Violet

Lady Lazarus at the Crossroads

2006-09-02T18:13:00.000-07:00

The Mortuary

A slit of light
Rasped as the door opened.
It rolled over and the whiteness
Spiraled in contours.
Cold, with those weeds clinging on
Like relentless capillaries,
We let the light rust our blood.
Steel scraped sand.
Moss was uprooted.
“Come on now,” an echo blotted the
Silence – Let us trespass, let us unshroud.
Webbed in white,
We unearthed.
To the mirages, yes go, let’s –
To those mirages where the earth grows.
To those mirroring mirages
Where light will become sight,
Where dust will become clay.
Let us go where the violent whiteness
Will become – a bit less – transparent.

And what a lavish desert awaits.

I
Sedimentary as stages,
These stones, grain by grain,
Diffuse into dust.
And then, as each mountain
Rumbles down, as pebbles that slip,
Stumbling down, each rock
Roams idly till it reaches
Its own valley. The mandrakes are quiet. All quiet.
Drops of dust descend.
They mortar these valleys
That travel across fumbling distances.
A quiver and even the
Valleys collapse.
The dust deepens.
Each stoned passage is
The excavated. One by one
Dissected.
But dry bones only rattle when disturbed.
As each finger unwinds its gauzy touch,
The rocks powder powerlessly
Into molten loam.

II
That luckless drop of dust is
Comforted by cobweb walls that slip, that stream
Like uncertain tributaries delivering
Charity across etherized shores.
Floating flotsam – these glass bottles –
Carry mangrove waters.
A cosmos is shrouded in a plastic cup.
A cosmos voyaging on a straw raft –
Tipping stealthily over the shoulders of
This murky, opaque sea.
The surge summons.
It drags – how it lingers –
Postponing adventures into delirious delays.
A thorn of a crown
Rises like an ivory horn.
The raft rushes to grasp.
No wings will carry
Across these gyrate blues.
The moon is a broken slab of ice.
The shoulder shrugs
Till the horn swoons with a simmer of smoke.

III
A spark shocks.
Blood broils and bubbles,
Toils and troubles
Till its loudness becomes a shy copper.
A thud, a lash, a guffaw,
As this lava is swallowed down.
A serpent slithers down these blackened cellars.
It reels, rises, then shrivels back
On the blind ground.
The smoke hisses.
Its golden fork chafes the lips.
Splintering drops flake and frost
As blood, like uninvited shoots, mine
The garden.
What fireworks plunge to plunder this dome.
And then, with a gasp of an excited matchstick, are
Choked into an ashen silence.
Lightning incises the blackness.
No bolts. No strikes.
Just chiseling with a blinding precision
Over cowering horizons.

IV
Is there where all vanishing points surrender
Their delirium?
What mirror is this that unveils no shadows.
This whiteness that islands these images
Just looks back,
Unquestioning, as transparent as time.
Those sparkles that blind,
That ribbon across these dunes
Wreathe the end of the gyre.
Perhaps from here the
Lyre looms light, from where
The Wind carries tired voices
Tossing them through empty passages, from where
Cosmoses breathe, turn, and
The retreat again
To hunger –
From here the spiral begins
Its tedium –
As the horizons color themselves
In flickering twilights.
Its largess is lofty, its restraint repentless.

The Requiem

The consummation of vital capacities
Kindles each soul as it comforts its skin
And ebbs and flows baptizing
Footprints stenciling the stride through muck and mire.

Does the light travel
Through the shadow of the prism
That enwombs all color.
And we like eager listeners, eavesdrop
As the mirages beckon.
And should we wade through
This mirror,
Or row and sculpt each ray.
The desert echoes no answer.

23 April 2006.

Diffusion

2006-03-02T11:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes air holds itself back. Sometimes, it seems that it waits for someone to reach out. Answer it – to see if it’s still there, serving. A long pause, that lies within parentheses, searches. Yes, it’s clueless. Yes, there are no more answers. No more phrases. No more fumbling uncertainties. Ambiguities rotted into comfortable ambivalences till both became faceless. Nothing followed nothing.
The night only carries stars pinned onto it, tiny cactuses intruding a desert’s infinitude. Trace each one, each stammering shine, till distances become delirious. It’s then when it’s stark. When miles and miles linger on, persuasively, yet still undiscovered. Uncelebrated. Unaffirmed. Then it’s pure and absolute – of being nothing more, nothing less than a smote in the iris of the universe. Of not being persistent, enough.
One room. One light. An unquestioned cell. A few phone calls. A familiar voice in the same familiar room. Echoes – an asymmetric oneness. Conversations are confabulations. They are stretched. A thread twitches. Then snaps. Silence again.
Cold, cold, caustic silence. Like having platinum around your finger. Just metal. Slippery. Shiny. Somber. Still.
Resilient.
So much knits itself deeper. Inside. So much is needed to defend. Yet, nothingness is unwilling to help. Justifications, humiliated, warm like matchsticks – those gasping sparks. Then darkness again. Capture that laughter in that matchbox. Clasp it.
A dipping sun has a strangely warm mellowness in its retiring glow. It gazes upon crowded streets, through blinds, diffusing in, falling modestly on the table, on human skin, fingers that gesture, then fold back. Locked. Yet an open territory still lies out-of-bounds. Few refer to roadmaps. Fewer bother to measure distance. A corridor. A highway. An auricle. A breath – or just the miles of travel that goes into that single copper ray reaching dust – yet still melting into shadows.
Deeper. Deeper. Rattling bones will bother no one but the dust that grasps them. How trapped. Tampered. Bound. Bonded.
Yet relentless in steeled solitude. Some noise now. Some voice. A crash of glass, a gust of wind, a discordant wail, a ceaseless laugh. Anything – anything that could travel from above and into this universe Held together by paper forceps.

Onion Rings

2006-02-23T14:07:00.000-08:00

It’s about bandaging
Sacrament – about
Taking apologies then
Wreathing them with restraint, a remorse,
A ramification
Till the very content
Is subsumed by substitutes.

A dive of a natural love
Can unravel a whole race.
An organic unity that
Holds the entire world,
Worthless as an unfound pearl,
In its untarnished fingers
That long to possess.

A sip has its drops
Divided into controlled decimals
As they round off into
Careful calorific intakes.
An exhausted eye with an iris
Wrung like a traveled globe
Questions quietly.

And then a thorn
That connects as needles do –
Bleeding through threads,
Measuring each error,
Each phrase as it lingers in the air
That we share, when bonded.
We remain so calm otherwise.

I see them –
spiraling into ribbons
of violet warm to the sight
but cold as the possession deepens.
I see the rind of a rainbow
Coiled in those layers,
like unposted letters
that silently rest in stamped envelopes,
clasped like eyelids
that have been kissed – not questioned.

I see them –
horizons locked in those webs,
smoking up as wisps of diffused color
that dims in delirious degrees
till sight becomes blind
and only specks trouble and itch.
That knife decimates the unity –
as an autopsied globe being spread into a map
that stretches over a miles and miles
yet still lies undiscovered.

Only the knife
Consummates it
As it unlocks
Those tiny radii calculating their fall,
As its infinite oneness realizes its
Concentric being
And then dislocates itself from its
Armoring shadows.
It measures certainty in coherent approximations,
As it distributes and delivers.

These tears are sprung by chemicals.
They know no emotion.
They sense only smell.

An uprooted lily wails, somewhere,
Over its severed soul.
Its sliced skin.

24 February 2006

Lost in Translation

2006-01-30T09:46:00.000-08:00

I hear a melting crystal.
Loam hardens
under tired feet
that drag along corridors
of a beach with
windows frosted
with an amber sun.
I hear copper waters
simmering the sand
till they square
horizons struggling to
clasp vanishing points
into some unity.

And how we float –
how you row me through.
These temperate waters
carried Miracles in wicker
that made mountains Burn
and Bleed.
Can an iceberg
become a chosen cave
from which shadows lurk
to become light?
Can chilblains heal
to become clotted blood
that inks these white, crystal walls?

Lo what calligraphic
Graffiti stains this marrow.
What whiteness armors these rattling bones
as I continue to rock, and float,
being towed by these lingering reddened
waters.

It sinks, yet stands
rooted. Not waving. Not drowning.
Just afloat.
What drives these laden chalices,
I wonder, to roam
rippling, as they write unheard scripts
in warmed blood.

I run my hand through it all –
the broken glass pauses,
and then becomes plain again.
The ice stiffens each ligament
till posture becomes nature.

And drop by drop
it loiters. It lilts –
Like a sure fingertip grazing over a Braille score.

30 January 2006

Algebra

2006-01-05T10:20:00.000-08:00

Across an inked ocean
A bony feather
Trespasses the quiet.
A robin, she said,
Bleeds the snow.
And tiny, wordless shoots
Locked in their seeds
Watch, exiled.
We all watch –
Cactuses in clay pots
Rooted behind
Bolted windows.

We all crave for
A possible desert.

Everyday now I
Pick up pieces
Littered over verbose pages,
Every moment now I
See waters cracking
Apart till glass
Leaves chilblains
On my fingers;
Jarring paper-cuts, banished star-points, squaring circles –
From where does my question begin
To grow and unseed
Itself into some possibility?

Where do I go now
When I see only a faint
Thread sharpening distance
As a metallic light, as a loamy darkness?
From where do I
Graze now when
Sand-dunes wash over
Every single excavation.

The sand struggles
More in possessive hands.

These lines – these defined compass points –
Narrate, yet subjugate.
A wind
That roams
From delirious directions
Swiftly effaces what
They speak.
Only fractured phrases
Linger as dust
That steadily sweeps,
Somehow readily creeps,
Even from my secured window.

And as the frost fumes
Over the glass,
As I trace mirages with
My gloved fingertips,
It is the dust that,
Like a frail skeleton,
Makes the water
Melt down and
Bleed the glass
As rude graffiti.

Come then, I say,
Let me wander and let my
Footprints be smoothed over
By a soaring stroke of this clay.
Let me swim through
Threads of rain
As it ripens
Quilted snow.

My boots are full of slush.
Naked feet should punctuate what the staff Beckons.

I feel this sand with a blind touch – an ashen white.

5 January 2006

And the Silence Suffered no Shadows

2005-11-21T11:01:00.000-08:00

I

Shapes and surfaces
Now make me surrender.
This letter I write
Stumbles upon every
Punctuation mark
Till the page
Empties itself stark –
Each phrase fumbles
In fright
As postscripts
Warn to remember
What the content otherwise effaces.

Yes a postscript
That wraps up as Amens do.
They remind of how we
Package, bandage
Our summarized desires
Into endlessly stamped
Possibilities.
And then deliver them,
Let them wander on
Relentless seas
Trapped in inkbottles
That seal yet spill over continents.

II

I had always wanted
Circles gyring freely as
Ripples topple silences
Like mirrors that somehow
Speak and shiver.
I hated symmetry when
Squares would cage
Me into their equilibrium
And pin me down
Where seas and skies
Would toss and turn
And be delivered as broken violet slivers.

But a glass square
Floats over waters, a bit too clear,
And its shadows are
Careful, fearful arcs
That wrap me.
I sense a logical pain,
An ambiguous knock
That collides continents,
That overthrows seas
Till they crash into
Their skies
With a brusque certainty.

III

Why then is guilt
Stenciling need.
Yes there is graver
Responsibility as squares
Uproot and inscribe
Frightened circles.
The same constants
Command me, my skin,
To yield now.
Memory mocks, stalls my desire
To comfort, to care.
I wish to cube this square.

And we share a symmetrical
Silence. Angles, triangles, rectangles
All untangle into
Open, inviting spaces.
I see a steeple doming
Above and we coil
In crowded confusion.
Was it just skin? Or was it more?
Did I dare to collapse –
Or were vanishing points
Too far-reaching to converge?
Being became unbecoming.

IV

And what happens
Now we question?
I think the guilt
Will comfortably explore
And settle into solitude.
But no – I long to share –
I long to take care of
Pain (I now know, a bit too completely) –
To bandage it with comfort.
Too many opposites
Now fuse horizons
From lines to almost perfect circles.

And I have sealed
It. White blots black
As commas of two distant continents
Suddenly clash, and then, equally suddenly, coalesce.
I am selfish in my understanding –
Of what happens when darkened cosmoses
Still, somehow, manage to calm me
In chosen conformity.
Longer prayers are abbreviated into anagrams.
All inks clotted, somehow,
Create again. Unsurely.
Yet securely.

That shy star with its perfect compass points
Is sharp with its squared certainty.
Why then it disappears soon after
When violets retreat.

21 November 2005

7.6

2005-10-13T19:39:00.000-07:00

New York Mining Disaster 1941

In the event of something happening to me, there is something I would like you all to see. It's just a photograph of someone that I knew. Have you seen my wife, Mr. Jones? Do you know what it's like on the outside? Don't go talking too loud, you'll cause a landslide, Mr. Jones. I keep straining my ears to hear a sound. Maybe someone is digging underground, or have they given up and all gone home to bed, thinking those who once existed must be dead. Have you seen my wife, Mr. Jones? Do you know what it's like on the outside? Don't go talking too loud, you'll cause a landslide, Mr. Jones. In the event of something happening to me, there is something I would like you all to see. It's just a photograph of someone that I knew. Have you seen my wife, Mr. Jones? Do you know what it's like on the outside? Don't go talking too loud, you'll cause a landslide, Mr. Jones.

– Bee Gees
…

May the Sheep safely Graze?

