Hide and Seek

The cold throne of the deposed king
lies abandoned as a protected monument.
And at its foot is the dome of the court hall
half surviving, like the stories it witnessed.
On the other side, defaced figurines greet
an empty space between them, while the ornate
pillars and beams rest on each other
like the dead of an epic battle.
The Gods' faces look eaten away by a cannibal
and like the creation, are in a state of disrepair.
There are surviving walls of a temple or a palace
and on them a graffiti about forgotten love
sketched as an attempt to piggyback immortality.

My mind tries to reconstruct the grandeur
while history plays one of its ancient games
Hide and Seek, to mourn in solitude.
I am absorbed in the moist sorrows
written on the walls while a man with three eyes
(One hanging around his neck)
interrupts to say how good I looked
beside these ruins and I let him
before I am lost in them.

I can see a girl turned to the wall
and counting time, for me to hide in the world
before she seeks me like this.

(My tribute to all those poets who walked those ruins of Kakatiya grandeur in Warangal and empathized with the stories they contained)

A Small World

It was home after school
Those four odd shops I visited
and a temple once in a while
That was my world.
Big enough for the small me.
And as expected, I grew up
into a different child
spanning the wings of my mind
to unknown boundaries.
And often, I take these
nostalgic routes to fantasy
and dream of the lost world.
One that is more beautiful than
the reality it's set in.
An image of the then dull phase.

Tell me, what is beauty if it is not short lived?
The ambiguity, that it might not survive
or I would not survive the onslaught of time
gives a chance to go over and
capture whatever I can.
And this is a continuous process
as I am being erased from a side
like a blackboard
after the lessons are learnt.

(Weak imitation/inspiration derived from Wislawa Syzmborska's "The Joy of Writing")

Any questions?

"What do you want to be?"
was a natural question put to me, as a child.
But it leaves only rhetorical fumes now.
There were words then
Fresh and grand, without meaning
and a new possession always inspired
awe and admiration
among friends and foes.
So, each day I wanted a new future.
Thus it was cluttered with-
Stethoscopes, Telescopes, Periscopes
and a large collection of law books
looming behind my lawyer's desk.
There were many more but nothing
like an engineer by the day
And a poet by the night.

I came a seemingly long way into the tunnel
and now the question, what I want to be
is a difficult and hence
a useless one to ask.

A thing called love

And once again
where do we find
this thing called love?
Is it in the air?
With the struggles and revolutions
locked in our hearts.
Is it between the lines?
Like a meaning shying away
and a metaphor waiting to stun.
Is it in that music?
A mute display of affection
Instrumental language of its own.
Is it dancing along with you?
In the very room.
And dancing as if
the partner mattered less.
Is it in the compromise that you made?
Where often you go for a search.
scattering your life in a pensive ransack.

Step changes

There are steps and then
there are step changes
Steps, as I walked all across my childhood
and changes that suddenly dawned around me
like the growth rings of a tree.
Those memories, arthritic now
have slowed down, and once in a while
surface as vague flashes of intensity.
Every time I see them
in a dream or as a deja vu, I tell myself
not to lose them this time.
A longing for those innocent
one dimensional and amoebic days
pulls me into a world of sand and mud
Where half-eating and half-playing
we knew for sure, that there would be a call
when the dinner is ready, shriller than
what I get now from the micro-wave
as it clamors for my attention.

Grandfather's days

Ghosts were seen quite often in his days
He spotted them regularly near the hay stack
during the time of harvest, when he kept vigil
for the wild pigs destroying the crop.
They never meant harm and were mostly impish
disturbing him before the break of the dawn
when he tried to catch some sleep.
The darkness was still dense.

These ghosts he says, are like us
Good and bad. Beautiful and ugly.
He had even heard from his friends
about ghosts repenting for their mistakes
and becoming good like in the folk lore.
After reconciliation, the humans and the ghosts
lived happily and people never minded
if the grain bags did not tally
if the food went missing
if there were odd noises
from the kitchen at an un-humanly hour.

Not to mention, there are some bad ones too
Up the hill next to the village
And under the tamarind tree towards the temple
everyone feels a little heavy, under their mistakes.

They fled, he says, with the advent of electricity
and are now found somewhere in the forests.
But he says beware during the power-cuts
Look out for them and look after them
Leave some food at the end of the day
And never mind the noises from the kitchen.

Ghosts and gods

In the mystic corners of life
we find shed skins of hope.
With its scales glowing like
the radium idols of decorative gods
we encounter what is called
A divine intervention.
A sign, an omen, a message
ratifying our state and henceforth
demanding gratification in all forms.
Like the shapes of phosphorus
(over the cremation ground)
scaring the villagers to praying
We are led to believing.
Believing
in dust, from our bones and minds
in Ghosts and Gods.