Sign boards shine

The sign boards shine
like the lines in a poem.
The cold scaffold of the moment
rings a hum reaching the depths.
A lost self reappears
in a dragon belch of the past.
It is an octopus self
playing a symphony of discord.

The clouds finally deliver the message.
It is eons late and is in Morse code
of stars dotting the sky.
Terrible significance of the self
reruns its stories but
the insignificance arrives finally
as a complete picture.

The answers

From among the waste lands
The Datura trumpets blow the nectar
The unsaid tries to have its say
The unexpressed inflicts violence
The questions are missing
but here we are, the answers.

Some dreams

Some dreams are really nightmares.
Piercing bamboos that grow
from the night's black soil.

A gleaming medieval sword
escapes the glass case of a museum
and beheads the defenses I erect.
Worst happens wrongly here.
Nothing that I have prepared for.
The days are brightest but
the memories of a dreary evening
are up everywhere.

Tonight is its domain.
The battle is tilted
towards the other.
I have to only comeback
with a sharper scythe.

Right after a cosmic poem

Imagination can't stretch till infinity.
It often shrinks unlike the universe
and the deep valleys of
between-the-line silences
iron out into normalcy.
The stereotype milestones
become visible again
as the straining galactic light
and the background radiation of thoughts
give way to the clearer and the mundane.
The reflective telescopes that read
the nirvanic scripts hung light years away
are given time-out and they rest for a while.
Deadlines, more immediate than the solar flare
burn during midnight. And an ordinary
everyday childhood memory
gives up all its sleep.

Knots of life

I merge into a silhouette
of woods at the sunset
But my words remain
Snuggle to each other
and are awake in the dark
They examine memories
Choose a fitting one
and drape it around them.

A memory of laughter emerges
a sudden island
in the solitary sea
The glow of bright future
Or of the glorious past
falls into disuse
at a moment's threshold.
Knots of life become complex
They dream to turn nooses someday
They are braiding themselves now.

ACGT

A chain of Elements chance upon
A language is born
Words everywhere:
Silence and noise
Dead stop and movement
Mother suckling the child
Father teaching the bow
And the aim vanishing into air.
The squiggles of nature persist
like the furrows waiting for rain.
A downpour of answers
sprouting new questions.
The piece of the shared sky changes
as the faraway light reaches us.

Minimum damage

Havoc has to be havoc enough
to substitute
bodies with bodies
minds with minds
a cursor with a sharper cursor
which blinks as
the writer looks at the horizon
and spells his words like a tried God.

Something's missing

And the eyes are out
like a search party in rain
Their urgent foot steps
Splash Time hither and thither
But memory keeps failing them
Something gone will never be found
Found is a word of someone else

Here it comes

Here comes the rain
From the pipettes and burettes of brain
It descends down into a puddle
Neatly arraigned lines of muddle.
Boiling essence in the fresh drops
and any excesses a stern eye crops.
The shoreline is far from this middle
Even crocodiles have to only wriggle
Birds flying high in a self help book
Have to fold their wings to have a re-look
No image of the sky is possible in this mud
Everything hanging above falls in with a thud
To a primordial soup that everything boils down
Longer and longer the eyebrow stretches in frown.

Free left

Journey through time
has may traffic lights to blame
They blink their rusted eye lids
slow things down
and throttle our vroom.
People don various hats
Decide everything on this route
Free left. One way.
Stop. Go. No Entry.
But often a poem crosses the line
and lands you just fine.

A Story

slowly inscribed
on the back walls of mind
stinks of an old fashion
but exists anyway.
It is worm food.
Stored and stacked
in a designer kitchen.
Looked up
when I float out on yesterday
and the universe moves away.

Dark Knight Rises

The darker part of my shadow
comes out in some lights.
It gleams like a Porpoise
crossing the road on a Zebra.
I fret a little but fit.
It stays with me
for a long night.
While my closed eyes
type out dreams on a Remington.

Crouching cosmonauts on wheels

turn into axles
of a recurring dream
where
destinations float alone

The Hungry

The light never dies out.
There is no slip into darkness.
Hunger is up and burning.

History and Geography are redrawn.
Old maps are newly coloured.
But the divisions remain the same.
The conquered and the elusive.

It opens up many mouths within us.
Tills the land, cooks a meal.
Breaks the test tube and sends a rocket.
In our inequation with the universe
we stand on the lesser side.
And we are hungry.

A Train of thought

The journey is in between
the stations of dream and wakefulness.
Minds go over a list of things
Tongues loosen up in the wind.
Out of boredom, a magazine flips itself.
And the country gets talking.
Where are you from? What about you?
Where are you going? Is it so?
What are you doing? Very nice.
Deep questions that admit silly answers.

Silence now, the food arrives.
We are in the belly of
an organism that's rushing on rails.
We are its microbes chewing our life away.
It rushes past unimportant stations.
Like someone who doesn't look back.

The fish plates have not given up yet.
Something is going on in the dark.
A plot. A threat
hangs like the pull chain.
That can stop us all
freezing this moment of life.