An Aubade for Negatives

2005-10-06T18:57:00.000-07:00

Yet Again
The season has returned,
A harped wind sculpts the moon
As an unsure halo
Of a twilight shadow.
And they roam on mountaintops
Where a touring air
Sweeps the horizons
Of all skies
As a ripple topples stone
And ushers its white root
To turn and sprout.

And yet the shadow
Only deepens its sky
Warming it and casting
A knowing tumult in oblivious seas,
Their Lazarus fingers
Only ruffling with an idle calm;
And as they stumble
And kneel, dragging their slivered copper
Towards the shores,
It tows them
Back – closer to where
The copper rusts itself to a platinum incision.

Yes negatives narrate
A parable where beginnings
Are enough to unravel
In corridors of wondrous silence
Through which sound can
Stammer. And sing.
Only silence has answers.
Only darknesses can etch Lazarus
And make us peer into
Cracking arcs – collapsing stones
Rumbling into water
That returns to dust.

And that violet star and its ivory ceiling arch to look on in constant clarity
So the sheep may safely graze
Upon deserted shores.

6 October 2005

The Subaltern’s Sign

2005-09-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

From a sliver
of a broken moon,
a silver shocks
the pond.
Inside the spark
of a broken mirror,
Water ventilates
till oceans topple
and resonate
the meaning of quantum
Answers.

The white fingertip
with its transparent touch
quivers the stillness
till motion rests
as a stenciled shadow.
And then sand dunes
again.
Tossing and turning,
then returning –
being plucked by a roaming,
Syllabic wind.

And as the arc
radiates to deliver,
stirring atoms that stitch
Entirety – that measure
of distance where galaxies
perforate twilight possibility,
there lies a horizon
that rotates and revolves.
And it sometimes
rests
like pauses always do.

From numerals that frame syllabic
Sounds, the spilling gyres that unspiral
into plains
as Water freezes to glass that
shatters. And seams.
From a single spark of a
wrinkled iris
Spaces stretch
into an untiring infinite
from the shuttered lid.
And creation is composed through its blurred image.

And as the space deepens
its corridors,
as the moon collapses
at its blackest sea,
the final ripple of a cosmic shadow
fuses into ice.
And those unsung deserts simply wait
upon their snuffed shores.
A ripple – a drop – even a careless pull
can Revisit and unlock
these melting galaxies.

15 September 2005

Stammering Silences

2005-08-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

In Dreams

When the Cold of Winter Comes
Starless Nights will cover Day.
In the veiling of the Sun
We Will Walk in Bitter Rain.
But in Dreams
I Still Hear Your Name.
And in Dreams
We Will Meet Again.

When the seas and mountains Fall
And We Come to End of Days
In the Dark I Hear a Call
Calling me There.
I will Go There.
And Back Again.

Now is a time when words are only sought. Not found. Now is a time when I sense
a lack of power. I sense a darkness that goes beyond the deepened blue of the cosmos. Starlessness, the emptiness after fireworks rise like sure comets and then leap and drown – what colors the sky before the moon decides to descend? Sometimes words surely don’t come. They linger somewhere as traces on a varnished canvas. A watercolor sheet that only has pencil marks stenciling shadows.
So I go to those who have said. And have said it really well. I feel a lack of reason. I know how what happens when Meaning is reduced to Motion alone. And only soundlessness stays with a sensation of a phantom limb.
And that slit of a sorry moon peers down pinned to that empty blueness. Let’s only see feeling as it is sensed through shadows said yet unsung. Let me plagiarize to pardon this unsaidness.
Let me just say that there is no prayer without faith. No sound without stillness. Even ripples need space to be heard. I trace an arc in the air that speaks of snuffed light. Metallic is it? Let it cut through and then melt as copper collapses at waiting horizons.

Delay

The radiance of that star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eye may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star’s impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

Total

All is and it evades me,
The trapped word, the tethered star,
The essence, almost the whole
Of is becoming aware
Of how I have troubled power,
Dared to risk despair.
Now through the five senses the soul,

The spirit of me discards crude self, takes on
Unpossessiveness.
O pure, spare moon peel off
Desire, greed, ambition,
Let me be other. Is love
The only way to this?
Even joy is a way to possess.
The full moon outstared me to show
Like it I must become less,
A sliver of self alone
Diminished to quarter moon.

Enough

A string is plucked, a word
Uttered, then silence till
A robin bleeds the snow.
Fingers are frozen, minds
Shrink to small purposes.
A thread of careful sound,
A rise of raging air
Then purpose found.

Longer than loss. Words should not be crouching. But they do. Now.

– Jennings and Fran Walsh.

Intervention Now: On a Night Shift

2005-07-23T01:18:00.000-07:00

It’s a calendarical call –
Something that tediously
Rises – soars – stumbles
Stammers
Like we run our steeled fingers
Across the pages of a Latest Volume
And are bewitched
By the incidental animation
The thudding whistle of the paper
And its writhing Ink
Construct.

Yes the pages are a
Wilted white,
Something like rancid cream.
And the words punctuate it
Like eagles would dip and roam
Idly or purposefully
In a redundant sky.
The ebb of echoic trebles
Pebbling through and through.

Suns, moons, stars
And the sky that carries them all
Just dome above in Sistine omnipresence.
Steel shadows against a charcoal light
Etch corridors, scrape windows.
An unsure Lazarus beckons.
A white arm stealthily stretches – not reaching out.

We seek for a promised Touch.
We stare at Violet gyres
As the rainbows in them fuse and diffuse.
As ribbons are sometimes rearranged
On gifts. Flowers.
And even at melting horizons.

I see a dipping sun,
Lidless, like a Watchful Iris,
Yet prophetically vibrant,
Blazed yet not Burning –
Contently orbiting like others do in
Other deeper, darker corridors.
And yet it stares –
As both twilights retreat and recreate
It peers into its rusted ripeness
As a thousand broken coppered mirrors
Ripple into a quantum infinite.

And as our colored sound
Unravels into these gyres,
As the first star
Becomes
The last and then first
Again,
As the horizons stretch through
All corridors
Of waiting clauses,
As the blues warm to violet

We will hear that Eagle’s Call –
As certain as Eventually.

23 July 2005

Forbidden Fruit

2005-06-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

It flows.
A Desert Wind
Desiccates the immortal
Backyard of Heaven.
I see weeds
Wincing in magmatic
Soil.
I see them unpruning
The civil space of our
Garden.
I sense a ripened fall –
A pull that
Entombs
Me to the waiting womb
Of a loamy possibility.

That bracket of living
Between not-here and maybe There.
That unexcavated dust
Between bone and being.
The fusion that encapsulates
As blood fumes and frosts.
Then frees –
Twilights toasting as we
Boast of clotted clones and corridored caves
Where only shadows
Blot to interject
And sometimes encrypt.
These whispers hiss and haunt.
What echoes
Crawl and creep.

One greyness deepens
Another urn.
Another rots. Another burns.
And how angelically the
Same mountains
Descend.
How flotsamly, how restlessly
We gasp for a residual wind
To calm our rippling lungs.
To balm our parchment wings.

From window to window,
Room to room, we roam to graze,
Till all the eternal spaces
Would recollect themselves
Thorough infinitely narrow
Streets. Shores. Skies.
And then linger
As spaces always do
With perennial persistence
Like hanging echoes chorded in darkened corridors.

And can we re-enter
Then? I mean it Is
Just syllabic Unity.
A terse knock.
The turning of a returned key.

Will Then Be a Time
When emeralds will nourish soils.
When seas will turn into deltaic infinite.
When there would Be
Possible certainty.

I long now to
Wait as mirages do
To be founded on
Firmer grounds that need
Both wings and bone.

I wait
For blood to colour all my seas,
To deliver a seed from stone.

10 June 2005

Versus

2005-05-05T11:41:00.000-07:00

Sleep disturbs.
Dismantles.
There is rashness in its knock.
And as it grates over a sore skin
Scrapes over an indifferent soul,
It lingers with
A feverishly long
Pause.

Where a sound
Creeps with a celestial suddenness.
Where a shadow explodes
In a twilight sprinkle
And blots passages
In which oceans flow
With a lavish unconsciousness,
In which mountains unravel
Like smoked certainties.

But what of ambiguities
That sink under sheets.
That crouch under pillowcases.
That cringe under lidless eyes.

But what of those spaces
That connect dreams with sleep
As commas, semicolons, ellipses.

There is a hallway full of hardworking dreams.
There is a corridor brimming with footmarks.
There is a drawing room, with dusty furniture and rusted landscapes.
In elaborate limitations. In cloned squares. In barred horizons.
And dunes of cobwebs that sweep them.
They only gape. And wait.

It’s when the cosmos
Consummates into its two shadows
That creation sets and shines.
What molten craft
Sculpts copper into gold.
From iron to silver.
What prism
Locks up rainbows in its grasp
And then unleashes them
Like spilt ink.
That does not write. But reads.

What goes behind
A sleep that blooms the imagination
As blood that looms
In skin and soul.

What goes behind curtained
Windows.
A whole cosmos
Awaits in stifled wonder.
A wind that bleeds upon glass.

And as soon a tired lid
Rises – beckoned back to the dead –
The Lazarus transparency is confused by crowded colour.

Effaced.
What a narrow space
For a breath to linger.
To remain.

What traffic.
Unseen City.

I close the window again.
It screeches beseechingly
Slam – shut – still.
But the Wind rumbles in,
Gasping.

Switch off that lamp.
Let the arc diffuse
Into possible darkness.
Let there be
A shared communion.
Let the blood toast as wine.
Let the caves clot and create
Cosmoses.

Let the Ink Write. Read.
Remember.

5 May 2005

The Fifth Element

2005-04-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

– Hurry up Please it’s Time –

I hear the wind carrying with its burden, an ashen leaf. They’re both exhausted, they tell me. They tell me that the season stumbles, and has tumbled to a new toll. They tell me that Della Robbia Blue now laces her shawl. She doesn’t wrap herself with it. The winters have wilted, she told me.

But I told her that no – they were fuming out of neatly pruned gardens like happy weeds. I told her that some do look at them. Some even incubate them. I wanted to just be there – in reverential awe. I kept mumbling. Fumbling.

I was wanting – not to stumble. But only to be sure.

And now, Spring seems to unleash itself on a whitewashed veranda of the echoing world. It lingers – something of a rainbow that spectras rudely through vomited petrol that suffocates expectant shores. And sometimes broken streets.

The air now snoozes off with a comfort. Something warm – urgent. Red. Green. Centred with a White. I feel the blood simmering in expectant eagerness. Like a blank watercolour paper that waits to be consummated. Even with a limited palette. You only need two for Creation and COmposition. The Lazarus Whiteness would always Remain. Even as a spatial reminder. It will Be. Like the Hypotenuse of my Isosceles World.

A basketful of strawberries with a raw – almost sour – suddenness can make Spring sprout into Summer. And Real Rainbows generously distribute themselves on skied parchments and inked seas. And how they sweep – slide – stroke – that lavish wet-in-wet diffusing across sterile rocks. And how the rocks dismantle. Spark. And then melt into warm gold that seethes in the comfort of a locked up volcano. Someone said that dry, sterile thunder also groans with Promise. Rocks and situations too. Water has to permeate. It has to make blood run. Race. Rise. Stagger. Soar.

And then Surge. And pour –
Into Infinite.

Someone also said that the COsmos was Created for Company. Who would want to just peer into a mirror. Yes reflections reciprocate. But symmetry needs a horizon – and sometimes a weed to disrupt into Completion.

And when we were ousted from the Garden and sent to the Land of the Rocks to construct and exhaust situations, we did not know much. We had to Be Told.

Those were times when Thunders Actually would Speak. Narrate.

And even Sing.

Now I hear retreating seas being carried by tired skies. Dust whispers by blotting images in my smudged imagination. I rub my eyes clear. And still peer.

Till I can Be seen.
Till I can Be heard.
Till I can Be Felt.

Above capillaries run into eternal Infinity.
Above I hear a Roar. A rumble. A Touch.

Something wraps around me.
Something that I can safely (surely) call Violet.

Della Robbia – warmed by Blood. From a clot – completed.

I feel the Wind Welcome me. Enfold me.

It lets me bloom.
Just as a hesitant bud.

Yet I look Up.
Into Beyond – and I can sense the Wind Approaching.
I can hear the sea returning.
I can sense it charge, capturing and consummating cosmoses as it Comes…

To stay. And not to exile itself as the wind winds and unravels over other distances.

I hear it as an Amen. All Seasons and Senses – as One.

April is the Cruellest Month

2005-04-10T11:02:00.000-07:00

Monsoons are encapsulated as if in a waterlogged soil that is more mire than muck. Tubered rains struggle to be plunged by a tuber sky? I hear shattering mirrors. I hear collapsing cosmoses.

I hear silence in comatose unease.

And yet I see Della Robbia Blue flowers. I see pink ones. I see violet ones. “They’re not white. They’re not blue. So are they red?”

I see shoots calling out from a smothering soil that drowns them.

And I leap.

Even stones have veins running into them. And when they consummate they narrate passion. They ignite. Thunders do not only violate the sky. They invigorate atoms that compose capillaries – that Connect. And sometimes sever.

They bleed.

After being fettered in a PanOptican of time, place and space (and other barring fences) and being Watched by the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg – who merely Stares with His Twilight Ashness – I only faintly feel my atlased being. Yes they come and go, not speaking of any Michelangelo. They just go, as soon as they come.

So many oceans now empty themselves into waiting gyres of memory. So many are tossed and tumbled, dismantled then delivered to hungry shores. With us – watching. Waiting.

And then we go.

So many strings and threads are stroked into some thwarted pattern. So many shadows coalesce at dawn to beckon mornings and moments. So many caves and dens and mountains are expectant. Some snow-capped. Some extinct. Some dormant. Some open-ended.

