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.

Slipping by

Rain lashes on heavily
and there's no cover
except the loneliness one feels.
Bound together in an unease.
A young couple is restless to get home.
The older ones are splitting the time left--
Too much and too little--
counting the drops leaking from the roof.
"Many rains ago....",
they saunter off into a wander.
Flitting like moths
into an unfelt distance.
The sparkling tongue of the road
extends into darkness.
And things slip by in a general hurry
towards a blanket of warmth.

In this downpour
memories take shelter in our minds.
Loves are lost and found, and lost again.
The "could have" moments flash by
Not that re-living makes any sense.
But the vacant place left by them
implodes yet again in silence
within the alcoves of hearts.
Countless sensitive things rise up
as the smoke from an asphalt skin.
Sighs and plans
to only move forward take shape.

The rain stops for now.
Things are left to the past.
Letting us go from its grip.
And everything waits around.
For another downpour.

This and that

This is a world of indifference
Nurtured for nothing.
And you only wait.
Doting on questions
Why this and that?
Curiously perusing every page
of experience, the book of probabilities.

Flash in the pan

Who are these people
writing down in solitary ways?
Losing out on time
Months, years and pretty dates.

All purposeful writing
should end in a comma.
When she walks up to you
and pushes you into a coma.

Friends are long gone
making the best of the time.
But these park benches linger
witnessing this desolate crime.

Unbearably motivated
things will go out of hand
And like all manuscripts
end up in a strange land.

While sisters ponder
their brothers' wantonness.
And mothers wonder
the flash-pan brilliance.

In simple terms

Not even the weakest link
in the long chain of events.
It is eternally uncertain
what has gone into
making each of us.
What intent? is a valid question.
There are more questions from us
than the answers that we find.
Collective intelligence is lacking.
and an overall direction
just disintegrates like cinder.
Any root cause analysis
quickly leads into a monologue
about the big picture.
In simple terms, there is no answer.