(untitled), 02Jun2014

~m.h

Let me be reborn
As a tree in your garden,
So that at least in one life or the other
I may give back to you
The tears you shed in vain;
Rise out of the earth tall
And shelter you
For the love and effort you gave me.

I shall remain heartless
But my love for you will spread arboreal.
Rest your heart upon a bough
And take my fruit whenever you will.
I will love you till the day
Your tender fingers are knotted like my trunk,
And love you still when your grave rests in my womb.

When your bones hide from the sun beneath my gaze,
I shall cry a shower of flowers upon your rested soul. 

The Gastric Survey

This aloo bonda mashed potato turmeric green chilli coriander craving
On empty days and empty stomachs and empty minded forced government holidays
Sans background noise or movie plans or crunch of popcorn in only myself ears

Give pakoda bun omelet heart shaped boiled peas cutlet
Karela chips benana chibs cold samosa all I want
Is oil oil reused refined sunflower or so oil

Want to go out and eat campus whole
Everyone sleeping no one will notice till nightfall in my hydrochloric stomach.

The Man Inside

~s.k

At some dendritic end in the mesh of roads
A signal turns red,
The heart of the city stills for a moment,
Scores of tail-lights glare to a stop.
A city where people
Commute in raving urgency
Still ensure that they make love slowly.

The new lover of the night-time waitress
Lets her moan escape into the neighbour's window;
A pack-of-ten he bought
Because he wanted it never to end.
They copulated that day
Agglutinatively like their tongues
Till their bodies strung incoherently.

The fat waitress in post-coital glory
Picked up her bag,
Chin-up marched past appalled neighbours
Taking herself home on a newly acquired old scooter,
Faded dirty pink with one mirror missing.

It did not matter what they said
She would never see them again.
But for one day after so long
She got laid.

The man inside was happy. 

It is Today.

And suddenly, nothing else matters.
No catastrophe can make me
Raise an eyebrow.

Today was ours.
Today is no more.
Today will never be the same. 

April

~p.r

Flying forth the confines of a cloud-
Freedom, Freefall.
Rushing against the whistling breeze
And into your arms
For a patch of wet earth. 

You know?

~p.r

You know when you look at him
And your smile bursts wide
And your eyes crinkle?

You know when you feel his presence
And you feel a blush creep up your cheeks
Like someone turned on the 'coy' switch?

You know when he holds you
And you swing one leg over him
And you snuggle like time has stopped?

You know when his lips linger over yours
And he kisses with aching tenderness
But your insides are devoured by passion?

I know. 

My Purple-clad Teacher Speaks

When I bow
At the feet of your wisdom,
I imagine green leaves
Bursting from my head,
Wild hibiscus blossoms
Kissed by yellow butterflies;
My mother's lips murmur blessings
When your breath rustles the branches.
Pour all your light
Onto this sprout of knowledge
Pollinating itself.


You are its creator,
You give it life. 

A Summer Lover

~p.r

I love you
In silence.
I whisper
When you're not looking,
When you're standing
Collecting leaves in your hair,
Beaming like the light
Shafting through the branches.
I love you
When you're running through the wind,
Raising foot falls of gold in the dusk.

I will love you
When the summer showers,
On the day you become
My patch of wet earth.

Pillow Poetry

Let me lay with Sleep-
He is the last man who shall claim me tonight.
I have grown weary of
Twirling around
The heart that is clung to the hem of my skirt,
The other that is snagged in the train of a stocking,
And another unhung from the strap of my bra
Black with the secrets of a million humiliations.
Only Sleep can quieten this whore of words
And bleed the tongue of all language but Truth.

To an Ancient Love

I have taken a step ahead
With your heart still freshly shattered
Beneath the other foot.
Mercy begs my many graces
To cite to our verses
In the bibliography of
My well drawn out second Act.
Your Gospel by which
My eyes were raised in Womanhood
To meet a life that was once meant for us-
A life I now spend in another man's arms
And call it home.
I have taken a step ahead
With your heart still freshly shattered
Beneath the other foot-
With this I shed the memory of all the pain,
With this the bliss tinted Polaroids will also fade.
I leave you only with words
Like a fallen husk
When the seed is lost.

Atop a Cloud of Pillows

With the silvery pale moonlight
Twisting like ribbons through the leaves,
Binding us to be one
Under the sheltered canopy-
Where our love
Is neither a secret nor a song
But just the truth
Stealing itself into
The corners of our smile.

The Unborn Devastation

Meet me at the crossroads of lust and hate

For an object I so desire must chain me.

Cast away your soul and breath

And come only with the weaponry of your trade.

Be unfeeling when I am not chaste

Lest my broken clockwork tick again

And race to keep pace with the life that has flown by

And bear witness to the performance of

Forgotten black angels in their hypnotic masque again

And string all their words in unbearable poetry. 

Meet me at the crossroads of lust and hate

And cast away all that I desire of you.

Be the faceless stranger with the weaponry of his trade

So when I meet my death, you can go your way. 

Meet me at the crossroads of lust and hate

But do not bring your love

I do not know which road to take. 

Written on 8 February, 2013

My polyglot pen tries to make
Several points
On the even surface of
Unwritten paper.
It hasn't got the same effect
For it whores around the whole surface,
Bastardizing various tongues
(Mostly South Indian).
All words break loose
When the good Indian woman's bun
At the nape of my neck
Tumbles down.
Sense can only be
Sieved in the kitchen. 