So many serve and wait.

And so many choose to linger. Not as mere cobwebbed echoes. Or vacuous ellipses. Or even as trespassing weeds.

They linger to remain.

I know that even though I walk through empty streets that diffuse into lanes then sublanes – even though I sense that only shadows stretch along these passages that perimeter infinite – I know that I see a Locked-up Garden somewhere. Above or Below. That I do not know. I do not need horizons now.

An Iris stares back as I look straight ahead into Vanishing Points that Converge to Consummate Unseen Cosmoses. I stare into It. and I know I commit no sin. I only share.

What is mine.

I wait for Rain to unleash now. And paint with transparent Unity.

I wait to open newer windows that I have polished – and then graze an indigo sky.

And then wade into its Ebb and Flow.

And then Call – Not Waving…

But Drowning.

Wo Yar Hai Jo Imaan ki Tarhaan

2005-03-22T06:49:00.000-08:00

A time has come, when words, as comforting abstract shadows, do not enfold me. I have always dipped in Violet, have reveled in its completion. But now I need a completer Sky. What we look up to Is a pallid, even deathly blue.

A while back I spoke of Pythagorean Completion. Now is a revelatory time. Celebration is spoken of. Is sometimes is composed as a sacramental gesture. Sometimes we fetter celebration is the form of bleak candles. Sometimes as ghastly fireworks. Sometimes as warm gestures. Sometimes as flickers.

Sometimes as absence.
Sometimes as lateness.

And I am late. In every due meaning the term dares to encapsulate.

But then – some things don’t really need time as promise. They don’t need something as barring as time to define their entirety. That is why, I think, mathematicians finally realized that they were petty humans after all, with contextual faculties. And maybe to measure something that they felt did not need any qualification – they coined (or should I say created) the term Infinite. And The Real Horizon Sign – that knotted notation to give it a visual validation. They spoke of COnnexion unlimited. Unlimiting. That unlimits – Blue does consummate Blood to Deliver Violet. A deeper soil.

This limited space that I have here to unleash the infinite quantum-ness of my sky is barring like any horizon. But I would use it as an instrument to frame an entire cosmos of Us (even as I paint it through a shattered mirror).

I choose to celebrate the reason that has celebrated Creation. From clotted blood, and from a cave it began when solitude was invaded then shared. Then COnsummated. Shadows and light. Violet and Blue. Sense and Sound. I know that Being is. I feel it pluming my senses as I see a soaring eagle. The layered silvery silhouette of clouds laden with rain but do not deliver. Till Thunder Beckons them to. And with every drop of careful rain that fuels and fills oceans of galaxies unknown to mathematicians and astronomers and all those exhausting minds that seek to limit the unbarred horizon of fuming stars and suns and moons and other Unseen things – with every chiming bird, shying leaves as light fuses them tempted by an easy wind, a strumming ruffle of water of a pond where ducks sometimes baptize themselves for special occasions, a silver feather, a silver stone with violet veins, with every silvered cloud that somehow alludes to a silvered eye with a watchful iris – the perimeter that marks and calculates what is everything – mine. Not mine. Possessed. Not possessed. But somehow, shared. Seen.

I choose to celebrate what promises to fill my being with Its sky, sea and whatever lies in between.

I merely image creation. But I feel a Truthful Touch in it. I learn by negatives. I know that I would be (for now) palled in shadows till an absence e that undermines our horizons would dissipate. And BeCOme One. Two Roots of One Great Tree.

I celebrate Violet. I celebrate Lazarus. I celebrate Completed Creed.

And its being sung everywhere –

Wish it were Heard. After all, echoes always linger.
There can never be complete silence. And even as I stammer as I sing – I still celebrate.

Even as a muted flicker.

From Stone to Shoots - that Grow

2004-10-27T04:27:00.000-07:00

My Tornado’s Resting

Two voices
Floating over nightness.
And mine was an occasional shadow.
A muttering echo
That did not need
Any form. Nor feeling.
Just Presence.

And sometimes,
Like an insistent always
Shadows deepened into
A wider space
That ravels across
Night, day and all the spaces
Connecting poles into places.

And from that widened silence
That navigated across all my
Laden skies – from blank sheets of
Expectant parchment –
To heavier inks, even frosted blood,
I sensed.
As it was Composed.

She didn’t notice.
He said it was an inverted earthquake.
Do negatives thwart, overthrow
And then recreate.
A canyon that smoked up
Across the new nightness
Crapped by the rising ones
Where the mightiest ones
Nest. And rest.

And we wait.

And as the floating fume quietened,
It continued to play its peek-a-boo
With a reverential reserve.
And I continued to gaze
At the hazy whiteness that
Sculpted the smoke
Making it apocalyptically three-dimensional
But points and planes –
There is a deeper form that defies
Constructed creation.

And we continued to wait.

As the smoke eclipsed the sky –
Greyer clay blotting it,
Writing holier notes
Whispering, humming maybe, or
Just plainly silent –
I could not tell.
Newer presences penned me.
And we tried to decipher
Together.

But still waited.

26 February 2005

Erosion

Time crawls.
and as it does, it drags –
scrapes corridors with its talons,
etches episodes as corroded relief.
I had the same respect.
I shared the reverentials
the same way.
The lavender diffused into loam
stretches forth.
And sunlight ventilates through
the curtains that belong to our soil
alone.
And we sit and wait.
The open clearing – bricked yet
baked in the white sun –
And then the uncrowded
sky unravels
like a blank newsprint.
Bits and scraps
of our entireties
live sporadically in habitual
corners.

And the corridors divide
from arms to hands to
careful fingers holding office furniture
into habitual motion.
And I would stand
There.
Looking at divided anatomy –
another shadow of a corridor
mounted by lavender-loam bricks
and capillaries of mortared grey.
And the field –
a liver image of the sky
unfolds
with perennially-pruned greenness
sported by human clay.

And now
I only decipher
Alphabets of memory
With my fingertips,
Excavating dynasties through deep dust.
Linkages are dismembered.
And traces are left –
Being generously
Carried (tossed and delivered)
As blotted shadows
By a heavy, lived
Wind.

Yet there is sacrament –
Of signs, subtleties, silences,
Songs – a sigh – a shy smile –
Severed, yet somehow, shared –

An entire cosmos captured, then revisited, in a Broken Mirror.

23 February 2005
Reasons Unsaid

Calm returned.
Even though scattered,
Patched, rather
As a slapdashed
Composition. No unity
Now. But even disrupted
Voices
Connect a silence.
Echoes wander in
Passages, alleys,
Alive hallways. Lived rooms –
With a purpose
That only space
Knows.
And senses.

And today
With presences
Merely as pencil-sketches
Shadowing
In closed walls
Blotting
Reality with a habit-pattern,
I felt peace mortared
With a pain –
Not stinging, but sipping
Away tears.
It’s all different now –
Suited to tailor newness
With a varnish
That speaks of blank, unused clarity.

Before
My fingers would etch,
Leave a signature, a scent, a sigh
Layered in form and feeling.
Furniture was friend,
Like persons, although propped,
Still serve
And wait.
A long, dry presence
Somehow
Seemed to hold the air
As sockets handcuff bones
Even though
They squirm to dislocate.
Disjoint.

There is an obvious
Language crafted
By history. And circumstance.
My tenses are shared, rather interrupted
By closer variables.
Not equals.
Constants will command
A sky with a forever.
Even though real horizons
Warm our feet.
At least they warm.
At least they remind.
A skyliner sculpting
The rusted sky
With a resounding brilliance.

Now I cannot
Continue to bind
A universe into four, disciplined
Compass points.
It is not enough.
A window stifles me.
One breath can
Resurrect moments
Into non-linear eternities.
Dizzying, delirious, daunting –
I now gasp to
Become
A bloodless star
That has no work
But to rotate and see.

And then
Still gallowed by its axis,
Pinned to the sky,
It gazes on others to
Be.
They all stir as shadows,
Ripple as submerged waters
Filling violet seas
And bluer oceans at my sky’s
Warmed feet.
They move – a speaking couch,
A moaning spread,
A painted window,
A curtained door –
As commas they speak.

With a canvas
Silvered in paused
Stillness, I wait,
Laden with stillborn revelations.
Suns, moons, stars
All crowd my sky.
The truth is a plainer, deeper, darker
Black – a holy ink – Brimming
Scores and volumes
With a peace of fluent blood.

5 February 2004

POW

"Aik aik qadam barhanay mein kitni taaqat sarf hoti hai. Kitna khoon aur paseena sarf karna parta hai maujon ka muqabla karnay kai liye. Paani ya tau pahaar ki quwat maangta hai ya phir mukammal supurdagi. Aur meray andhar donoun ki himat nahin thi."

Masood Ashar, "Dukh Jo Mithi ne Diyay."

A number. Yes it began with one. It was a 19 I remember. Like any beginning it equated. The singular I bent into C and then became O – that gyrate eternity. Alone like that Absolute Numeric that is shared by some strange mathematics that calculates shadows and equates them with darkness. But they rely on Light – that call of Lazarus.

And from One I moved to a 360. Sines, Co-Sines and Tans – all in a gilded room – when Identities matured into entireties in that shared zone of a newer meaning. It’s funny how I was terrible at solving Identities. Answers were never given to you. You were expected to reach QED on your own. The formula was there – Pythagorean Theorem? Of Isosceles Triangles and what not. I used to spiral in and around the three but never QED.

I always failed at proving them. I was caught not waving, but drowning.

This time the Water Beckoned. The ebb and flow promised to carry me even though the answer was as far off as infinity itself. I hate traveling. I had traveled through water, muck, mire, opaque rainwater. But never this Peace. I knew that the spiral of the 9 would couch me, enfold me as it always does. I never got tired of traveling through infinite. The One was there to equate eternity with Absolute.

But sometimes terrestrial logic bothers me. I sometimes hate blindly following these reckless numbers. Sometimes the water clots into silence. Even ripples don’t form. It is then when only shadows lead on – that pace where blood clots to garnet. I am stoned.

Into DisPlacement.

~

Yes I stopped writing for that while that preceded then. Yes I spoke of Benediction – when she ran between the two, what They call Symbols and water sprouted from her feet. That was a time when thoughts were just empty spaces. Miracles were stuff of dreamy adventure that only dared.

But then Movable Feasts came. Even though I am always invited, I’m still on hold. What feeling my poetry had then. The largesse of meaning, the hybrid imagery. Those overflowing chalices when wine would brim to blood that flows unrestrained.

That O gives life. It all began from an empty space. Yet it fills when coupled with H. HOH – almost as if the O is walled, parenthesized, enfolded. But isn’t it unfair that hydrogen has to put in double the effort to make it flow so that Being is not tossed into blank vapor? Oxygen can give life alone. It can survive.

Yet the formula intends to consummate.

Alone hydrogen can bring death.

Walking barefoot made the travel fluid. Now, the rainwater chokes my shoes. That guttural residue.

From crowns, to cast-off umbrellas, veils, question marks and broken mirrors that ripple images into creation, I wade on.

Despite the DisSection.

~

Then was a time when no frontiers used to demarcate. It was a free space. Shadows would fall, then rise, fusing through Substance. It was when Spirit would breathe through its Skin. Yes I could reach out, learn, and dip into real horizons where I would touch the Vanishing Point.

But how far can broken flight carry you? Carry me. My own weight burdens me. Walls, fences, borders, borderline uncertainty all bar direction into a delimited dominion. What became of Bridges that were designed to move closer? What became of Capillaries that sought to Connect? What became of Strings that always attached – never retracted.

What became of BeComing?

Time does not heal. But pricks. It’s a forked path now that slithers across seas and skies. There is a dichotomy of choices. Memory is packaged into neat compartments set with expiry dates.

In caves lay echoes that would summon answers. Yes there was contemplation then. Ripples did fuse from arcs to semis to creation that was sought. It came on its own instead. In one drop. But it came. In a shared solitude when unequal music would rustle in open passages. When seeds could sprout from stone. Even echoes could balm. Spaces were enough to punctuate Bonds.

Newer regions have now been erected. They now flirt to explore. Barren earth with futile soils can only bring dust. I am in the ground now.

Amidst DisLocation.

~

I am accused of not giving. But I have given what largesse only defines. Never promises. The journey must equate. Rings must Complete into 360 Degrees.

BeComing should be enough to satisfy BeLonging. Water when desiccates into desert grains speaks only in the Wind. Be-ing should not be dissected into an uneasy prime.

I need Unity of COnnexion. I don’t want numbers that mainly define or demonstrate. I need equations that determine. Variables can be substituted. Constants remain.
19 is like Violet. It promises a Shared Space. Twilights never linger. They just fall and rise to remind.

Roots are always buried in the deepest soil. Tributaries always distribute into a sea. From O to Infinite – I long to trace that with my fingertips.

But I need a hand.

I need a touch to make me whole. I choose to BeCome. Not just Be.

Phantom Limb

Castrated.
What ceremonial
Calculation.
Amputated
With an incisive
Precision.

Yet it freezes
The blood –
Clogging the skin
It breathes through.
Too embarrassed,
Maybe tired,
It diffuses into uncomfortable
Silence.

Function
Is thwarted.
I still feel
With feverish gadfly wings
That I can flutter
If not soar.
Flitter with fractured form.
Yes I would
Dip in Circles
Deep.

And now my sky
Buries me.
How far can
Severed flight
Carry you?
Till how long
Will the Wind
Pull those Strings
Already twitched
Into silence.