No message

Only search engines know my ignorance
and for others I doodle a brave face.
My search lists must be endlessly repetitive.
I do not know. I have no memory now.
The whole world appears to have
an ear for my key strokes.
But I carry no message.
Sorry. Please log out.

At the periodic table

The moon, a cotton seed behind the clouds
Presides over the expanding night's stage.
Stars, the dim theatre lights decorate the ceiling.
But what is the play about?
It is about non-still life.
And the actors spring like deer in the woods.
It is life all the way.
Listen to the peal of a death squeal.
It only echoes life.
Half of the stage is in dark
while the other is all lit up.
Daydreams and nightmares
exchange their costumes near the dateline.
But what about the dead?
Everything finds its place
at the periodic table decorated with flowers.
Carbon to Carbon. Ashes to Ashes.

Gone for a toss

Whose happiness is greater than whose
And whose sadness will you choose
They are the two sides of the same coin
Heads of happiness have tails of sadness
While the hearts are stuck in the middle
With their vain attempts to sort the riddle
Judgments will be passed, poems written
But to the nightly warmth we all return.
The dawn is without answers in stone
And the struggle starts again alone.
Libraries of answers stacked in memory
Never become the sufficient armory
The shield is lowered, the protection ceased
Hunt is on with the booby traps greased
With all this we grow many layers of skin
And a widely misunderstood sheepish grin.

Our Thoreau

Thoreau of our troubled times
lives in a house with wind chimes.
He sends Email, tweets and blogs
Those are the woods for his jogs.
He holds a PhD in taxation
His life long fixation
He occupies a place in Occupy
Watches TV with a regular sigh
He hears things beyond the drone of Drones
Sees footage of the living and then their bones
Of the far-away land where bomb smoke rises
Where every corner suicidally uprises.
A whistle blower from within, he doesn't rest
Till all the governments are put to test
Post nine-eleven he is the same
Questions the torture methods of shame
He often goes in search of forest and light
Deeper and deeper into the human plight.

Sambar stain

I walk in the rain
Sing aloud in my brain
Sit on a chair with strain
And on my jeans a sambar stain

I am too furious to walk away
My coffee wants me to stay
There's loads of work to do
And the Windows of my mind turns blue

Horror, Horror Mr. Conrad
Everywhere things go bad
A hopeful end hangs by the rope
In the darkness where I grope

I raise my hands in this dance
My difficult partner is Chance
A tango of my travails and none others'
While every dream this world smothers

It rains deadlines. Pouring troop lines
Tonight all who are in this crib
Have nothing else but to crib
Are the stars out of their light?
We don't know and that's the delight 

Scary self

The homeless are scattered
all over the well lit station.
My journey and I
are glued to the seat.
But my eyes jump across
buzz around them like flies.
They become the lamps carried by
guards searching for any missing links.
They turn into gangmen of that moment.
Make sure I am not derailed.
Crumbs of my many thoughts
get entagled in the sweeping beards.
And the cold shadow of my hand
does for a moment care.

The journey resumes.

But I remember the scene.
I grow heavy taking a mental note of it.
I remember to write it down later.
Hand over the lamp to someone else.
A lamp to be held against the darkness
A lamp that shows our scary self.

Return

Birds returning to their nests
draw the boundaries for the night.
For a moment the network is busy
and the air rends with calls.
I give out a call too.
To all those lost and scattered.
In memory and now.
They all assemble.

Every body's home now.

The pass

A script slowly writes itself
on his numerous lines of wrinkles.
He is a log book kept by the universe.
He raises and waves his hand:
A flag amidst all the commotion
A sail reflecting off the sunlight.
His well being is one-legged
and he limps along in the race.
He is a symbol
through which everything will pass:
Living and non-living.

Twilight vigil

Clouds come in shapes
Turtles, dragons and apes
Water colors them grey
and in the wind they sway
But not a drop spills
from these giant rain hills
It isn't time
It isn't time
Wind writes this on the roads
and the leaves read it out
from those notice boards.
Amidst the scrapers a red moonrise
Its tight rope walk, a daily surprise
The night pulls down the curtains
There's a pillow fight in the sky.

Childhood stations

A revisit to childhood stations
They are soggy, old and small.
Little feet that measured them
are thick skinned now.

Off the hook

The world is new and harsh.
Letters pile up against grandfather's name.
He stashes them away
next to the hurricane lantern.
A hook runs through them:
Daughter's troubles with the world.
Son's tryst with destiny.
Grandchildren growing up.

The keys change hands.
Rusty locks are thrown out to decay.
Worries too find their way out.

Are they really gone?
Let off the hook?

Nocturnal

The bat wings of my mind
scribble things in the dark.
All meanings hide
and the hunt is on all night.
They still see the light of the day.
My poems.
But skip breakfasts.
Have bad stomachs.
Take siestas like the elderly.
And stretch out like emperors
on the cusp of a coup.

When they do return
to their original unfinished forms
they are without their belongings.
I bear no responsiblity.
And the night barbarian starts again.

