These eyes

Have seen much darkness and light.
Gazed at almost all the stars on the dome.
They have been searching and searched for.
Ghoulish times have laid their glint on them.
Owlish wisdom has swept across.
And the Universe before them, arranges itself
into lines and lines of raw verse.
Which are picked up, polished as a fruit
and gifted to posterity
by this grandmother of poetry.

A Report

Sprawled out in laziness
On the shores of boredom
The here and now, contemplate
The goals unreached
The loves unexpressed
The hidden wings
And all those other things.
Curled up in a disconnect
each feeling is examined.
A moment is returned to
and given back to neglect.
Past is pulled up
from a stroll it is taking
in the tucked away sepia gardens.
Questions are put across.
As to what it meant.
And what it means.
Nebulous times are recalled.
Grimes are justified.
Wellness is declared to oneself.
And life in general is carried on.
Reportedly, nothing happened.

Conversations

Breaking
the much avowed silence
they will start again.
From the mid-furrow
that a grandfather left off.
From a grandmother's lap
that lies vacant
in an unmarked mound.
The stories told by them
and about them, wake up to life.
And have their wings spread
from end to end.
The little character sketches
drawn out of mythology and boredom
form a continuous stream.
Hopping from knot to knot.
Thought to thought.
Of a rope hanging in mist.
We are to listen intently
for anything that can be picked up.
It is that story time again.
And sleep doesn't silence us so soon
At least, till we have added our part.

Nowhere

A place not so nice
but we've all been there.
The one that lurks in the shadow
of a joke we share.
Much has been said about it
Common place but not too common.
Our hopes, like streaks of a firefly
measure the extent of its darkness.
And our private successes illuminate it
in those moments of eternity.
Full of us, checking in and out
Nowhere, a place that is everywhere
Never wears a desolate look.

Half light

In the half light
of a personal past
I see her
The crazy woman of the village.
Smiling at us
hurling advice
and crying, complaining
about the mis-treatment
by the master of the house.
A summer-visit by us
from the city
seemed her only sense of joy.
But to us children
she appeared
even more childish.
A mechanized doll
pretty with Jasmine flowers
well dewed
but unable to prune to the deserve.

The lashes every night
that is drunk on people's mistakes
only burnt her skin
into a terrain devoid of feeling.
She would cry out
into an emptiness
which clutches my arm, even now
in a strength and urgency to act.

And out of helplessness
I now daringly presume
that she is finally resting
in some peace of a distant solitude.
And her skin torched by the whip
is alive moving in the underground
forming rivers, mountains and fields.
The geography of suffering and pain.

Fit for love

All this for her.
The rippling body
that of a Protein X container
he is aiming at.
The distance he runs
pushing the limits of exhaustion.
The weights measured so accurately
A feather would make a difference.
He is after symmetry, definitely.
Every evening after the practice
a guitar is hung in silence.
To be able to serenade one day
is his dream.
Few songs and rhymes are penned down
with the words love and her eyes.
Mostly her eyes in the evening light.
A general good behavior is in vogue.
And there is this waiting
around coffee tables and book shops.
The things which brew a conversation.

And finally, he is looking into her eyes now.
With all the little things taken care of.

The disease

Is poetry just a symptom
or the disease itself?
It has nothing to offer.
Except that feverish haze
when I am at it.
An unwritten enormity
is a siren's song.
It always wrenches me
to pour it into words.

A poem feels best
when unexpressed.
Given the shape
it crouches in its smallness.
One would expect it to have
those deep searching eyes.
Piercing the reading public.
Nothing like that exists.
More over, it shrivels
into being non-great.
And slips into enormity.

9 dead, 11 injured

9 dead, 11 injured.
Things might change.
Stay with us.
Dead will disappear.
Injured will die.
The cordons are not permanent.
Stay with us.
Things will be let out again.
They are coming, yes, the leaders.
They will hug the grief away.
Touch a bruise here and there.
Stay with us.
The photo-shoot will be good.

These dead are really brain dead.
They don't put up a good show.
A limb here, a limb there.
A limbo altogether.
Are they dead?
No one knows.
But most definitely are.
We are told the next day.
The headlines are munched
and the crowd dispersed.
People, they are tired.
Of the dead and the living.

It'll go on

Life falls on the way side
and is unable to break always
into a rapturous song.
The one well-rehearsed in simple Past.
And beaten to death in the Present.
Beauty in everything, as it is
ceases to exist.
Boredom pervades it all.
There is nothing special I feel
Only my solitude, peel after peel.
I abandon conversations
to their foolishness.
And move on to devour
the heaviness of silence.
Things take this cue
Turn themselves in a different way.
Proving to me
they'll always have their say.
And the show will go on.