Yet that urge
Is still lingering –
Like scent crowding
Your senses –
Yet it vaporizes from the fingers
That held it, clasped it,
Safe, in equal possession.
Yes it clings
Like clotted blood
Staining a stabbed soul.

I plunge
Now – that ambivalent
Nostalgia packaged in memory:
Just like this bandaged Bond.
I only drown
Deeper, darker
In diaspora.
Down and down,
Devolved I dive
Till I disappear in that dim Horizon.

And once
Fallen – is there a possibility
For the dead to rise
Again?
Or should I return to haunt temporality.

Should I spark the stone.
Should the feather heal
After such mathematical surgery.

Or should I just trace feeling in my paralyzed paradise.

5th November 2004.

Of Rye, Wheat and Gold

Heavy –
That dense Shadow
Layered and laden
With wait and invited
Promise.
From indigo it melts
To a violet
Then simmers to
A temperate orange,
Unsure.

And then –
As Shadows color
To Substance,
As Time journeys
From city to periphery,
Within its parentheses
Lie created beings.
Constructed lights that perforated
That silent corridor of darkness,
Now succumb,
Demure.

And as it
Rises from shadows
Deeper than dense –
Gilding autumn to winter,
Dusk to daybreak
There is conversation
Rustling in ripened reason:
Green to gold
Then clay
Again.

Twilight is a comma
Punctuating
Shadow and Substance.
And on both ends,
Unspiralled –
Completion
Unravels with
Uncomplicated meaning.
Even opaque waters
Are not frosted into timelessness.

And as the fields grow
Garnered from husk to whole,
As the roots continue
To sink into deeper, denser
Soils
Of skies and seas –
There will Be rust.
There will Be dismantled shadows.
There will Be
Gold.

30 October 2004.

Cast Off – An Obituary

Each step quivers
Into ripples
In that murky,
Opaque puddle
Till it silences
Into slate blankness
Effacing
Prose and poetry.
Phrases and words –
Even those protected
By enfolding parentheses –
Are stripped.

I held the Umbrella
That was once Crowned on my head
After the purgation,
After the stride into
Desolate darkened
Endlessly extended
Empty streets.
There was a mystic breath
In the air that carried
Choir music wings flight
And dust.

And as I walk, umbrellaless,
Carrying my broken, trespassing shadow,
My body cuts through the
Strings of rain.
But the strings stab now
Severing body and soul.
I am not purged.
I am not poisoned either.
I am just stung.

I hear no drumbeat.
The angels are on pension;
The birds on winter-vacation.
Only shadows linger here.
Church doors are bolted
From the Inside.
I hear an unsure Hallelujah – the last note –
With ampersands that atomize to a question mark
That looms above my head.

It tolls now.
A solitary last-service
Of the fallen sky
And its evaporated sea
All being carried away by the opaque water
Like forgotten flotsam.

The umbrella, inverted now,
Carries rain water as inventory – Filtered from
The Highest Sky
To be Delivered to
The Lowest Sea
All buried in waters deep.

I can’t run
Alone;
The water’s too high and heavy.

Let me swim
Then;
With the water suffocating my shoes.

12 June 2004

Unmapped

I

I am lost in the maze of a wailing piano.
And I don’t know, don’t know where the music’s going to flow.
Don’t know where it’s asking me to go;
Don’t know the wind that makes it all blow.

….I have walked through that lone lane,
Watched everything as it came.
I saw sand becoming stone –
Saw that and more, not alone…

II

Tried following the way that I thought would reach to you;
The locked door, the lost key, unfound – knew I had no clue.
Questions were unanswered, myths half-true,
I wondered if my pale shadow knew.

…

III

I have no passport to take me where the sun wont sleep.
Have no music, no sound to fill a silence so deep.
No path, no passage where peace can creep.
No light that can make my darkness weep.

…
16 August 2004.

Rounded with a Sleep - the Space where Your Eye moves over

2004-10-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

Almost Completely

A quiet glimmer
Of Day awakens.
The Twilight is slowly... surrendering.
A star smiles –
A shy, half-smile
Against a newly emerging
Purple sky.
The warmth gently enkindles.
A demure wind wavers,
Singing a mixed melody.
The Soul
Opens
To an uncertain Knock:
Somebody enters
Without a word,
Unwinds comfortably.
And The Soul feels,
At first clouded by doubts
Rising from the Outside
Of Itself: blurring its vision
In the retreating Twilight.
Somebody begins to live inside,
Exploring
The Soul and Its Dimension,
Allowing It
To Reincarnate.
The Faith grows,
Armouring Itself
Against the Doubts
That may falter Its strength.
The Soul waits, silently,
Softly murmuring –
But the Twilight still lingers.

The Soul rejuvenates
In the warmth of Its own spirit:
Its Glow spreading inside
Its Dimension,
Embracing someone with simmering comfort.
Blinded by the vision of Faith,
The Soul beholds the beauty
Even when the temperature of the mind
Fails to measure it,
And the body
Is benignly lukewarm
To its humble touch.
The star flinches, involuntarily –
As the Glow magnifies,
The Wind looks expectant –
But the Twilight still remains.

The Soul continues to grow
In the Glow’s exuberance.
The energy of Faith revives a sleeping dream
Frozen in the dizzy shades of Twilight,
But shall awake to the Complete Light of Day.

Blind

" My place is the placeless,
My trace is the traceless... "
- Maulana Rumi

I Search:
It’s an aimless Journey.
There is fear.
After all, it’s just an abstraction,
Something beyond...
I am blind.
It’s a world that lives in Darkness,
Something I know.
Something I live in.
Something I possess:
It’s peace,
It’s absence.

It sounds simple,
Almost like an equation
That culminates
In two answers:
Both have different values
Yet stem from the same.
I use logic to explain myself –
I am blind.
There is no calculation.
No manifestation.
No destination:
Just a Journey.

Had it been so simple,
I would have had all the answers:
I would have been satisfied.
Even the blind
Question sometimes:
They also wince in impotence,
Protesting.
But the Darkness spells out
Some answers:
Even in space,
There is a quiet motion –
Something lives.

I struggle:
It’s something I live through.
Yes, there is doubt.
But the negatives
Themselves sum up
To something quite close to
An answer – a fulfillment.
It’s inside,
Something I feel:
I just trace it
With my finger-tips:
I am still blind.
A Movable Feast

I was also
Invited.
I acted formal, at first,
Not knowing whether
To decline
Or accept.
I felt
A strange insistence
In that gesture,
Something that coaxed me,
Yet I did not
Agree
Quite formally.

I felt
Honoured
When I arrived
There;
I felt
At home:
There were no
Other guests
To study and calculate
Each step,
Each Move –
Just
You and I,
And the Feast.

I tasted it,
And felt
A flavour
That I was missing
All this while,
Yet hungry still –
Hungry
For a complete creed,
Seasoned and spiced
According to my palate,
Garnished
According to my aesthetic.

But how did you guess…?
I was very much alive,
Even healthy
In my own famine,
That my world
Thrived on.
How could a mute pang
Of hunger
Be heard
And then answered
By a call
For a Feast?

It was delectable.
Each course
Moved
Through its series of ceremony –
But it was not
A ritual
At all;
There was nothing
Suave
Or decorative about it –
It was all so plain,
Raw
Yet so refined,
With no clanging cutlery or crockery
To disturb
The delicacy.
You suggested
That I should use
My hands.

The fingertips
Quivered –
It was too hot
To handle.
But I felt
An unfamiliar energy
Rising
Like fire
Being born
From a dead stone;
Its warmth
Nurtured me
Just like the candles
You had lit up
To excite
The darkness,
Ignited
A passion
Whose taste
I had forgotten.

I relished
Every flavour
As it tipped my tongue
Penetrating in
Every marrow,
Animating
Every atom –
One by one
Every hunger
Was appeased.
The new flavours
Balmed
Those scars and wounds,
Each cavity
Was now
Filled
To the core –
The Feast
Had just begun.

The Communion

There is a Stillness –
A serenity that Rises
Within and Without.
Peace
With all its softness
Gently Embraces.
All sights and sounds
Dissipate, become less important,
Rather not important at all;
The Real World
Is unknowingly silenced
To thoughts that are heard
Once I listen:
In the silent thoughts
I hear a Feeling –
Something wonderfully different happens.
All the senses of my entirety
Succumb to the Touch,
Seemingly Inarticulate,
But powerfully meaningful:
The essence of its Message
Gently unwinds Within.
Along comes a weakness
As logic and other existential realities
Become numb.
A demure coolness
Enfolds me
And I feel Contentment
As if the coolness
Lovingly whispers,
“ I’m here...”
I close my eyes:
The Darkness forms nothing
That is born out of imagination,
Nor does it summon
Any warm recollection.
But it produces
A Calmness
That is enclosed within.
Something Inside
Explores comfortably
The World alive
In the “dazzling” dark.
It figures out,
Discovers
New meanings,
Recovers
Lost Answers...
That mature Understanding,
That explain complexities
And embittered reality
Tastes less sour.
I open my eyes:
And the lambent World
Outside
Manifests clear Signs
That Confirm
The Experience;
Answering Questions
Wiping away Doubts
That blur Vision even in the Light.

For just a quiet magical moment
I enter a world of Order –
The point where I reach tranquility.
Back Outside
The Signs spell out
The Experience
Whereby I amalgamate with Love
That Promises Blessing
And constant Renewal.
The feeling dwells
Within and Without:
The Arms of Omnipresence
Dandle me.
And my Soul sings an innocent lullaby,
Wordless, without a sound
But in tune with
The Serenity,
The Stillness
That only The Communion can bring.

A Ripple in Stillness

A demure darkness
Veils the Sky.
Almost soundlessly
You Smile:
A mellow softness,
Just a touch
Of a humble Compassion
Softly caresses me.
The trees
Like dervishes, are
Charmed
By the Omnipresent magic
That has embraced them.
A pacific palette
Of blue
Has lavishly stroked
The Sky.
But You
With wondrous skill
Continue to add
A new hue:
" May be just a tint of white,
Perhaps a quick splash
Of metallic gray would do."
But then,
Each deft stroke
Spells out its own meaning
Sings its own song.
The Veil
Very Gently
Lifts only a part of itself
To reveal the serene innocence
Hiding behind it,
Like a baby,
With timorous mischief
Peeping through from its cradle,
As its skin glows
(Or is it just the sparkle of its eye?)
Beams of a brilliant world
Look through:
Perhaps, You have brought out
Your Finger,
Just to Feel
This world?
A shy wisp of orange –
Broken links of a golden chain
Connects the placid silver,
Which uncoils:
Drop by drop
Heavens beat their drums
And the Wind
Whistles to the rhythm.
Diamonds studded in the links
Flake with a melodious cadence.

And then there comes
A Silence.
The Veil
Slowly reveals
A quilted patchwork
Of innocence;
Newly born.
The links,
By a designed order
Divide themselves further,
Part,
Giving way
To fresh undiscovered strokes
That enhance
The Countenance
Even more.
Newer dimensions awaken –
Even in the Stillness
There can be traced
A movement,
A Breath,
May be, just a ripple:
You are still here.

Re-Turning

I am passive –
In prayer,
Power,
Performance.
I just know
How to trace
Shadows as they linger,
Clinging feebly
In thinning air.

Is my faith
Just a theory,
Cowardly arrogant,
Yet fiercely adhering?But how can I
Dismiss, devalue,
Dissuade
The ardent sincerity
I have always felt.

Yes I look away,
Rein feelings, actions, thoughts,
Are reduced to muted utterances.
Sometimes I savagely sever myself
From honest responsibility
And re-arrange priorities,
Etherized to react,
Recriminate,
Remonstrate.

I hide.
I bar myself from finite time’s
Perennial terrors and ambiguities.
I find
Comfort in obscure evasions.
I silence
Pain, patience, protest
In muffled, suffocated
Indifference.

But I turn to,
Trace,
Trust
The truth that
I live with, for and by.
I know
I am always Heard.

Grant me what is needed to
Grasp, and then, gift generously.

26 December 2003

Meteors

It is always
A heavy night,
Sunken
In a strange gloom;
A silence
Seems to guard
That vaulted sphere
Wary of each second,
Vigilant,
At the same time
Waiting
For those teeming match sticks
To ignite
The sky.

And they arrive
With a flourish:
A whole army
Descends, striding upon
The night’s battlefield.
They inflame
The sky
With their fiery splendour,
Chanting,
Strumming
The chord of lightning
That sparks
Of the energy
That charges them:
The refulgent sky
Beams
With the truth.

The brilliant streaks
Rise
With such invigorating might,
Slashing across
The sky,
Razor-sharp
Slitting the darkness –
The fight is on –
But the daggers lose their glint,
And are sheathed by
The night.

I gaze from afar
This celestial battle
Bombing the peace.
I see them
Perish –
The wish I mumble
Like a desperate prayer
Eager to be fulfilled,
Measures the distance…
But I guess
It falls too,
With them;
Surrenders
To that sombre silence –
And their fall
Is a fact
I simply cannot fathom.

The sky
Looks more empty,
Sullen,
Perhaps dreading
Their absence:
The battle has now ended.
And the wish
That I muttered,
My earnest prayer
Dwindled
As hastily as those meteors
Swam down,
And then
Plunged
In that sea
To be drowned.
I call –
But my voice
Like a lonely sailor’s
Is just shrill echo
That pricks the silence,
Sails lazily across,
And is then
Dissipated,
In the shipwreck
Of those diving,
Dying meteors.