Summer shades

The shadows of tall trees cringe
Asphalt melts and flows like strong hearts
Squirrels stop all movement
A drifting cloud steps up
to save the world.
Nothing stops it.
Nothing holds it there.
Any movement now, the barks could sweat
Leaves whisper once in a while
Transmit a message to the sea
But all have to wait till orders from above
After a long wait something shifts about.
The day sheds its skin
After all it is all shade at its core.
The colors vaporized before
form a rainbow of embers.
It is a late rise for the night though
Look, the bats have arrived.
A conference in a nearby tree.
They have to save Gotham.
Everybody, brave along.

Needles of rain

Needles of rain
wipe out all our sighs.
The last exam over
cold feet become warm.
But our knees hurt
as we try to fit in
at the window.
We watch
the clouds greying over.
And a mother, under
an old-fashioned family umbrella
flexing her calf muscles
in the rushing streams.

Count them

The farm implements rest for the night
while the cattle in the next room stomp about
trying to negotiate with sleep.
But this room, around me,
is filled with people
now lying down
only to tackle the tomorrow.
Reality has its gashes on everyone here.
Violent wrinkles smile at me in a faint light.
My mind attracts a mob of thoughts,
encircles them in a halo of memory.
Suddenly around me are only bodies.
Organisms breathing in and out. 
The conscience has left them now.
Too deep a sleep for anything.

I count them, relate to them.
These threads of many stories assembled here.  

The third eye

The third eye in first person
writes about solitude
that churns the loneliest.
It pours out human suffering
far away from the epicenter.
Sitting between bounds of comfort
it coldly expounds on uncertainty.
And it's the only one that remembers
the flash mob of moths
and an occasional attack
of the garden lizard.

Elsewhere

The chances are slim
and the situation grim.
April is back.
Cruelty out of the shack.
It is afternoon.
The trees stand still
put up a brave face in the sun
while the sea prepares the breeze.
Pens slip out of sweaty palms
and write whatever pleases them.
A thumping heart leaps out,
paints its relief all across
an easy question paper.
The mirages clear out.
Evening switches on the breeze
and suddenly we are elsewhere.

The great halo

A halo goes around.

Its silent steps all over

trample out the darkness. 

Under its gaze

creation reaches cremation. 

There is no stop. 

The march continues. 

A life is born.

Released slowly 

onto the four feet of survival. 

A tongue swoops down

reaching everything in one thick swab.

The umblical cord wears out. 

Splits, sprouts and dies into many. 

To join the march again. 

A life is borne. 

The halo goes around. 

The unsaid

There is so much unsaid 
forming a great margin 
for the little 
that gushes out into the main.
There are more spaces
where ecosystems grow 
without anyone's notice. 
Without any loss 
the ruins of a moment
become the background. 
Little things left to themselves 
comeback to their shelters. 
Outside, it rains 
and the puddles boil with essence. 
And death climbs out of the coffins 
to be that supportive back 
to the boquet of life. 

A midnight vignette

The mid-night breeze goes around
Checks twice, if the world
is locked up warm for the night.
Four feet alone, together remain awake
in a tent of yellow mist
hanging from the street lamp.

Clasped hands are air tight
holding on to the time left.
Beyond this, the night
clouding over everything.
Dark blue or black
it is opaque even to imagination.
In its velvet shoes a cat goes past.
A dejavu with sparkling eyes.
There is a quick hug.
Fear doesn't spare togetherness.
That hanging fear for tomorrow.

All this while
shadows are at work.
They seem to clue in:
Now is the time, now is the time.
To breach another boundary. 

From the future

A sadness from future
becomes a knot around my neck.
A poisonous clot of knowledge,
it decorates me.
I look around the room
and names fall off
the register that is kept.
Books turn cold
for the lack of warm hands.
No longer will they bury the noses
and twist the glasses askew
in their last attempt
to change a perspective. 
Oil stains on the keyboard
will not be kept up.
Hurried calls will not be made
to share something minute and monumental.
Cracks too will disappear from the story.
Walls knowing no inhabitant
will crookedly laugh.
A place goes cold.
It spreads out into darkness.

Inner breeze

I have gravity in me.
It pulls everything towards
a lurking unknown centre.
Happenings and stillness
flutter the inside breeze.
There, in tracts of nowhere
I exist.
Yes, it is just me.
Self looking at self.
In a mirror, so polished
reality and image
merge into ambiguity.

Keep the night going

They keep the night going.

The earth turning.

They, the scarecrows of the dark:

The long dead and forgotten.

The bustle that I hear

is beyond the reach

of the enveloping night's screech.

An invisible plow

keeps the furrows intact.

Wells condense the winter

down their throats.

A potter's wheel turns itself.

And the blacksmith's fire

is alight with care.

Chatter fills the streets.

Leaves take shape and fall

Become tomorrow's waste.

A distant traveler's eyes rest

at the sight of civilization.

A general bonhomie

of a parallel universe persists.

Meanwhile, the deathbeds

left behind at home transform

into working desks of fertility.

Some stay

Some memories always stay
the same extent of yesterday.
But they grow deeper today
Pull me in from the quay.

In threads of dark streams
a river runs in my dreams.
Taking with it the memory-tombs
while the Present hurriedly combs.