Sleep and Hunger

My tummy's a-rumbling, rushing

Into mid-day with

Last night's dreams still in tow

Between sleepy lashes

Of mine eyes.

I can only collect

Falling dew

On tip of my tongue

As visions of you

Melt and leak

Out my head

Down the tip

Of my nose.

I might eat your

Candy-cane fingers,

Blue water-apple face,

Eye-balls on a lollipop,

Shred strawberry centred

Marshmallow tongue,

And slurp

The cappuccino cloud hair.

Lemongrass: A Cyber-Space Freshner

The words jump out and glow extra bright-
I imagine the satellite shoot at me.
The internet is fascinating!
My laptop is bright red!
The fall-rise tone of a new notification
Is the only acknowledgement of my cardiac arrhythmia.
His blog is a two-way mirror
That I'm on the wrong side of.
I'm fan-girling like a twelve-year old,
I have that minor-celebrity crush thing happening.
Mama told me not to talk to strangers on Facebook
But what if I really want to get tangled in an elaborate web, world wide?

I will never know how green his blue jeans are
And he won't see how my bed is a chocolate wrapper junkyard
But our IM smells like lemongrass. 

Wordsworth, Blake and Hegde

A picture,
A painting,
A poem-
What use?

Forever it was,
Forever it will be;
Before my mind thought
And after your eyes read
And crumble to dust
In the earthly bed.

A picture,
A painting,
A poem-
What use?
In the end
I will only taint
The perfection
Of the beauty
Of the Mother
With my
Ignorant human touch.

Veronica's Origins

I have not seen you
But you have honey brown eyes
Because he said he loved you.
You have an oval face
Because he said he held it
As he wiped your tears away.
Your lips are frozen crescent,
Colourless and unhappy
Because he said you were another man's wife.
Your nails are long and shapely
Because the scars you gave him
Are the only treasures he has of your love.

Veronica,
You approximant tap nasal plosive-
He breathes in every time your name resounds
In his head and in his heart and in his lovers' eyes.
He sees in them and he sees in me- you.

He walked down the aisle
Of the library with one
Because he hoped
That her brain had your beauty.

And another-
He let the other pat him on the head
Hoping that your motherly love
Ran in her veins.

He looked in my eyes
And said "At last!"
Hoping for your dreams
To shine through them.

What devastation in his heart, Veronica!
He fell.
Now he wanders
With his orphaned love,
Foolishness is
The only other child
You had with him.
For both their sake
He seeks refuge in
She and she and she.
And then one day
He came to me.

I saw him and I loved.
I made a home for myself
In the heart
Of Your homeless man.
And then my love was orphaned,
And I was not you,
And I fell
Full pregnant.
Foolishness is the only child
I had with him.

For how long now I have wandered
From him to him to him.

I walked down the aisle
Of a library with one
Hoping to find his beauty
In his brain.

I patted the head of another
Hoping he'll take
The motherly love in my veins.

But no matter
Who looked in my eyes,
My only dream was him.

Veronica-
You are my theory
And his reality
Behind our big Bang.
Veronica, your Origins-
Our universe
Is governed
By Entropy.

And in knowing this I sigh
From the depth
Of the Language
Of the soul
Rattling within-
His name
Affricate tap nasal approximantly.

Son of Geraldine*

How many times this pen has been held, Son of Geraldine!
How many words it has traced!
Still, it behaves like it has no memory,
Produces no trace of an echo
Even as it writes the same words again
On a pale fresh page
With virgin clarity.

Only the pages remember,
For they are only written upon once.
They remember the force with which the ink flowed
And where it became tender.
When they age, their yellowness will only know
One touch.

Son of Geraldine, you had many lovers,
Your pen has written and discarded
Many works of passion.
Crumpled, they tumble to many corners of the world.
Your words touch the soil of every land,
In every language,
How mothered the tongue, notwithstanding.
Like pupils of a teacher who taught it well,
They carry your coloured words for lessons.

Son of Geraldine, your words remain
In whispered glory
On a last page torn with longing to breathe.
Your word lives
On the last page
Beneath their book's heavy heart.




*Not biological

Your Sister, The Whore

For Nithya

Because we bear the same cross,
Of wanting to love and be loved-

Like Carbon atoms shifting
With new attachments every day.

Organic are our bonds-
They disintegrate everyday.

They say we are special
And want us all for themselves.

I love them truly,
And so do you.

But who loves us
The way we want to be loved?

Bear a Torch to the Toilet

The Greatest Thinkers were born in the loos-
An Archimedean "Eureka" speaks Volumes for their thoughts.
But to a toilet frequented by the country's brightest young minds,
Their heads illuminated by dreams and virgin knowledge-
A Torch needs to be borne.

The floor underfoot is watered twice a day,
It shines emerald when the top layer is skimmed.
Universal truths are deciphered on the walls
Where the delicate pink tile makes patterns in the grime.

The Intelligentsia prance in their night-wear,
All beauty and brain-
Ballerinas leaping over fallen hair.

The Pricklers in the Nether region
Turn a blind eye to their performance
And remain indifferent
To the drains constipated
By the Black mesh of Keratin
And over-flowing codes of Red.

In the toilets congregate
The heavy Recta
And their last meal behind clamped mouths.
The ceilings blink down mournfully at them and die.
The taps snort dryly.
The pleasures of a rear in mid-air
Is plunged in dry darkness.

I step down from my brown ceramic pedestal.
My heels slap the floor below.
I'm at a moss for words.