But I am grateful, still
For the meteors that poured
Down
From those infinite galaxies
That I cannot
Reach,
But can
Some how
Feel,
Near…
Something
Enkindles
My hope,
In spite of that
Fall
That nevertheless
Created,
Those luminous ripples
In that dark, deep ocean –

That withering glow,
That forgotten wish
Both, still
Spark
A dimension
Where meteors
Continue
To crash
Down
And no armies
Clash
By day or night;
They are resurrected
By an unknown energy
Whose truth
Beams
The galaxy
Of my night’s sky.

The Benediction

We were restless.

The heat
Pitiless,
Seemed to glare down.
I felt the desperation
Mounting up,
Battering
My energy
And the desert sand
Inflamed
My bare feet.

I could feel the urge
In those pleading cries, prompted
By a parched thirst.
My sighs were heavy,
Fraught
With an anger
Being overwhelmed
By greater sense
Of defeat
As the desert sand
Paralysed
My effort.

Something
Powered me
And I ran, searched –
The heat
Was stinging my feet
As they kicked the loose grains.
Those two Hills, the Symbols
Towering above
My meagre frame
Stared down, least moved;
Those cries continued
To hammer
In the very marrow
Of my exhausted bones.

It sprang out –
Gushing forth
From the defeated desert sand.
I stopped
My anxious stride;
The urgent cries
Melted
In relief
That poured out
Just like
A peace
Penetrating,
A tranquility
Seemed to surge,
Flowing deep within.

We were revived.

October Air

It’s a mute gold
That rusts the air –
Something hushed
Like the glare that has been
Somehow, muffled,
Toned down
To a quiet light,
Perhaps demure,
For the shadows
It casts are silent,
A gray a bit too glum,
Like a weathered
Tombstone.

But then is at all
Ripening –?
Like the murky glint
Of locked up brass;
The rust in the dust
Is veiling the sky
In a feeble sheath of
A hazy gaze:
From the heavy eyelids
Still open
With a lethargic glow
Making everything
So limp.

But is it suggesting
A hint
That only the October air
Can guess and understand –?
Is it expectant
For the ripening
To succumb
To its fall
When the gold
Shall rust into a silver
That shall chain and cripple everything
To a silent, glum
Sleep?

8th October 2002.

Opposites together

I

I tried to trace
Logic in things
That I couldn’t explain.
No body can.
I was abstrusely
Unraveling myths and meanings,
Answers
To questions laid down
By our own obscurities,
Restricted
By our own qualifications.

I heard us,
I heard her pain (only remotely felt).
Her voice was questioning
But in her questions
I also heard, meekly,
A passive acceptance.
She said she didn’t believe in fate.
She asked me to
Explain
What incarnates
Suffering.

She gave me
Examples
Of it – in mind, body, may be in spirit too.
I tried to feel the same pain that I had listened to.
I had examples of my own
But I merely mentioned them
In obfuscate undertones.
I wanted
Answers
Of my own.
And I used trite phrases to define them.

I mentioned Purposes,
Plans
That steer and motion
Experience;
We headed in a new direction.
But the content of the conversation
Lingered, like images of memory that echo
In spirit.
We thought of happy things.
I thought of miracles
And the purposeful, planned Promises.

II

But then I failed.
I had no terms to explain it all.
Nothing lay beyond –
It had just happened hours ago
When I said, “Maybe her purpose is finished…”
It was an example
Then,
But now it rephrased itself as a fact
As bitter and irreconcilable
As suffering.

Opposites together – a birthday
Was squared with a funeral.
The same flesh
In shared pain.
Negatives
Grade one’s fall.
But how can a bud
Moan
Its ripening and
The concurrent fall
Of its own seed.

I heard pain,
I heard a new voice of suffering.
I am deaf to logic.
I am ashamed
For I can’t explain myself.
I thought I knew
So much of life,
I knew all the answers by heart.
But now I’ve learnt
Something more than that;
I have learnt death.

28 April 2003

Apathy

“The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
When I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on a wall.”
- T.S. Eliot

A square room of
Defined worlds;
Wax paintings
Hanging
With stoic stature
In a gallery, a long corridor.
They just mumble,
Fumbling lacquer
Phrases
Varnished with etiquette,
And bound in intricately carved
Brass frames.
How eloquent is the illusion,
Seeming and becoming
A new, indistinguishable whole.
The paintings speak,
But also sneer.

And with the careful eye
Of a detached observer
I view them, melting the forged meanings,
Listening, addressing each one
As I would accost a lost
Acquaintance.

I cannot share.
I am not of them.
I embody vestigial worth –
One voice
Of molten stone
Speaking illusions
(Fleeting evasions)
For several listeners,
None earnest.

So many of them
And a wild uproar,
Yet somehow tamed
By a calculated dexterity.
Roles keep interchanging, replacing, displacing,
Misplaced in monstrosity where
No care is involved in cloning souls.
Observers stealthily
Walk in. Walk out.

I wish to step out too
From this world
Framed
By rounded corners.

7 July 2003

Beholding Absences

Only images
Remain,
Last -
Those glossy visions
Stamped.
But in the Real Vision
Of an anxious eye
They just hurry past
Like the flash lights of running cars
Leaving a careless
Trail
Across a dark, busy road.

What fireworks
Lit up
The still sky
And how they
Surrender
To its blindness -
And they leave
No trail;
But only a deep emptiness
Of sky
Where the light
Does not glare,
The images are blindfolded,
And only the stars
Peer down,
Quietly,
Clinging
To the hollow sky,
All alone.

20 November 2002

Gargoyles

They stand
High,
Towering above,
Stone incarnate,
Cold,
Rooted resolutely
Over the shoulders
Of the Cathedral’s balustrades;
They peer down,
With blind eyes
Viewing
Those landscapes
Being sculptured by
The iron-mould of Time.

They steadily gaze:
Their vision
Remains unchanged,
Alive,
In that gallery of the past
Where only memory treads.

That devil-like glare
Is more like a grimace
That seems to contemplate:
Why embody something
Misshapen or
Grotesque
In stone?
Its open mouth
Stares
Like an angry scream,
Inveighing against
Its form
That forges its
Monstrous identity –
A construction
Carved
Out of the mind’s
Unkempt workshop.

There is a strange sadness
In their stares –
Something that tools
Cannot cleave –
Their stony world
Is a solid kingdom
Where reprisal reigns,
As they withstand
The scars
And bear
The prints
Of a forgotten Age.
The Cathedral bells
Toll,
Chime
The walled tales
Reverberating in stone.

And the gargoyles
Continue to gape at
The stranded streets
That once
Thronged
With an energy,
Abounded
With a festivity –
An air
Only
The gargoyles’ walled, stony lungs
Knew
How to breathe.

Stillborn

I cuddle innocence,
Right in my arms;
It’s comfortable:
That smile, those hands
That clasp mine in such a way
That I could touch a whole new world
In which only she lives,
Those eyes that just look around,
Explore,
With no worry to dim their glow.
Her voice chimes,
Reminding me of
Something that is much more
Than mere pleasure and pain.

I want that
Back,
Restored...
It’s more of pain –
The Knell beckons.
I sense it
Mocking,
Abusing
That instinct that I have
Still,
Protesting
In silent fury.

I myself feel like a child,
Eager and demanding.
The language is
Difficult to decipher:
It spells out
Some thing like a nursery rhyme,
Or a lullaby maybe,
Both in tune with
A child’s world.
Yes... it’s just a far-off world,
Beyond –
No one has ever seen it.
Not I at least,
But just to imagine it
In glum-chum shades
Is enough.
It’s stillborn:
Flesh and bones,
No beat, no rhythm:
Just a doleful song
Whose very echo bangs
In that empty womb –
And is not heard,
Still.

And innocence sleeps.
I feel life,
Its ‘white root’ labours
To spring up.
I hold it back,
Inside.
I should surrender –
And I do.

Composed to Make Sounds Clear

2004-10-22T04:35:00.000-07:00

The Sound and the Instrument

It was an Echo
That kissed
The Silence;
The Darkness
Quietly stirred.
There was a shyness
In that motion:
A pause,
A beat,
A continuous rhythm
That made each Shadow
Dance –
The drum beat
Was a gentle downpour,
And no thunder jolted the
The Silence.

The Shadows
Pirouetted
In the still Darkness
Alive
With that wondrous Sound
That filled up
Each empty,
Hungry space.

The Echoes
Magnified to a
Treble,
And the Shadows
Felt the energy,
Low
Yet
Lucent
Penetrating within,
Charging
The movement,
Instructing
Each step,
Vigilant;
The Sound itself
Was like
A Shadow
Rising
From the Darkness…

But You
Touch
Those strings
Making Everything
Move –
And I feel
The harmony of the rhythm –
As We
Are chorded
Together,
Like shadows
Being composed
When light and darkness
Embrace
In an orchestral pattern.

You are the Instrument
I touched with my fingertips
And the Sound
Charmed
The Silence,
Loud and
Clear.
The Echo
Reverberates
Shaking
Each chord of silence
Again and
Again
Permitting
The shadows
To stir the darkness
Just as the Instrument
Proclaims
The Truth
Being whispered
Through that Sound.

And Echoes
Rise and fall;
The shadows
Orbit around
The darkness:
The Instrument strums
Animating
The Sound;
And We are
Entwined
In that symphony
Being enchanted
By the Sound
And Its Instrument.

Bent and Bonded

Two polar points.
A line segment
Stretched
With angular
Remonstrance,
Stoic,
Like a barrier
Scraping the sky –
Yet never
Reaching it.
Only reaching
Out.

And then came
The timeless whisperings
Tickling
Obstinacy.
There was a shy
Surrender
Outside mathematical meaning,
Outside
The geometry
That measured
Every perimeter
Of being.

A gentle Touch
That made it
Blush,
Coil in
Coy tenderness.
There were
No formulae
Now;
Just the fingers
That molded,
Melted
And then
Crafted
Iron
Into comfortable
Gold
That could ripple,
Dance and
Spring.
The Music
Flowed
Invigorating
Waiting capillaries
That mortared even the
Atoms that
Bound the segments.
It Trailed along,
Curving it
As it enfolded
With open arms
A Brimming Being.

And now,
Bent and Bonded
With its bones
Heavy with wait,
It merely longs
To embrace
Being with Be.

And then,
The Ring
Will carefully clasp,
Bind those ends
To a Perfect Circle,
Orbiting
In 360 Degrees.

Come On
O Come –

And let
Continuity
Begin

Never to end,
Not knowing destination,
Not knowing space

Even as the rings
Multiply
Measuring Infinite.

A cyclic Whole
Spiraling
Like Eternity

And Its Company.

25/ 26 July 2004

Not Waving but Drowning

You said
That you had to
Contain
Yourself
To make those waves
Squirm into place;
A while ago
You said
That you were drowning –

Drowning
Like ice cubes
Melting
In a glass of wine:
That lucent red
Beaming
Through the whiteness
Of those three cubes;
Yet they diffuse
Inside,
Dissipate
Or should I say
Amalgamate
In the wine’s omnipresence
Making it
Overflow,
Profuse
With a cooled passion.

I said
That I had to
Freeze
Myself
To make those waves
Baptize
That moment;
I said
That I was drowning –

Drowning
Yet the waves
Seem so still;
I cannot say
That it is a storm
That toppled my ship
Over,
Wasting its cargo –
I just
Cannot say
Much.
The sea
Is empty,
The waves,
Just too silent.
The driftwood
Floats about
Just like
Those melting ice cubes.

We find
Ourselves
Spilt?
Is the voyage
Over?
Or
Do I wade my
Desperate way
To navigate through
Something new?
Something as lucid
As that ice-cold wine
Slithering
Through our sea,
My sea –
The waves are still
So still,
The sea is
Cold,
And I call,
Not waving
But drowning.

Let the Blood Echo

Signs speak now
A language that relies
On a richer,
Deeper touch.
The winter sky is warmed
By a ripeness
That plumes
The silence
With a more speakable,
More hearable
Sign.

First – the skin –
Just the touch that entails
The turn of a fingertip.
Then a fusion flowing
Deeper – finger, hand,
Anatomy – an entirety is
Discovered,
Not created.
Skin melts to Soul –
A voice that Spoke a readable
Sign.

And It Echoed through walls,
Gilding stone –
The rustle of a bush
Blazed in a Roar.
And he heard,
Spoke –
Through skin and
Molten soul.
Longest rivers severed,
Waters bloomed,
Bled.

You are not skin
For touch now
Speaks
Through stone, soul and signs.
You are nearer than Blood.

13 November 2003

The Waiting Womb

I

So many of those;
Stoic, stolid
Yet sublime.
Some crowned into archaic arches, others morose minarets,
The rest plain,
Passive, placid
Earth.

Roots with shoots,
Some unmatured – yet plucked –
And sowed in a deeper earth
To be ploughed, and then
Harvested by a greater garnering.
They wait for the ripened seed
To sprout.

II

I saw a man;
Not prostrating, not even contemplating,
But maybe resurrecting
Fragments into familiar confabulation.
Propped against the
Marble, cement and sand,
He looked as silent,
Yet not as still.
A communion, I conjectured.
But I could not feel it –
Death and its dread –
There are no riddles here.

Maybe at night,
After the dreadful day
They all do rise, un-resurrected
(Yet rested still) to meet, greet
And retreat
Into newer history.

III

The earth is
Impregnated with its own entirety;
Roots, shoots, seeds
All the same.
Shadows are cloned –
Finitely congruent,
As rootless as resting dust.

Shadows never deepen.
Nor can they impregnate,
Procreate yes – but not consummate.

And the earth will
Dissipate to conjugate
Substance.

There will be
Communion,
A celebrative consummation.

And infinite will begin.

