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Another Country

I stumbled into your country

accidentally though,

I liked your straight skyscrapers,

the prettiest of your homes,

your sumptuous girlsand succulent lifestyles,

your green meadows,

and glorious sunsets,,your broad boulevards,

and bullshit punctuality.

But what I failed to gaugewas your predilection for

the retroflex and long vowels

though you speak the

language of love and oneness.

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Signatures

A poem remains a blank,

blue space,

as the mind is essentially

a tabula rasa,

until its signatured bya lucent image or an

edifying metaphor,

and pushed through the

contrapuntal lightand shade,

motion and stasis,

sound and silence

into the expanse of agglutinating

imagination that gives ita name and local habitation

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Angst

Something unpredictable

seems to have happened.

If not why this commotion,

and uncertainty in theentombing sky

which is ready breakinto a torrent of syllables.

And the sea is regnantwith thoughts.

Its only the seagulls

which seem to have felt

the brewing storm.They fled to the safer

distances for the fearof anachronistic disharmony.

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Around the Bend________________

Its around this bend,some god must have crossed

to the other side of the river,

or some woman must havebathed in the cool waters of

the silent river,

nakedly and dried up hervestments on its bank.

Has anyone saw her?

No. Not even the birds andcurious squirrels,

for shes Sita, the daughter

of the Earth.

And so the legend moveson into an edifying myth,

and the river morphsinto another lucent metaphor.

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Begum pet-Hyderabad

In Begum pet ,Hyderabad,

all roads lead to

air port

through sprawlingover bridges,

and surrealist lanes,

and sub -lanes,

tenements and temples,to the rotund

airport lounge,

where women comeand go

talking of Michael Angelo,and the men listen

to their gibberish

as avidly as children

listen to the cock and bull

stories.

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Carpe diem

I love your smooth,

petal soft environs,

and the unmystical gesturesthat radiate my dreams.

Do you remember how you

and I rode on the crest of

sea waves in the dark night,while we first met

to anchor our thoughts to

galloping desires.And its this darkness

that more revealed

the gestalt of your hopes

than your bright eyes,

the ripples of lightthat made your perceptions

impervious tunnels.

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Courting on Net

How splendid is it to

court on the Net?

how easy to woo?.No need of one night

cheap hotels,

no more saw dust restaurants.

when the Cupid isntplaying truant,

and an email is so vibrant.

Just an exchange of bios,

and preferences,

and idees fixe.And then come straitto the Atlantic on Maine

to be wooed andcannibalized into

a covenant .

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Darkness Again

Its darkness again that

defies the dialectic

by preferring to

spread its dominance

over hills and valleys,

cities and alleys,and rivers and oceans

by creating a reality

of illusions

And its only stars that

refuse to accept its

superiority for they knowthat the power of darkness

is only limited to anambient metaphor.

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Desire

Imperceptibly though,

desire springs fromthe ocean of silences,

and conjures up a space,

and moves on into

the terrains of love,where no boundaries

are set,

and no tasks assigned,for its a matter of weather

which the bodiesmust be attuned to.

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Dropping In

Tinsel soft rain

dripping in,drop by drop,

from the green of leaves,morphs everything into

mish mash of feelings.

And again,in the awful moments,

when thunder strikesthe sky,

it turns into violent

paroxysmsof perceptions,

all shored into

a belabored metaphor.

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Exegesis of Love

I dont know how

these solid moments

of darkness slipped

through my fingers

The suns already pouring

shards of light

into my bedroomwhile I ran my fingers

through the contours

of her bodyas one through the Braille

Shes still dreaming

as though its still dark,

ruling out light from

the exegesis of her love.

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Fear of Fear

I have morbid fear of

absolutions of all kinds,

and nearly collapsed

when my plane bound to

Chicago crossed

the giant shadows,like phallic thrusts

piercing the dark waters of

the Lake Michigan.

Youve had your share

of the American obsession

with terror.

It isnt New York,and we are landingin Chicago in a couple

of minutes

assured the voice of the

air hostess.

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Fear of the Unknown

Its this morbid fear

of the unknown thatsnaps all ties with the

arterial routes to memory,and metaphor that

troubles me more than

anything else.

I feel it to be cynical

to be away from the

verdure of the spring,and the glorious sunsets

on the Broadway boulevards

only to be hurled into

the nihilistic nothingness

where Ive to make to withthe glowing ineptitudes

of the dawns iridescent

light

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Fitting Finale

Life isnt divisible

into a series

of selective

scenes or Acts

as in a dramaticcomposition

of Shakespeare.

Its more

like a dream,

staccatoed,

and derailedinto disjointed

wads of desire.It may end up

in the Kafkaesque

nightmare of a dilemma:to be or not to be.

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Friendship

Friendship is an

indefinable

togetherness with an

umbilical chord bindingthe twosome

like content and forminto a lucent poem.

Its never strained,not segued into

loving thoughts,

nor chilled by the

desert cold.Its both transcending

and transfiguring,

blending the contraries

into the absolute zilc.

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Gift of the Tongue

Who wouldnt succumb

to the beauty,

and who wouldnt towholesome praise?

Mortals as were,

and mortals we remain to be.

Was this the face thatlaunched a thousand

paper boats upon

this perilous sea ofuncontrollable passions?

