Fungible

Here and now we are a rupee for our daily rice and its liquor. We are escalatory and olfactory piling up live bodies for shouts in dusty streets roaming vans. We are placed and exchanged with other shouts, other bodies piling up as gold brown straw afer every paddy harvest little birds peck at deep dawn.

We are straw mountains to a sky. We hardly escape a day’s light but turn golden brown to a rain. We are straw people escalating a diet cola, after obese laughter.

We form demos for their cratos ,our thumbs illiterate, fungible, eligible for a mutual exchange. Our rupee is all – time fungible with no colour to it as our bodies.

Electricity rules

Apart from lighting my bulb, electricity rules my adult mind as making my father weightless to sky.

When kids we had no electricity, just dimwit kerosene lamps hanging on the door frame. When it rained there were halos of moths. The halos moved on the wall in shadows.

Then we had shadows gently touching wall lizards . Electricity finally came and removed shadows except lizards.

The electric thoughts still play on my grownup head, especially the then grownup tongues clucking sadness at the child’s loss of father.

Ruskin’s housefly

We are appalled by the irreverence of the common housefly ,who buzzes around the poet, regardless of the stature of the body it is hovering on.

Arrogant , as Ruskin rightly said. Since Ruskin , the behavior of the houseflies has not changed much .They still don’t show much respect to online poets. Flies are about the poet’s eyes sometimes ,like persistent metaphors.

Houseflies are hardly aware that they are just a few cliched images ,as they hang around poetic eyes . The houseflies are themselves cliched creatures since Ruskin’s time. They still buzz in exactly the same way and do not care about the poets, whether they are alive or just bodies in a corner of the room.

The whims of the story teller

A woman is dancing her limbs sideways and skywards. Some people are doing their clockwise rounds .A pocket is walking, bulging with the seventies  film music. Some times you come in my thoughts…

We saw how stories were  made up in  our yesterday’s movie spectacle . It is quite a  spectacle to see how we make up each of the stories as we walk our clockwise rounds or sit on green benches. The stories are ever changing . The story teller makes such a mess of our characters, each of which is a story in itself  running beyond the plot-line.

The story teller enjoys a perfect freedom to tinker with  the plot .He makes us sometimes go beyond our outlines. We tremble out of the plot. Like the woman whose lateral dance  threatens to demolish space.

Girl topics

Through the dark night,  the girl topic emerges , sadness slowly being taken out of verse with a death forcefully ejected out of memory. The feeling bones of a girl are but a laughter, of  an evening wedding function, a girl’s laughter about her own wedding and Spanish proficiency .

Why not wed a swashbuckling Spaniard , says we. Can the swash be  buckled in the Kannada blood of black alley, we ask facetiously to her silver peals of laughter. 

We are of  upper caste with preferences for sour lentils soup and a lungi clad forehead with three horizontal lines of Shiva affiliation. In reality,  girl is not worried about the lentils soup but about English proper and Oxford grammar. 

Girl topics eventually turn women in the fag end as if they are maturing in their bones to women over  lentils soup with jack fruits served in weddings .Their stomachs will be peopled in due course. Their necks shine with the black beads of husbands from their aliveness in offices behind computers . 

We wish girl topics not proceed beyond this point. There are other topics  that do not grow so fast.

Forming the poem whole

We would finally land on our mere fragments like bits of rain in the afternoon remembered by a white laughter that vanished behind teeth on a table waited on by the whitest of aprons. A gleaming white glass of the lift fell in a thud holding men and women in tourist backpacks.

At the entrance is two- horse buggy with men before waiting welcome scimitar by footman. The ceremony is a fragment of the afternoon. Inside is the beginning of a vintage photo-op that will stay fragment of a chance unrealized.The books promised fragments of afternoons of ancient people, who were mere fragments from everyone’s memory, itself a fragment.

However much one tried , fragments would always fuse together to form the poem whole.

The broom

Having just cleaned the floor, the broom rests behind the door, in a soft sibilant silence there,  in the slightly open arms of the door, triangularly marking lines of shadows enclosing a darkness, a darkness that takes the form of a  creaking silence, a soft purr.

It has eaten a room’s lines, in one large scoop, formed in the half light of curtained sunlight, writ in the waters of a window’s ascending sun. The lines are like flights of birds white to our fingers that will soon fly to temporary night rests as little blobs of white in the darkness of trees.

But the broom has scooped up the dusty light and the light is now flying feverishly as soft dust particles towards higher reaches of the room.

After creating the storm the broom safely rests in the shadow of the door’s triangle with the wall.

Morning intact

That morning we were led up  ,by words,  to intact morning. Icarus failed to fly on waxen wings  and dropped down peacefully as the farmers furrowed their land. Our monkey God rose to meet the sun fruit only to return with a red apple mouth .

It did not matter we failed . Our mornings were intact.

The almond tree forgot all about the maroon leaves it had dropped a few weeks ago. It is now green spring in its leaves. A pocket music sang of the many women of Krishna with only one in his heart.

In the neighbor green bench there is now  an absence where  was a stretching girl. Girl now stretches  morning runs, clockwise.

The song in the pocket asks lover why she is not singing her love song.

It does not matter we have failed.
The farmers quietly plough lands

And sun is burning in eastern sky
And vow, our mornings are intact.

A brown silence

All is brown,except under the banyan. The young banyan looks down to send green overtures.  A leaf falls on silence. A bird cries from the brownness around.

Bush and rock are brown. They merge in a silence ,not their own.

They had made holes  in the rocks.  I see four boys  generally fooling around with Sunday curiosity about holes. The holes are full of silence. Silence is brown and some times it rises like  vapor around  bushes.

The boys break their silence and their laughter comes to us over brown bushes.

Anchor word

The mountain child becomes born and turns a wavering coconut, which, daily, dallies with the sea wind . The child born to a mountain points to a new bird of plane. Look there is now new bird ! Planes are here and language. An anchor word is yet missing.

Now the near one is transiting from silence to a radiated arm. The arm turns blue like the sky and there will be nothing like it.

Please go on with woman talk while I hear my talk inside my eyelids. I hear fall of the cascades that I cannot hear her silence, says the poet of the near one transiting from temporary to a permanent future of silence. I am waiting for anchor word.

A word fails when poetry gains. I am anchored to nothingness. Mountains melt and turn river. River flows to the big wide sea.