Evenings

I hop skip and leap
In traffic rush at six
And tackle a few shoulders
And chassis en route,
As I wobble to my unwelcome couch.

Drained off of dreams past expiration dates,
I mix up some soup,
Of old 'if's and 'but's
And slip into my answerless 'why's.

Ironed with stains that'll rather now grow,
I fiddle with the stitching that is surely unstuck
And popping a few pills for a stomach rather weak
Scrape for the passport of fate.

Apologia

The ministry of beauty is now off my hands
And foregone those wonders of sense.
Smeared by the oozings of unsealable wounds,
The air now is pungent with Hemoglobin smells
And smoke from the bonfire of skin.

Blackened to their core,
My words are on strike,
And locked out my workshop of hope.

Padlocked in times that are raped beyond rage
My sentences cringe amid funereal howls
And gather rather messed on my page.

Sorties

I

Monsoon evening trickles down
With smell of trash from open vats.
Seven O' clock.
Chewed up ends of bony days.
And now a surly breeze will wrap
Plastic sheets around your feet
From broken roofs and fallen tiles
Of grim shacks on barren tracks.
A naked urchin totters by.

And then the engine whistles on.

II

Morning peeps with uncertain feet
And wafts with the stale smell of urine on walls
In platforms with latrines unclean.
Here among hundreds of feet that are rushed
You stagger into coupes
Full of baskets of fish,
And mouthing your quips
On climates and cost,
Drowse as an old dog at noon.

III

You disclose your tab
From smooth leather flap
And finger through posts
That are heaped on your walls
With least bit of care
For the tear on your dress
Or for that man
Who bundles down stares
As a rat that has gobbled its cheese.

You finger your hair with humanoid limbs
And blast from your discs the loud latest fad
That drowns all the insistent voices that float
From bleak little rooms where you played.

IV

And all of these fragments of dolor and dross
Now rush into your streets and scatter
Along declining overbridge or tracks,
Remnants of faces that rose strong at dawn
And rotate as splinters of perforated cans
That groan as if skeletons in epileptic fits
With discord of perfected schizophrenic mime.

Step out of the wings and dance.
The world now'll mumble and tumble in dark
And snap all the circuits for fun!

Lone Ranger (In memory of Neelkantha Bagchi)

Boxed in the penumbra of mutated weeds
That suddenly are labelled as banyans and oaks,
I search for a branch in the clear light of day
From where I may sing now my lore.

Left without axes or saws rather sharp,
I falter and waver and try but in vain
To unleash those squadrons of thunders I dreamed.

So I seethe as if grilled by lightnings unseen
And harvest that poison of time in my limbs
As I churn its seas for one final cleanse
That'll restore our gardens unspoilt.

[According to Indian mythology the god Shiva would drink the poison derived from the churning of the seas which would eventually yield the elixir of life. The poison turned his throat blue. Hence his other name is Neelkantha, the one with a blue throat]

Misfit

Circled by slingshots of lamda and pie,
I'm swayed by the vectors of contempt and lie
That emplot my self within Eulerian graphs,
With constant of doing-what-I -hate.

Such are the prices of growth they'd said
And I am all sold-out of late.

So how did old Tom spend hours in his bank,
And dredge through his wasteland of self?
But I can't risk spells in the asylum or church
To sustain my fabrics of neurons in stress
And count little rosaries in train.

So battered by the brickbats of turbine and torque
I call to my aid dear Auden or Donne
And hew their jargons with dictions of self
For symmetry of semiologic shields.

Patched up with armours of allusion and trope,
I dance among circuits and unwanted chips
And practice with phantoms of hope.

Sighs and Wings

In the stillness of dawn, to sighs I've asked
Their lineage and destiny untold.
Flitting among shelves full of papers and books
They've whispered me tales full of petals now torn
Amid debris of silence that piles along walls
Or cleaves our bedsheets with barbed wire lines
In these our dawns full migraine and cough,
With concern now caught in its bluff.

Foreclosed with too many of dues still unpaid,
We scrape for the ounces of trust that'll loan
Perhaps a few bonds to us still.
Jumbled in fractions of aggregated dross,
We gasp among compounded interests of loss,
As idiots in ponzies of heart.

Spanning over ebbtide of dark deeper night,
Unbroken wings of cranes soar in flight.

Same Old Stuff

My confounded muse can hardly explain,
How each mere sight will unleash those lines
That swim from the depths of my soul.

Rhymes that were absent for weeks shuttle back
And swing into new shapes and cling to her curls
With music that chimes with her smile.

So I conspire with time and implore with wind
To extend her stay in my sight; as seconds
Move on minutes and minutes to new hours
That whiplash my soul into shapes that are wrought
By agonies of unfulfilled hope.

Knowing none of this, she smiles and then leaves
Trailing my heart in her heels.