I said matter of factly,to extol my fiancs saggingspirits and morale.

And what she said was

even more spirited:I know what youre

up to,hon

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Guilt

A multitude of eyes

look through the dark

prison bars

to glimpse the blue patch

of an open sky,and feel the tiny

portions of the earth

which they belong to

And why is this

recurring rites de

passage ofcrime and punishment?

Arent they more sinnedagainst than sinning?

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Home

Now that Ive a home.Though not a big one

with sprawling windows,Venitian blinds,

and serendipitous doorsto allow the light to stream in,

but just a small one,

as the black in the eye.

Why should I live in

the rented rooms of my poemsand hold on to the crutches offebrile metaphors?

I now at least have a placewhere I can hold my bones

and breath under the shade

of incandescent truth

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In Benares

In Benares,

the Ganges spreads into

a veritable sea to surge up

to the precincts of thetemple steps

The water of the river is darkthrough with the votive

offerings of the coconuts,

flowers and the saffron,

and the floating human

carcasses which are munched

by the waiting crocodilesthat chat sacred hymns

In Benares neither the livinglive nor the dead die,

for theyre granted absolution

beyond the cyclic life and death.

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In Defiance

Im attuned to wholesome

denials rather than

squeamish acceptance

of the power of the elements,

including the insoucianceof the earth,

the stubbornness of the winds,

the anger of the congruous

tidal waves,

and the scalding temper of

the forest fires.Who dare them when they

disturb the artisticsovereignty of my poem.

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Khajuraho

In the sculptured images

of Khajuraho,time stands still,

and history gets the

lineaments of eternity

in the amorous loveof man and woman,

in their coital gestures,

and serpentineentwinings.

How long does thisbacchanalia last?And how long does this

love? No one knows

f or sure.

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Mothers Picture

I remember to have

seen mothers picture but oncewhen I was three year old.

It was on the attic,

in an album,

I saw her huddled betweenmy uncles and aunts

looking straight

into emptiness,fatigued and careworn,

as though she felt thetugs and pulls of time.

She was trapped in life,

though,with premonitions of death.

And it was that look

that sends me into reelsunrelieved of pain.

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Nocturnal

Mountains are wavy,

geometric lines at night,

stretched from

one end to another.

And down the valley,the prettiest of homes

are like moving caravan

of lightsas you sped on in the

encrypted night.

And the sky and itsmyriad brittle stars

too join the nocturnalcongregation,where the dark is pitted

against the riotous

break of dawn.

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Nostalgia

Its like rolling back

in timeinto the green meadows,

and ashen hills and valleys.

Like cruising on

friendly rivers,and entering into staccato of

dreams of lost innocence.

Like a looking backinto unfixed directions

when memory becomesa ritual exorcism,and nostalgia turns

into a gluey nightmare.

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Occasionally Yours

At time even the casual

strokes of a brushspruced up in yellow or white colors

might photo finish into

a beautiful laburnum,

or into blooming cherries

and morph them all

into a tuft of lucent symbols.

While even a well-conceivedmetaphor limned onthe crest of sea waves

may fall flat as a

missed out opportunity

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She

Shes an idea,

a perception

ensconcedin a metaphor.

A bewitching

beauty

beyond thetemporal,

tanshuming into

a transparent

legend

shes like anorchestratedsymbol morphing into

the immanence of

Mozarteansymphony

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The Call of the Sea

Could I resist the call of

the ocean with its coolwinds lashing against

the shore and the giantwav surging up

to mix memory and desire.The ocean is friendly though,

with its serendipitous doors

opening into the tufts ofsilences hidden in its

labyrinth of an analogoussymbol

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The Deeds We Leave Behind

The good we leave behind

is rewarded,

and the bad interned,and negated.

Therere no oracles to light

up our untrodden paths.

I remember Gandhiwhen I take my usual peg

of brandy,

and the sensual Abelardwhen I visit the places of

little respectability

for the modicum of my

titillation.

My sevenyear old grandsonchain smokes and

tells lies as naturally

as he breathes.

Hes beyond repair,

my wife wails.

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The Endgame

Someone has said

that the world ends

either with a whimperor a bang.

While others concedethat it floats like an egg

in the diluvial water.

The end must come

either way,

I said.

And if you allow an eggto float,

you allow the chickento come out.And life has surely

renewed itself,

albeit in eidetic metaphorsof honed imperfection.

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The Facts of History

History is time turned

backwards,

the dog- eared yellow pages

shuffled backand forth

like dreams.

And is replete with stories

of wars and triumphs,of deaths and

devastations,

of the legends ofcoiffed men and women

whose pictures are hungon the dilapidatedwalls

of our own making.

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Where Shall we Go this Summer?

what an absurd plani said,

where would i go whengods plenty is in here?

shored in yourtemperate body

and variations in the

atmospherics customized-

like Chicagoswintry cool,

or Californiasoozing heat,

or Manhattans

buoyancyreaching a crescendo

of the spirit

youre a woman

for all seasons,

combined or discursively

disunited.

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Dripping In

Tinsel soft rain

dripping in,drop by drop,

from the green of leaves,

morphs everything into

mish mash of feelings.

And again,

in the awful moments,

when thunder strikesthe sky,

it turns into violentparoxysm

of perceptions,

all shored intoa belabored metaphor.