27 May 2004

Bonding

And how heavy
That night was.
It had a strangely sore
Intensity in it;
It was a bleeding moment,
Like the loss one feels
When letting go of a loved one’s hand.

But then
You never let go.
You just loosen the Grip at times
For me to enfold myself in it
Even more deeply.
I dwindled in the darkness
Only to recover my shadow in your light.

And can there be
Doubt in a shadow
So solid in its Substance?
Is there any delusion
In a light
So blinding in its brilliance?
The only Truth is your Touch.

Yes, I feel it…
Your Presence
Is constant,
Sound in flesh, breath, and soul.
And I dare reject it?
I sever myself
And drift away.

O let me not
Dissipate
In my own selfish delusions and doubts;
Let me
Remain
Enfolded
In your clasp.

And let the darkness
Wane into weakness.
Let the night always
Fall with that Rising Sun.
Let that hand with its brilliance
Clasp me close,
For I feel your Truthful Touch in it.

22 December 2002

Ebb and Flow

Water again
At my feet, after that stride
Through slush, marsh and
Mire.
Water again
Fluid with your Touch –
That glass
Of glistened music
Pouring in my ears

Beyond sound
And sense.
The feeling of returning joy;
Waves gliding like that
Eagle that rises and roams
In the gleam of the polished sky.
Wind swims across the tide
With lavish strokes
Surging in each note, each string

And the sound
Touches the Braille score
Till it speaks an unrestrained
Music;
Till the eagle
Sings and strums
That ultramarine
Blue.
The sea rolls – wet in wet.

An ocean
Awaits –
The blue tinged
Then teemed
With gold;
The wings spread, an angel falls,
Strings hum –
Music at sunrise.
Eternity washes away the driftwood.

I walk
Barefoot
Lilting with your touch,
The fingers
That feel,
And also form.
I flow
Towards fulfillment –
The water Beckons me.

1st August 2003.

When the Stammering Self Sings

An unheard sound.
An imagined note.
A felt music;
Ripples
Rising
Into resonance,
As reflections
Coalesce to compose
Images.

The sound speaks
With rarest clarity,
A lucid language.
Notes consummate words
Resound
With a phonated rhyme.
Music
Of a new realm
Unspoken of.

It’s your voice
That sings through the
Empty walls, passages, spaces,
Drops, oceans, winds
And all the skies
That sphere sound,
Spoken, sung and sensed
Into music
That spirals
Beyond strings –
It echoes through all silences.

And your voice
Fills them, like substances
Giving meaning to shadows.

Like that eagle’s
Soaring song brimming through
The blank silence of the sky.

An image completes a vision.
Ripples surge an ocean to flow.
Your music sounds creation.
Instrumental Music

It has the cool,
Serene smoothness
of a pebble’s skin.
It has the quiet
of calm – when there is a sky
as clear as
Reflections
that flutter water
Transmitting Sound through
Silence.
It has the peace
of an oceanic palette,
The Boundlessness
that brims
the Soundlessness
of song.

and as Ripples
Incarnate a
Resonance as
the pebbles are flung –
it is the Water that is
Resounded –
and Silence is still
as the Ocean
Dips
into Soundful Creation.

20 November 2003

The Shell

It seemed like crystal
Radiating an opaque light.
But it wasn’t glass.
It was a reflection;
A spiral of colour –
Our palette of course –
Skin enfolded Spirit
Enfolding both
Silvered with a glistened ripeness
That reverberated
The reason for the rainbow.

You said it came from
The Real Horizon.
Yes, it was distilled by light,
Delivered by water.
The organic armour
Travelling
To gift our triumph,
Mystical like water that
Winnows.
Yet the crack couldn’t tarnish
Eternity.

An ocean ruffles,
Encapsulated
In the twined
Passages
Where horizons
Melt
And entities
Consummate to
Entireties.

And we have travelled
Through gyres
Of colour,
Of water lucent
Through light.
We have
Waded and
Soared,
Spiraled.

And this gift
Wreathes our journey
To eternity.

A rainbow
Unleashes.
The sky is
Spangled
And the sea
Basks
In a fulfilled shadow.

Reflection
Emanates
Creation.

20-21 November 2003
Is

A simple word.
It has a truth in its
Terse sound,
A calm
Like leaves when they hush themselves
After the wind’s deep kiss.
It has the calm of touch.

It’s pure,
Like the first raindrop
That is delivered by the cloud
To the waiting seed;
Like the baby’s cry
When it enters this world.
It’s as pure as birth.

It’s so sure
This humble word
Like the Word of God
Where no doubt or delusion
Blurs
A brilliant vision.
It’s as sure as faith.

19th February 2003

Here and After

“No vision can grasp Him, but His Grasp is over all visions.”
(6:104)

I

It got blurry – a misted window –
Inside
I saw, with the glint
Of a newly polished spark,
Haze lifting up to reveal
A deeper sorrow;
You spoke of death,
How it packages life
In dust and darkness.
No matter how sealed
It is,
There is a latent loss,
A fog congesting within.

And today, when we
Sealed desires
Till the seed that is sown
Is sprouted,
I sensed, then saw,
Sorrow, how it stains
Both skin and spirit.
The right eye it was,
Mine now,
And I touched it
Clean.
I felt a buried pain
Resurrect itself
In living comfort.

II

I had never seen you
Cry.
It was a pain that used only
One drop
To measure it.
I swept it clean
In parts –
I had never seen stoic
Sentiments
Struggle,
Seek.

And I found
All answers that need not be
Explained;
It only appears
Convoluted,
Fettered and maybe, Fouled –
A timeless hide and seek,
All shrouded
In falling shadow.
But is the substance buried too?
It is restful repose
Till the spirit rises.

Today
Images, ideas, allegories, similes,
All substitute to Creation,
Coalesced to animate
Meaning that we
Always gasped for.
Today,
Death, in its obliquity,
Enabled life to be lucid,
Graspable,
Breathable.

III

Sorrow, though unspelt,
is vividly felt.
Death, though distant,
defines every timed instant.
Promises
Conjugate to consummate
Purposes.

Let the haze
Rise
To reveal the real Truth
That we seek.
Let us rest
Our search.
Let It find us instead.

17, December 2003.

Let us go then, you and I

I Wait
for You
with my luggage ready
packed
expectations assumptions
wrapped
in little packets of tales that
ramble on and on
like a relentless rain
I Wait
to pour forth
to Meet Your shore –

Distance I Labor
to Meet
just You.

a Plunge
severed –
a fish Hurled, “out”, of Water,
cast, – away –,
Exiled.

the luggage
is Now flotsam –
and the floating fish
is buried in opaque Waters, deep,
instead of bundling death
in grains of wet sand.

I Wait
Again.

Where do We Go
Now…
You and I?

7 July 2003

Back

Silence, its Language

Silences convulsed
Into grimmer disorders
Of not the mind,
Silence that dwells
In another place stifled in languor –
Function is not needed
When purpose is thwarted.

Resurrection of
Sorts,
Unraveling through muck,
Roots torpid, shoots equally slumberous
All released –
Silences
Reshaped into found moulds.

There alone,
Swooning with eyes open,
Through limited minutes of
Counting till the hours
Became meaningful at last –
One hour
And silences metamorphosed.

This time
I came back.
I spoke
Through your silence;
I heard
Your echoes
Again
In all the languages
You speak.

Archaeology, its Meaning

But I seem
Alone, without substance.
Is it too much
Of the mind?
Mathematics breaking down
Language to square roots
Of rusted steel?
Is substance too dependent on volume?

I can’t decipher
This unmindful disorder.
I ache
For the shared joy
Of discovery when we
Like avid archaeologists used to dig up
Meanings
And then learn them as habits.

Are we too
Entangled in feeble postulations?
Waiting
For the other to question
First
And to authenticate
The finding –?
Who will lift that spade?

Only three days now,
And history is
Buried deep.
I still hear
It gasping through the
Stratum of memory,
Of mind.
We used to speak a language
In silence –
Help me excavate and understand its meaning

Again.

29 June 2003

DeHydrated

Before
I spoke of
Benediction – the last word
To sum up shadows
As they crept
Into timeless corridors.
I intended
To lock time.

Then
I peeked through
Eternity – permeating sense and spirit
Measuring it
Drop by drop
As it squirmed
Through that One Moment
That was enough
For feeling Truth.

And later
I basked in
Completion – cherishing its largess,
Clasping each instant
Safe in memory
Of expression
And experience
As it encompassed and then
Outdid
Mere description.

From dust to desert,
From rain to sea
I retreated
In Water.
There was a sacred bliss
In drowning,
In wanting boundlessness
To enfold me
As its own,
Even though I was
Just a drop.

I heard
Your Music
Rippling and surging –
That rush
Of Brilliant ecstasy
When the soul needs its body
As Instrument
To measure the sense
Of the Sound
As it speaks
In abounding Truth
Just in Consummation.

Now
Too bent
In becoming Be
I am lost
In translating us:
What I wrote,
What you sang,
What we felt,
In Water.
I am deaf
Again in silence.
I am buried in shadows deep.

Fill my silence with your Song.

Let me drown Again.

Let us share Eternity.

26 August 2004

Dominion

Trace, not even touch;
Demarcate
Skies and seas
Reducing them
To possessed, residual entireties.
New fingertips snatch
From the Hand that
Deserves.
That Does.

Delusion in possession,
A nameless passion.
Patterns that are
Intricated, sophisticated,
Subjugated
To a lesser meaning.

And the labels are
Labeled as
Numbers and weight.
And we prostrate
Before relentless debate,
Effacing, obsessing to repeatedly rejuvenate – create.

Innovation, expectations,
The battle to name.
To be – till it lasts?

Give up – eternity knows no time.

13 February 2004.

From Hours to Eternity

The same thing
Packed
In multitudinous ways,
With multicolored threads
Bundled up
In a raveled day
Knitted by
Wrinkled fingers,
Speckled eyes,
Arthritic –
The same illusory lie
In all
The hours.

A book;
A plot about
Convoluted passions:
A film;
Images
Corrupt with
Cloyed disgust
Fetter
The mind –
Threads and threads
Of patches and shreds
That seam
The hours.

But just the mind
With its feeble walls
Rotting with blight,
All gristle and muscle –
A labyrinthine slum.

Hours do cling
To bare skin
And itch
Like needles that needlessly
Prick with a rasping pleasure.

But eternity needs
No days, hours or
Seconds
To copulate and consummate
Its being.

It’s as unscathed
Like a newborn’s
Skin.

An untarnished truth
Heals and bandages
The wounds.

And pure blood
Flows
Free.

19 July 2003

Tethered

Speech
Is slivered.
Each sentence
Debilitates,
Dwindles
Into silence.
Your sentences
Are shrunk
To questions.
My answers
Are the same.
Can silence
Ever sound different?

How hard
You try
To unwind
The twists of my tongue;
How stubborn
I become,
A cripple
Smashing away
His wooden
Crutches,
Not realizing
That those legs
Fetter him.

But I try,
I try too.
The words
Don’t come –
They refuse to
Cover the slightest
Distance
That I have created
But fail to measure.
Silence and distance
Both wait
For words,
Not tethered,
But unrestrained.

23rd February 2003.

Error

Birds retreat,
Withdrawn in sporadic corners.
Skies are bleak
With a pallid scorn.
The rumblings I hear
In the wind
Are not an easy rustle.
I beckoned it to rage.

Gray sinks to gloom,
Atoms that seam, sever.
The thunder has a
Roar
Of mockery,
Of disdain
That berates
My calculated recklessness.

Rage is volatile,
A sentiment extinct
Is somehow excavated
From stratums long buried.

Absolution can reincarnate ashes.
And your wind can
Rise with a calmed Purpose to make me whole.

29 August 2003

Serenity

Serenity
Is like one moment
Of ecstatic brilliance
Stretching beyond
The horizons that compass us;
Like when we are silent
And can still hear ourselves speak.
Serenity
Is like one moment
Of ecstatic brilliance;
Like the peace
That enchants you
When you strum an instrument’s strings,
Like words
When they rhythmically fall in place
And the meaning synchronizes
With the feeling fumbling within.
Serenity
Is like one moment
Of ecstatic brilliance;
Like brushstrokes
That flow along the form
And each color swims calmly
Surging a life in that dead sea,
Like the resurrection
When a piano’s first note
Animates dormant silence.
Serenity
Is like one moment
Of ecstatic brilliance;
Like the echo of a flute
That pours the soul
Reincarnating a symphony,
Like the music
That is composed
When we dance to the rhythm of our souls.
Serenity
Is like one moment
Of ecstatic brilliance;
Like the reassurance
That whispers through the faith
Powering a prayer,
Like the embrace
When teeming waves
Clasp the shore in their arms,
Serenity
Is like one moment
Of ecstatic brilliance;
Like that warmth
That surrounds me
Melting away all pain,
Like the calm
That enfolds me
In your Presence.
Serenity
Is like one moment
Of ecstatic brilliance;
Like the completion
That perfects us
When we look into each other’s eyes…
Serenity
Is that very moment
Being immortalized –
A moment
Where even an instant
Is enough.

At Equals

“…Where they shall be… one equal communion and identity, no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity.”
- John Donne

Distance
Sweeps away tides
Of atoms
Into vapor.
Dust settles and sinks.
It lessens.
It subsides
Perhaps dwindles
Under the legion
Of distance.

Miles and miles
Of seconds
Link up a time,
A fugue as palpable as
Ripples –
Waves that topple in the sea,
A drop shakes a silence –
There is music
In every sound, in the silence
That I create.

New notes fuse into a composed form:
Beads stringed on a scale
That measures Spirit
And the sound of its Music.

