The Rain's a Requiem Tonight

I have stilled
the frenetic bird flight of my thoughts, of you
into this frozen lifeless spread
this sheet of glass framing

The window of my listless soul. Outside
the rain falls,
in another listlessness
its cloying wetness, a weepy requiem

No ears can hear.

Sightlessly seeing, I stay inside
the familiar embrace of a cold only the rejected know. Outside
from the brimming eyes of a grieving sky,
in a flood the tears roll.

Soon you will be an alien pain.

The lacerations on my soul will heal
into scab I can never touch or peel,
again, I will live.

Till then, the salve
is the play of these flightless words
the poultice of my loneliness,
the silence of another answer-less night.

The Quiet

I have never really thought at length about why I have got used to wandering (not by motorcycle, but the relatively slower way -- on cycle and thereafter afoot) so much, over the last 3 plus years, since when I brought out my first book.

It largely had to do with the need to sit and work on what I had already put together as a first draft; but I can clearly see that it also had to do with a need to relate to the open spaces and the wildernesses around me -- to see art, individualism, identity and even life, in the dirt tracks, the cracked earth, the sunburnt rock (there are a lot of abandoned quarries around my place) and the waters I would go visit, Shameerpet Lake, the puddles of ochre / red rain water and the spirogyra-laced pokhuri like waters collected in the quarries.

Moving On dealt with a lot of those "relatings" in poems that are artless (and to a certain extent boyishly awestruck) in perspective, uninhibited in treatment and "inked" with a minimalism (especially in my pithy choice of words) that can probably be expected from someone to whom words are are kith and kin.

By the time I brought out my second book, I was an addicted walker -- thanks to my close encounters with butterflies and an increasing felicity to relate to birds. By this time, the poetry was almost incidental -- I had started to learn how to deal with my immediacy and also started to learn how to let the poem brew in me. In fact, apart from the poems dealing with butterflies in my second book, most of the others have a contemplatively detached and "quiet" air as if the poems are voiced by the elements, by time, or by a stoic whom nothing can touch.

I still don't know if I am ready (or capable) to look at my third book in a contemplative or objective mien; in many ways it was the toughest of the three, but again there is that sense of quiet in many of the poems in them, even when I am being irreverent in my take on a particular bird; there is an utter lack of anything to do with the aural element of birdwatching in any of the poems. Its another thing that whenever I am ghooming and I come across Francolins (called Teetar in Hindi) and stalk them to get close to them and photograph them properly and they first go to ground and then take off in an "explosive whirrrrrrr" it completely deafens me, almost as if I have a proper pair of ears.

Its also another thing that I can hear and feel the lake breeze and the rain squalls and tree songs (I need to be able to see the tree for this to happen) and I seem to be hearing it even better with the passing years.

And there are times when I am up in the penthouse (which is where I incidentally "wrote" most of the poems of my second and third book) when I am stunned by the clarity of what I can hear -- mostly the silence, sometimes my thoughts and on rare occasions, the bars of some Old Hindi song that I hum to myself.

It is at times like this that I feel the most content, that I feel foolish for having again and again tried to go out of this quiet -- into the clamorously questioning eyes of women -- to search for love.

Surely it would have been better if I had been less of a "moth-being-attracted-to-the-candle-flame" and more of a nature poet?

Kahin door jab din dhal jaaye

कहीं दूर जब दिन ढल जाए
सांझ की दुल्हन बदन चुराए, चुपके से आए

मेरे ख़यालों के आँगन मे
कोई सपनों के दीप जलाए, दीप जलाए

कभी जब यूँ हुई बोझल साँसे
भर आईं बैठे बैठे जब यू ही आँखे

तभी मचल के, प्यार से चल के
छुए कोई मुझे पर नज़र ना आए, नजर ना आए

कहीं दूर जब दिन ढल जाए
सांझ की दुल्हन बदन चुराए, चुप के से आए

कहीं तो ये दिल कभी मिल नही पाते
कहीं से निकल आए जन्मों के नाते

घनी थी उलझन बैरी अपना मन
अपना ही होके सहे दर्द पराए दर्द पराए

कहीं दूर जब दिन ढल जाए
सांझ की दुल्हन बदन चुराए, चुप के से आए

मेरे ख़यालों के आँगन मे
कोई सपनों के दीप जलाए दीप जलाए

दिल जाने मेरे सारे भेद ये गहरे
हो गये कैसे मेरे सपने सुनहरे

ये मेरे सपने, यही तो है अपने
मुझ से जुदा नही होंगे, इनके ये साये, इनके ये साये

कहीं दूर जब दिन ढल जाए
सांझ की दुल्हन बदन चुराए चुपके से आए

Shaadi.com

There are only
three kinds of women in this world.

The first
are neurotic, full
of themselves, adept
have smart phones.

The second are divorced.

(From what?
Don't you dare ask!)

The third will like
everything about you.

Even your ears.

But hey,
this is matrimonial porn.

You will bore them,
they will move on.

Poetry

It has rained all day,
the wetness is a living thing, cold
its clammy touch wispy everywhere air
like the dull dead light
in snake-lidded comatose eyes
an indolent, endless weep.

Far from the dripping panicles
of the all-seeing leaves,
distant from the refuge of trees,
untouched by the soaked skin of earth
my eyes are dry
for whom do these skies, so cry?

In whimsy, why do these words come to me
bedraggled by the damp smelling must of a dogged past,
that no deluge can wash, have I not cried enough,
for loves that were never mine?
What requiem will they write
for this epic defeat of my emptiness?

A Haircut

I am large,
I have multitudes,
but even I need
the barber's ritual touch, 
a scissoring away 
of now mostly salt, 
with a smattering of pepper
of what's always been
so much of dead hair.

Tomorrow,
when I grasp at the meanings
in spoken words, try to survive the day alone
I will know it is okay.

For the light's a scythe 
scissoring the pretensions of everyone's days
and time's a meadow of green grass diminishing 
as Munias feed on it.

I will know it is okay that I lost again
know it with the total weight of every word
felt on the lightness of this haircut head,
hear it said in an echoing epiphany 
in this beautifully desolate, steadfast 
ever growing wilderness of my soul 
where in a passionate deluge of light
unbidden the sky kisses the earth's face
thrill in the triumph of knowing 
that no wanting could touch me 
with the madness 
that teaches hate when love ends.