Avoiding the genius

Ofcourse, I am all bruised
after all those efforts
to rub my shoulders with the giants.
Geniuses like Hawking, though confined to a chair
and far away like a quasar
unsettle me in apocalyptic terms.
Species of this breed, who would, in a fraction of second
light up the dark corners of a confusing world
drive me to my room and bolt up my sociability.
I grew impervious to their success stories over time
and learnt to cleverly sidetrack the conversation
and discuss things of the immaterial world.

Despite the care I take to muffle such noise
there are some inevitabilities that crop up.
When I hear of a character from the past
stretching the limits of my imagination.
That is when I succumb to the pangs of hope.

A new dawn

It is all a new world by dawn
The sun brighter than ever
A new morning with new hopes
glistening rays across the green slopes
A rainbow adorning the skyline
A morning which outdoes itself to shine
A sunny dawn, A pleasant weather
What care do I if everything is fine.
The joy ,as always, is all mine.


(A re-post. This piece went to semi-finals in the International Amateur Poetry Contest held by poetry.com.Also, this is my deceitful attempt to hit the century mark for this year)

Natural selection

Legalities, moralities and formalities
Chain us in this zoo-like world.
Of course, there is enough grease to loosen them.
Under this invisibility cloak of morality
how could you protect a deer from a Lion?
It is to be devoured and feasted.
On the other hand, no hanky-panky is entertained
The picking has to be slow and natural.

Yuletide

Carrying a detailed report to its heart
Light travels alone in space to find you.
It tries its best at the marathon
and arrives a million years late.
You are a fossil by then
having a lot of catching up to do.
It's not that you were waiting for any message
You never knew that it was posted.
Anyway, let me tell you
The sky was lit up like a thousand suns
with the Christmas gift from far away.
It was good, you just missed it.

Copenhagen

In a bowl of water, collected from the springs
Nostradamus foresaw us.
With predictions centered around disasters
he saw many ends to this world
But nothing as clear as what I see today
when I look at the rising sea and thinning rivers.
Rivers, once ribbons wrapped around us
are now, the precarious threads holding our lives.
Agreed that worlds end everyday
in instances of news-making explosions.
But what 'might' lay in store
is death by entrapment.
It might not be at the door step
but I can hear the elevator coming up.
I know I can jump off and end it, once and for all
Would that be a good enough fight for survival?
Will I be that weakling in Darwin's index?
Crushed under the cold feet of betterment?

I believe in might
'Might' has a mighty hope.
That could save me from being
the boiling primordial soup.

Telangana

Whoever is dead
Over those heroes
Our future would march
into the tunnel of chauvinism.
More or less, less or more
The loot will not change
but the looters might, now empowered
with that slight change in dialect.
The dream goes on
to distill and separate
the blood mixed over time.

Cartographically speaking, I belong
to two different sides.
My tongue is from the other side
but the rest is from here
I only wonder about my mind
Who would lay claim on that?

Celebrating our helplessness
suddenly suicide is heroic and the bards are out
writing songs for the coming of a golden age.
Wishing for a Midas, who would
bury us alive in his wealth.
For the revolutionary artists, recession has ended
Free food and shelter, and a footnote in the history
is all guaranteed for them, either way.
They played with stones all these years
and only now struck the golden spark.
The fire caught on to the dry forest
Warm for now and like the early man
they dance in a trance.

Clothed in white, the egos are short
but their shadows wish to be long
and crawl towards the horizon of time.