Distance, miles –
Cells of souls
Budding
In a womb of silence.

Sheaths, tissues,
Curtains
Drawn to keep
Distraction at bay.

O how far it
Widens –
When will walls drown
And bridges rise
Like cadenced capillaries…?

When will blood flow
With a Sound of its own?

I heard it cry
When the soul was born.

I await
The Sound to stir my Poetry,
And resurrect
An Equal Music,
An Equal Eternity.

One moment – whole – like Being.

18 July 2003

It’s Coming

Sleep
Turns it into
Stone,
Barren,
A dead
Branch,
Bereft.

But how
Long
Can sleep
Last?
Night has to
Surrender
To the sun.

Stones
Enkindled
New life;
It’s a Design
As prehistoric as time,
A term has been
Appointed.

And from that
Stony branch
I saw it coming,
I saw
Birth
Rising
From its own death.

One
Leaf –
A brilliant emerald
Mined out
By that Hand;
And the richness
Augments.

A Tree
Laden
With leaves,
Blessed with
Largess.

The sun
Will rise
To enliven
The seed
That waits.

14th March 2003.

Our Pain

We search
For signs
And we surrender
To the Truth
They confidently
Remind
Us of.

I

And I heard that eagle sing twice,
My faith was articulate.
When it sang thrice
It was you –
A church bell chimed
And I sought
A promising sign.

But you said you hated them –
The promise lucent in the setting sky,
The desperate prayer reverberating in the eagle’s cry,
The music you hear lucidly in the silence –
O could the chime be convulsed in a knell’s choked throat
And you sought
A deceiving sign.

I found my faith fumbled –
It was your pain
Screaming at it.
I screamed back,
I shouted
At a world for being so wrong in its message,
But I was barely heard.

II

It does not matter
Who cries,
I felt your tears
In my eyes;
Yet I waded my way through
Just to clasp
Your wandering hand in mine.

Let us glide through
Our pain;
And let us soar high –
Above this wretched sea,
And let us not touch
But reach
That Mighty Sky.

20 December 2002

The Prayer

Shadows,
Just plaguing shadows
For this night hour.
The prayer
Is not a semblance
Like them, slithering
Like sinuous smoke
On that faint blue wall.

It’s a dark chamber
Eerie with this gleam
Cleaving these shadows.
The prayer
Is earnest.
I revere the shadows
That created me,
Soaring me above stale ashes
Of a dissipated self.

But there’s another
Now –
My shadow
Has mined its substance.
The sky
Craving to fuse with its reflection.
Shadows, semblances,
Reflections
Are lost
In Darkness.

The Prayer is shared.
So are all engendered passions.
Longing can never be so athirst
In its hunger,
Wait is more wretched than death.
Resurrect
Them all into consummation;
Let the Music
Tune its poetry.
Let us Rise from darkness,
Hallowed and healed.

2 July 2003

Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? In a Minute, there is Time for Decisions and Revisions, which a Minute would Reverse.

2004-10-22T04:23:00.001-07:00

Deaf

Some words
that are never said,
are spelt out
by silence,
but are not always heard:
they are mere echoes
that scream,
like shadows falling
in darkness.

Threshold

A face
Wrinkled
With worry, a thought
Seasoned
With a suspended anxiety
Grained
Through the relentless rolls
Of the stony mind, the bricked spirit.

I once
Called it a labyrinthine
Slum.
And how I
Reveled the phrase.
My intellect is frozen.
Words don’t come to delight me now.
Emotions divert their courses
Only an inch away from me.

Aims, aspirations
Are nothing
But competitive desperations.
Love is dormant,
Contact seething,
Squirming for an instant
Of “unconditional positive regard.”
Maybe souls are
Composed
Of bricks
Layered
With blood that no longer feels.
We all are
Crystallized into silences
With spaces in between.

It’s like a Necker cube –
Made of solid ice
Yet transparent
For vision to just peep through.
The walls are flimsy then.
Yet even though I
Pound
They don’t seem to stir,
Crack, sever,
Set me free.

Can’t it melt?
And let me wade through
Water
As I used to…
When instants were timed eternities.
Why doesn’t music
Calm me
With a patterned serenity.
Why is my poetry
Just mine now.
Some things, like light creating
Shadows,
Are solely felt.
We are locked
In blinded glass windows,
Shutters down.
The ice walls close on me.
Corners
Are comforting.

I have been lonely before,
Have been unheard,
Have traced
Shadows as they
Deepen
Darknesses.
But this deep –
Where do fathoms
Lead to?

Maybe the blood
Clots cold.
Maybe the beat
Silences to
Regain
Lost peace.
Maybe walls do
Melt
Drop by drop,
Measuring spilt eternity.

And the face
Is just gristle
That apes, moving lesser muscle.
Less blood flows.
The bricks are neatly
Stacked.
And yet the muscles collapse,
The blood smolders
Till the bricks are
Displaced,
One by one.
Till the walls
Stumble down
To dust.

I want voices.
Voice –
Not mine, only.
Not mine, alone.

Speak,
Speak up.

Let it be heard.

16 January 2004

Lees

“The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.”

Dust deepens.
The wind settles in insoluble silence.
And in each alley,
Every moonless alley
The cradle creaks –
Cringe, creak, creep
As the bones wriggle
And weep
And wait.
Cringe, creak, creep –
Worms crawl
And reap.

Spaces, passages
Are bloodless, empty.
A lonesome laugh
Staggers
The silence as the dead bones
Toss – as dust is littered by vapor.
Burdensome, burden some,
Everything is packaged.
Wait and weep
For the dust to reap
Rusted ripeness.

And then shadows
Too consummate darkness.
The seed is encapsulated
In a stony shell.
The roots strangle the shoots –
The umbilical chord gallows.
There is no room for growing.
And only echoes mock, wail
And stretch this elongated wait
Over scores of deaf music –
Over volumes of mute poetry –
And blind bones powder to grounded sand.

The desert has condensed the sea.

Rustle and Roar

I

Wind has a voltage.
Each current aggravates to a
Rustle that is sometimes
Subtle,
Sometimes a
Roar
Echoing through all the
Caves
Of shadows, leaves,
Aloof
Cloned homes,
Aloof
Incongruent minds.

Wind
Grazes through all these.

A kite
Soaring in the sky
Slung
And chained.

The wind severs it both.

II

I long
Not to be a
Falling leaf
Or a flittering shadow.

Instead
I long to be
A single,
White, washed
Shirt
Dangling
On an empty clothesline
With the wind
Inhaling
Through each atom
That seams me.

21st June 2003.

A Dwindling Spark

Meteors rise,
They have an evanescent glow
That quickly ignites the sky.
Fireworks bloom
With the same fleeting radiance
As the colours boom with animation.

One falls,
Dissipates in the shadow of the horizon.
The other withers
Like shriveled leaves surrendering to autumn.

How that last spark
Of a blown-out matchstick
Gasps
For just a breath of its own brilliance
That quickly smothers

Dissipates and shrivels –

It’s just a
Spark
That enkindles darkness
Just for a while –
As quick as a sigh
That vaporizes.

It’s a spark
That dwindles and drowns
In shadows deep.

And only darkness
Stares back,
An empty gaze,
A shallow substance.

Stars
Are not sparks.
They remain
Immutable
On a sky
Far beyond my
Reach.

4 April 2003

Jaded

Rooted,
Ripened,
Then up-rooted
From the quilted comfort
Of the sea.
The longing to snatch
Just a moment of the sky
Matured
Into a homeostatic need.
And the desire
Was not only breathing from
Skin to skin.

An open invitation,
A modest adoration
Then a deep vocation
From the wasted debris
Of the sea.
I, the flesh
That cemented skeletons once, was
Garnered
To balm Being.
And entirety
Was not only sewn from
Atom to atom.

And every time now,
I am wrung
Tossed spun
Choked charged
And then churned.
Am in buried into
Or delivered by
The soda water –
I cannot tell.
I cannot tell
Much.

And as my breath
Is throttled out of being,
Withering
Each atom and each skin,
I am entrusted
To inhale the debris
That I did not litter.

And now defaced,
Effaced
And exhausted,
I wait
To breathe
In an unleashed sky,
An open air.

17 July 2004

Change

There is promise
In a fresh
Start:
A new page
So virginal
But is tainted,
Perhaps wishfully consummated.
A seed
Planted, clasped
In ploughed tissues
Of the expectant soil.
A summer
That comes with a swirl
Of wind, invigorating,
Unleashing the sun.

Starting over
Is stale
As death
of rotted
poetry,
rotten
fruit,
Rotting
this season.
2 July 2003

Commas and Full stops

The chapter
Was flooded
With them:
Each sentence,
Each phrase
Paused –
I listened to
Voices,
That softy whispered
Right across the heavy torrent
Of those words;
The voices floated
Within,
As if the ink tried to
Trammel up the
Tumbling energy
That rolled in them.

But there was a rhythmic motion,
A uniform pattern
In those sentences –
With subtle breaks –
Like violent waves
Slipping into place,
Finding something
That waited
Upon the shore.
I traced
The movement,
And those tiny tributaries
Coalesced
To form the mighty sea.

The chapter
Is pierced
With them:
There is reluctance,
A kind of force
That pushes
The voices
Decimating
Them to inarticulate echoes –
The waves
Fling against the
Jagged rocks,
Ram into each other.
The energy still
Clamours
In that aggressive beat –
But the words
Are now, muffled.

The pattern is disjointed:
It’s a careless composition,
Like the links of chain,
Each separate,
Yet somehow –
Shackled together –
The waves are dragged,
And then anchored
To the shore,
Where they dissipate.
The tributaries are severed –
I gather the driftwood.

Corners

Four corners of a
Closed
Room.
I have a crowded mind
Clamped
By noisy thoughts,
Too many
Blaring like
Untamed voices
That don’t shout
But scream.
A weird distortion
Shapes
These echoes, fiercely magnified,
Making dexterous incisions
In flimsy cerebral
Walls,
Whitewashed.

Dust beset on them
In an impervious layer.
So tamped is each particle
That there’s no space
Left
For breathing.

Noisy dust
Decomposes
To earth
Where roots
Might silently
Grow.

29th May 2003.

Too Many

Too many voices
Speak.
I know not which
Is mine.

It’s all dissected
Into compartments,
Each voice is as
Discrete as the
Division.

It’s a crowd,
A wild herd
Ravaged
In a stampede.

Hours
Mount
to minutes
to seconds
and other nuances
that mount
to those voices.

Voices
Bomber
Everything that
Seems tidy
In those neat compartments.

Too many
Voices,
Hours.

Loss of words –
Too less
Of them.

And none are mine.

20th June 2003.

A Late Poem

“O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.”
- Dylan Thomas.

The same roll,
The untrammeled turn of tide.
Images, ideas
Ripened to a new Autumn
I sought, but
Found
Today – late,
In borrowed creation.

I wrote and was
Just with a self that is
Only mine
Shared with a season
Discovered, yet
Possessed.
Today – a bit late, I celebrate
A life I own.

His lines,
Their largess,
Of water, winged trees flying his name,
Brimming in “the other air”, “the altered sky.”

I am too young,
Too un-etched,
Still un-garnered
By the changing air,
The gates of my town
Closed, yet not
Awake with its eyelids
Un-shuttered.
The gifts of your imagination
Today – I received, and remembered.

And the sound my breath enlivened today.

3 October 2003

The Yellow Brick Road

I

It’s just a film,
All animated,
A bit exaggerated
But
Does the image
Incarnate
A vision
That I see?
Surely,
It is not my imagination:

My Land
Is black
And white,
Where vision
Is blurred,
My Land
Is no fantastic dream
That was coloured
By an inventive artist’s
Tour de force.
It is a Land
I wish
I can transcend
But cannot escape;
It is very much
Real,
Not over the rainbow…

But yes,
I do locate
This Land of mine
In a storm,
Tossed
And trapped,
Where it’s dark,
Even lonely,
With no faithful companion
To share the lonesome journey;
With no ruby slippers
To bear the weight of that weary stride
I embark on,
With bare feet,
Down
And Down
I travel –

I follow it,
Hearing all
The straw-like
Mindless voices
Stacked in my head,
Those rusty tin-like
Hollow thoughts
Galvanized within
My empty chest,
And a lion’s exhausted might,
But no courage
To crown my struggle
Down,
And Down,
The yellow brick road.

I am
No thinker
Who can lead,
No sentimentalist
Who can mend a broken heart,
Not even a hero
Who can command pride –
I come
From my own grotesque
Munchkin Land
Bubbling with a joy
I fail
To recognize;
I just lick
The lollipop
Of my past, happy days –
And no good witch
Navigates
My course,
And directs me
Home.

II

At the very end,
With the trio
That shapes my entirety
I see,
With eyes wide open
The Emerald City,
My Emerald City,
That will fertilize
My vision –
I see
My own landscape
Of dreams,
The merry, old Land of Oz…
But no Wizard
Greets me there,
And no Wizard
Hides in a ruffled curtain;
I hear
No thundering echoes,
No conditions being attached.
I wait –
Not for Tomorrow,
But Today.

With all the
Dark adventures
That reveled
My Search,
My struggle
Though terribly exhausted,
My Vision
Dosed off in a slumber,
I find
Rest,
Peace,
All
Back

At Home,
And not
Over the rainbow.

