart tonight?
a strange lilting melody of a thousand
drums on my skin
laughing at the dew on the trees
that shiver with its coldness
if you touched the sky now
it would blush scarlet
with the sunrise of its desire
(written this morning. inspired by the brilliant light of the morning sun
in the still-awakening sky)

At the far end of
the room
a bare arm sorrowfully
pulsates with
a blue light
mirrored in the thousand eyes
of the world.
Like the calypso of sadness
the room hummed
with ever unspoken
questions and answers
that like the waves of
a subterranean sea
rose and fell
in the dimming disconsolate air.

Ammamma

Sitting here, in front of
this glowing screen
I wonder how to introduce you
when it becomes difficult even for you
to decide your true home.
Time unmercifully trudges on
your once-unlined face
with new contours of loveliness,
stealing the past from you
in your misty fugues,
and you cannot sometimes remember who
I am, and how I, (if I am to be who I am),
bypassed the shady lanes of your memory
to now present myself as more worldlier than I really am.
and so I capture your memory for you
and write you an ode
knowing you will never read these lines of remembrance -
but then you surprise me
and in a lucid brightness of a firm resolution
through the hazy wetness in your eyes,
you clasp my hands with the gentle firmness
that only age-spotted hands can have, and
tell me - "you, I shall never forget".

Liquid Lessons

It happens every once
in a while, that all my feelings
feel hard
and shiny, like smooth river pebbles
in my hands,
grating against each other, until
I send them
skimming across the stillness of the waters

Indu

She talked of many things –

Of toys, bangles and

the cold icecream on winter mornings.

She remembered –

The cradle her father had made,

Carved out of wood for her son.

And remembered also

the crackling of the leaves underfoot.

And they said that the Chinar was on fire.

The trees

did not want to go back,

And the swollen-eyed lake wept

for songs unsung.

The catch in her voice

behind her smile,

said something else.

Something that did not smile.

And the wall behind her

Remained silent.

Cold.

And did not remember

that the Chinar was on fire.

Bol, ki lab aazad hain tere
bol, zaban ab tak teri hai
tera sutwan jism hai tera
bol, ki jaan ab tak teri hai
dekh ki aahan-gar ki dukan mein
tund hain sholay, surkh hai aahan
khulne lage kuflon ke dahane
faila har zanjeer ka daman
bol, ki thoda waqt bahut hai
jism-o-zuban ki maut se pehle
bol, ki sach zinda hai ab tak
bol, jo kuch kehna hai kehle
-- Faiz Ahmed Faiz



Speak for your lips are still free,
Speak, while your tongue may still be yours
And your body be still yours in its strength
Speak, while your soul may still be yours
Watch the blacksmith’s shop
Where the fiery flames turns the iron red-hot
Unlocking the jaws of locks
The chains now broken wide open
Speak, for this little time may be enough
Before the death of this body and these words
Speak, for the truth lives on still
Speak, say what must be said.

A peripatetic god

I saw a man today...and I knew for the first time what beautiful meant. He was naked save a loincloth, and there was no way of telling whether he was an adivasi tribal, or a public exhibitionist or just stark raving mad. He seemed as if there was a definite goal to his journey, and his stride had purpose and determination, which coupled with his barefoot, naked, matted hair status would've looked absurd among the weaving traffic at the India Gate circle, but for some strange reason - it did not. The sheer incongruity of the man, with his matted brown wiry hair, his ebony skin, the bare feet and the dirty loincloth in front of the Shangri-La Hotel, with Corollas, Mercedes Benzes and Chevrolet's struck me on only hind-sight. At that moment, there was only the image of the man, surrounded by a sea of automobiles and the fact that he paid no attention to any of them. It was he who seemed to have the right to be there, not us. It was he who looked real and true in his raw, sexual, masculine beauty, while the rest of us just grow more numb, fat and puffy-eyed....It was my first brush with a true to life Billy Biswas come back to search the urban jungles for the essence of his inimitable, earthy sheerly masculine being.

The Flame
asked the Darkness rather brightly,
"Who are you?
Of what substance do you derive
your essence?"
The Darkness paused
its ponderous depths, and answered
"Of all that you are not comprised,
Of all that you cannot imagine,
Of all that is NOT."

The Flame flickered self-consciously,
for it grew unsteady,
but in a flash of illumination, countered -
"So if you cannot be collected,
you cannot be named,
in your unimaginable fathomless deep,
my being signals your non-being.
Therefore while you are simply not,
I AM"

Death of a Mountain

They say it’ll be a cold winter this year
The coldest we’ve ever seen
While men carve roads out of mountains
And roads slip into streams

I shall forget you a little each day
Like water in a city dies
A line for your mountainous dream
a token note saying goodbye.

So here it comes
like breeze through a door ajar
For the spaces you carved
Now the dew settles on the tar.

For Dashrath Manjhi (written on 15 December 2007)

Losing it

Its been a long long time, and the time,  I think, for some poetry....the good sort, the autumnal sort. And so I shall leave you this month with Elizabeth Bishop, a very capable, honest and refreshing poet, at her autumn best, and hope that your losses are as fun, as serendipitous as hers.

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop


The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Wingspan

We wondered yesterday,
just for fun
what kind of birds we would be –
parrots, bright and chattering,
swans, graceful, white and vehicular, as is
the owl, but wiser looking and patiently intent,
as we perhaps sometimes can be, or freewheeling slightly crazed
bluejays, going whee over children’s heads,
all of their continual pastime music
that leads to the windows opening out to maybe the park
you once visited as a child hanging onto your mother’s index finger
breathing in the autumnal sunshine, for you had to wait until the rains had passed
to leave everything shinier, greener, and until the birds came back to fly.
And maybe we are creatures of flight inside, and in the night when nobody’s looking, and you know that beyond the fan whirring against the ceiling lies your unlived life,
we could take off solitary
And measure ourselves stretched out against the cool hippie skies
singing ourselves hoarse, wingtip to wingtip.

Shaman in the Subway

I dont know you, only just saw your picture on a pic-sharing site
and I might get villified for writing my pretentious poetry on a shaman I don't even know
(but you know me, and every one else).
I cant imagine that you live in a subway station in New York as the photographer said you did,
your tigereyes seeing elsewhere, a place of bittercolddarkgrey
and place of desolation that could be me, for now you know all my secrets and leave me bare to the chillwind from your eyes
and inspite of my research on the Beats, I do not understand who you are.
(well what do you know...
New York isn't the same anymore
for there is no beatness left).
New York is still the same, and more
coz you are left

The City That Sleeps

Today I saw,
travellers caught in an endless
void,
partners who could not partners be,
children who could not children be,
I saw their mental machinery.

I saw, or thought I saw
battlescars etched on the visibly
happy faces of sad children
and the lonely men and women of the world,
some who smiled only at graphic acts
of surreptitious pleasure,
and others who smiled only at the pink graphics on
accessorised, sexed-up cell phones

Wn wl u cm bk?

Shubho Bijoya

Who are these people
with their painted
smiles and morose celebrations
of unhappy truths?

Who vacillate between
unfixed positions, forever
standing at knife-edged
thresholds and doorways -
unable to return, and always
disallowed entry into the hallowed
precincts of masculine sanctums.

It is at the edge of the page,
that they molest her quiet devotion,
And underneath her
many-coloured blouses, petticoats, saris, bindis, bangles
anklets, and the blood-red sindoor marking
the cleavage of her body,
resonates the unasked question -
...