The Vacuum

It’s hazy inside.
The room is empty:
Thoughts
Retreat into hibernation
A lost place
With no address;
Imagination
That once animated them
Becomes prosaic.
Life dies –
But not completely.
There continues a wordless war:
Many voices
Howl like ghosts
That aimlessly wander
At night.
They scream
Bang from behind
The doors
Locked from inside
The screams
Are not inaudible –
Each one wishes to console,
But fails
To listen
Completely;
It’s a plot less parable,
Boring to hear,
Pointless to comment on.
Vision
Suddenly becomes blind.
It hobbles restlessly
In the unrest:
It is laborious
To even trace
The path
That leads to each
Of the doors.

But from this sterile silence
Sprouts a desperate wish,
A longing
To flee –
Forces clash
That saddle
Even the nullity
Of silence.
The urge
Is desperate than ever:
The sight
Of the Pale Horse,
Like its trots
Is blind and lame –
It’s tedious for it
To trace its route.

An uneasy emptiness
Ensnares.
Everything hangs suspended:
Like somebody
Waiting to enter
But cannot find a way:
No map,
No key
Nothing
Is available.
Perhaps a shriek
Can be a relief –
It’s no peace
And all quiet:
The room is still empty,
Expecting
Even an echo
To barge in
Soundlessly
Without a tumult
Just to break
This Silence.

The Fortress I made

I have cleaved
Each stone,
Constructing it
Bit by bit,
Making them embrace:
Like bones
Sheathed in flesh,
Right in place –
Taut,
Together.

I feel strangely comfortable:
Indeed the steel of armour
Though cold to the touch,
Enfolds
Those wary bones and flesh,
Scorched
Yet energized
By passion –
Penetrating,
Profuse.

It is my home:
What peace
Echoes
Through the stone walls.
Even when silence
Entombs,
It is swallowed,
Tossed in that empty chamber –
Surrendered,
Submitting.

The cool iron roots
Were grounded
Securely, I always thought.
But the blistering tongue of those sediments
Licks off the steadfast steel,
Stunting my growth,
Mocking my struggle –
Deluded,
Dwindling.

It’s a siege
That rumbles,
Surrounds my stone shelter:
The walls
Tremor to
That rising terror,
Drumming that angry beat
Of an ignorant battle –
Pitiless,
Pervading.

I have lost.
Yet I conquered
All those wastelands;
And those walls
Stood ardent.
But still there is a hunger,
Something like two
Clanging swords –
Relentless,
Repulsive.

And it dismantles,
Each stone,
Bit by bit
That my grazed hands
Had polished,
Grinding
Like flesh and bones
Grained in a millstone –
Dissected,
Dissipating.

Filling up the empty spaces

There is no sound
That might just
Create a ripple.
A soundless drizzle
Disturbs the silence:
Even a drop
Can hammer down,
Nailing it all in.

A House of Cards

It’s a weak-rooted
Structure
Hinged upon
A quietly constructed
Reverie.
It’s a fruitless obsession:
Toiling with those
Weightless
Pack of bricks,
Arranging them
In an orderly design –
A towering
Architecture
Of a dwarfish
Vision.

The cards seem to quiver
In those clung fingertips,
Like an arrow
Just pleading not to be released
But is dropped
Right on target –
There’s a strange pride
That one feels
Enlivening
The marrow of one’s
Desire.

And there it stands,
Complete
In its feeble
Might,
Aligned as perfectly
As bones
Socketed in the skeleton.
And one stares,
Mesmerized
With fascination;
An awe
That tempts
The architect
To gloat over
His tour de force.

And, almost suddenly,
Unexpectedly,
It collapses –
It takes a second –
And it tumbles
As if an earthquake
Ruthlessly
Pinned it down,
Shattering
Desire, pride, vision, obsession
All –

And one
Dumbfounded,
Harrowed
With a sense of dismal
And defeat
Is benumbed,
And just stares
At the debris
Of his wasted whim.

Reincarnation

And I rise,
Soar –
Like that creature
Living in some lost legend…
Yes, I rise
From my own ashes.

DeConstruction

2004-10-22T04:21:00.000-07:00

There is space. When there is nothing there is still space. There is space defining silence, absence, difference and their negatives: sound, presence, sameness. In this space – there is always time, either filling it or extracting it to emptiness.
So there is definition then. But is that the same as meaning? We have systems and structures that we follow and sometimes, adhere.
Here, in my own post-logical parenthetical space, I want to break away from what uniforms me. I want to challenge this constructed notion of a calendarical time; I want to know who has assigned time the authority to conquer and control, to define and monopolize my being.
Its 2020. Why should I trust this? Why should I finish my day’s work by 0000. Why is that the instant when tomorrow will BeCome and metamorphose into today. Why I should I let my space crowd itself with this imperialism. I want to deconstruct this structure for it dissects me into compartments. I don’t want discipline of doing. I just want to do.

~

It’s Derrida. I couldn’t read his entire creation on “Differance.” It was 0000. I had an appointment with rest. But – see, this is it. It’s barring. It’s this didactically dogmatic discipline of time. My space is divided and sliced – labeled and shelved. It’s like when you take ripe peaches and bottle them up and sell them as “tinned” food, all sentenced with an expiry date when it will be condemned to breathe its last. “BEST BEFORE” they warn. Who defines this life? Why is there this threatening finality? Why not BEST AFTER? Who determines the Before and the After. Who constructs these dominions. Why can I not rot on my own. Ripen, rot and then fall. Why is my accord mobilized. Why must I actuate. Why can I not deliberate?
I was Created. Now, in my tinned existence, I am constructed.
I spoke today of effort. How it’s all orchestrated and contrived. I repeated myself. I was asked not to. There was so less time and so much more to do, say, feel. Again, my space is crowded with “dos” and “don’ts”. Why is 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, 30 (or generously 31) a month, 12 a year – this relentless dichotomy of time.
Time was Created. Now, it’s constructed.

~

So now my space – that little precious corner of the crowded universe that is just mine. Why is this manipulated time intruding it; I don’t want to be assimilated into this constructed Gestalt of civilization – where silence is now throttled by dissonance. Where absence is bombarded with herds. Where difference is cosmeticized into clones.
We have water in packaged bottles. We tattoo the ground, and clog manholes with cigarette butts, chocolate wrappers and other “uninvited” things that mock at our residual being. We are all employed by time, that temperamental boss – who can hire, assign, then resign and retire. Contracts – tins – packaged bottles – that ticking clock – that beating heart – all a pace – on a leash.
And all this, on lease.
~
And there is my stubborn gray space.
There is no room for song, for making love, for connecting into timelessness. Safely armored by my parentheses, my locked doors, I simply grow tubers in my space’s tired soil. It’s a pretty little garden, you see. A forest is not allowed – that undisciplined growth on its own accord. Who would prune that rude vegetation? Too much hassle. This garden is on rent.
And sometimes, through my unpunctuated, unapostrophed and unabbreviated space, water flows, music consummates, fruits ripen. Unrestrained. Some times.

~

And, in my gardened space, I wait.
These constructions keep pounding on my parentheses. I fear some times, that they might break down and my space will be trespassed and then trodden upon. Like a cigarette butt or an empty plastic bottle. Wasted.
I want to be filled.
I want the clock to stop ticking. I want timelessness now. I don’t want further construction. I want Creation. Again.
I want to be Free. As Nothing.
Again.

~
7 October 2004.

Inertia

2004-10-20T23:43:00.000-07:00

Inertia

And here I am
Again.
The same questions
Pervading
Like an exponential curve,
Plotting
A segment
That lingers –
On – above – but
Never touching
Its Horizon.

Yes the same
Again.
That reckless riddle
Itching
Like a festering wound
Rotting
A soul
That starves –
In – inside – but
Always longing for
Its Skin.

So many details
Are left in parentheses.
So many meanings
Are littered
Within prose and poetry
Both.

I,
I have stretched
The linearity
So far
That it can only
Sever
With a twitch
And recoil.
Yes I want
The Circle –
But not like this.

I change
Names,
Substitute imagination
With new variables.
But the equation
Remains
Empty,
Gaping into infinity.
Gasping for Q.E.D.

Yes,
I now whisper
In emptiness.
Before there was silence
Where shadows
Were at least a possibility.
I use the past-tense –
The present
Has no potential presence.

Then
Maybe absence –

Maybe soundlessness –

Maybe wordlessness –

May,
Be.

And
Yes there is a lot of pain
In inertia,
So much that I am too tired
To explain.

There is multitude in gray –
There is leeway in space –
There is purpose in deference –

But where is the Absolute.
History had its meaning.
Ritual could bind.
Why doesn’t memory balm me.

Why is there an
Echo that
Vibrates
In the recesses
Of an empty room,
An empty space.
An emptied sea.

It is Known
What I need.
It is Known.
It is Heard.
It is Felt.
An incessant reminding.

Even shadows
Are disarmed and distorted
In disarray.

And yes –
Again
I am waiting,
Lying violet etherized
In gray space.

Just Reunion.
Just Connexion
Now…

14 October 2004.

The GadFly

2004-10-20T23:41:00.000-07:00

The Gadfly

And so again I came. It had not changed much. The bench was still there with its roughly wrought bones. The fountain was dormant. And the rocking chair was cradled by the idle wind. And I was there. Again.
Again they poured back, with the same lavish largesse. Memory was damn good at erosion and then depositing the sediment as scum into my chalice. I quit drinking a long time ago. A friend told me that its bad for health. And religion chastises it. I didn’t care much for both. I cared more for what my friend had said. That admonitory tone. I missed it all. The chalice was tipped down. And the sediment overflowed over the rim, tripping over the body that contained it. Yet there was touch. That I heard.
The man came again like yesterday, and the day before. He sat down beside me. He wore dark sunglasses. We were quiet. That subtle silence – its so evocative – but unspeakable. I kept going back, rewinding the convoluted reel that connected my being like weary capillaries sifting out blood that no longer wants to travel. I was tired of traveling. The same road. The same signs. And the same journey.
And yet there was a nearness in that distance. The absence insinuated a presence that I always felt. But never touched.
The library was deserted again. And the courtyard was barren. Wary maybe, the man ventured off to his same travel. No baggage. The office tea-break was over. He had to go back. The same papers. The same phone calls. And the same journey. With those glasses on.

And there he descended again. I sometimes wondered how he could travel down the tortuous staircases that punctuated the courtyard like relentless question marks clotting the blankness of a page. And yet he always came. That Lazarus white shrouded him, and his wavy hair – almost a Replica, but better. He was not flesh. He was just shadow.
And he came down every afternoon. Sometimes I awed the feminine sensitivity he had. But why attribute definition to a shadow. He’s not even 3D I thought.
But he was more. Whenever he would come down for his travel, the sun would appear as a luminous disc meshed in the clouds. The same Lazarus white would brim the sky. That moment seemed to trespass over the bounds that circumscribed eternity. And I was a part of it. 3D, yet on a newer plane.

He came and did not sit. I wonder why he smiled at me. Children have such pure smiles. But it always seems as if they are laughing. And the joke is always on us I think. The thinkers. How his smile sneers at me. For once he made me smile too. He whispered in my ear and he offered, as if he was taking me for a night out for some hearty drinks. He said that I should leave the chalice here. There was no need for clay grails there.
I looked at the fountain. A whole era was etched in those patterns: forgotten glory, wasted whims of toppled empires and stubborn history. Yet it was dormant. It was strange that I saw the pine-tree after that (domesticated of course, fettered to embellish the courtyard). The same shape I reckoned. I wondered if a seed can sprout from stone.
After all, gargoyles speak too. The unspeakable truth. Maybe some molded blood surges through them too.

We walked. I was behind him. Does this juvenile Lazarus have any carnal knowledge, I asked. Being a woman I should be ashamed, I was reprimanded. But I was flesh. And the chalice. Why would he not let me take the chalice. I asked him, and he looked back and said, “It’s already full. We don’t need to drink more. Let the blood flow.”
And I let it circulate unrestrained.
We walked down a dark corridor lit by torches. And the floor was littered by puddles of opaque water. He told me that the water kindles the flame of these torches. I asked what the torches were for. He did not answer me. Maybe, he did not hear me. The convoluted reel unraveled itself into a motion-picture. The talkies. And it was deafening. Maybe I did not hear him through the rumble of the strings and the rustle of the words. The puddles rippled. Or maybe, he did not answer me.
And there I was again. The talkies were blunt this time. Blunt, boisterous and blatant. Alliteration. Ah! The past days that spelt out some meaning. There was rhyme then. Some coherence that bounded expression.
They asked me to let it flow. They asked me to efface the chalice’s pattern. Plain clay, unadorned was what they wanted. Patterns they said, elaborated, then complicated. They did not need crowded truth. One voice is enough. And the chalice was large enough to carry the blood, its awaited seed and the voice’s echo.
“Do you not hear it?” they asked. I just shut my eyes tight. They laughed a mocking roar.
“She seals it… She’s sealed it with a lid? Would hearing me enough for you? That gurgle would deafen you… it’s brimming. Let it flow. Let it overflow itself.”
“But even though it gushes forth, I have to bear the pain. The wound is fresh.”
“Will your closed eyes clot the blood faster?”
“No. But it may dilute the pain.”
“So you adulterate the blood then? How would it heal then. It’ll be an infection. No?”
“I don’t know. You confuse me. With your double talk… you confuse me.”
“Hear the blood roar. You cannot barrage it with your immaterial bandage. It will flow out of the chalice. But would never empty it. Never. Even if you have your eyes lidded.”
I heard the Echo.

I walked out. The sun glared down at me. I took out my sun-glasses and shielded myself. The blood kept flowing, reverberating with the Echo’s call. I could see – but a reined view. I could only see the road.
The man came back. He sat on the bench again. And again, Lazarus descended and whispered – in his ear.
I chose not to overhear. The Echo brimmed in each passage. Overflowed.
And I walked down.
The same road.

~~~