Month: May 2022

It injured me to see her read
A poem I had texted her.
Her narrow screen and largish font
Were wrapping down my metered lines,
Distorting chiseled, sculpted form.

I ran a finger on her screen,
“It’s meant to be a single line
A single movement, left to right,
Of eyes, of mind, of breathing voice.”
I pinched to show her what I meant.

She ran a finger down my face,
“It’s meant to flow into my heart.
So, let it flow the way I want.
I like it when it wraps me in.”
She pinched my chiseled, sculpted nose.

A middle glaciers out of me.
A word, an image, something small,
Atomic with two valencies:
A good beginning, worthy end.

And if I want to make it flow
I better get the start and end
To match like hydrogen protons
That swim around an oxygen.

It’s best if there’s a little turn,
A Mickey Mouse of three quatrains
Transporting readers’ minds aboard
A Steamboat Willie whistling off.

You pinged me at the chime of three,
“Oh sweetie, have you gone to sleep?”
I saw the notif, saw the time,
And saw the price of answering.
And yet, I saw my fingers swipe,
“Some nights are just too beautiful
To drone away in snoring sleep.”

“What makes tonight so beautiful?”

“The power’s out. Been out for hours.
The moon’s translucing through the clouds,
The cateyes shining through their shrouds,
And not a single human light.”
Except the glare I’m staring at.

“A punctuated silence moves
Through steady rain on metal rooves,
Through crickets cricking in a groove,
And not a single human sound.”
Except the pinging of your words.

“A beloved sleeping somewhere else.
Afar, her bosom’s dips and swells.
Afar, embracing sentinels.
And not a single human touch.”
Except these haptic responses.

“I’m sorry I disturbed it, then.”

“Oh no, you didn’t disturb it, love.”
Except, you ruined it. With my help.

1.
The three-year-old was not convinced.
For all his mountain-climbing mud,
He got no chance of plucking stars
To sparkle up his goodnight milk.

2.
For thirty years, he sat on hills
So Milky Way adopts him once.
But all it ever did instead
Was orphan him of conviction.

3.
It took his words three hundred years
To rise as cream in people’s minds,
Convinced, at last, to hear their breaths
That pluck at constellation chords.

A reader of my poetry
Who also watches poetry
On YouTube, Facebook, Instagram,
Reported on a WhatsApp call
That poetry on page is dead.
That poetry is poetry
If performed as poetry
By singers, actors, rappers, prudes,
Or simply boring poets too.
“If writ for ears the poem is,
Why leave it as a paper piece?”

Because it’s written with the ear,
But for the mind to find the time
To grind through lines and rhymes that try
To pound the sounds of all around
Into the silence of the Self.
A poem is a poem live
If all it ever does is lie
Upon a tongue, be old or young,
For just a moment’s inwardness,
Arousing an inflection in
Intuition’s inventory.
The page is good enough for that.

Dissevering a cucumber
I envied how each slice retained
Identity as “cucumber”.

Now, there’s a litmus test for craft.

You slice your poem into lines,
And thumb a line between two slides,
And hold it up to cloudy light,
And squint to look for “poetry”.

If all you see is whitened verse
In search of fractal fulfillment,
Compost the line inside your mind
And hope a vine is recomposed.

Until then salt your severed whines
And grit your teeth on cucumber.

Her Cinderella crystal shoe
Bombarded on my Iron Mask
With shattering ferocity
Of Simba roars in Tiger Caves.

Of course, her crystal shoe was strong:
She’d bargained off her Ariel hair
And mermaid fins for thousand pricks
Of steely blades on every step.

I swept my Humpty Dumpty mask,
And picked the shoe to lick it clean.
Of course, it cut my Sparrow Tongue:
It’s made of Diamonds in the Rough.

She pulled me by my Beastly mane
And blew me her al bacio,
Accepting everything about
My Ratatouille existence.

She wrapped her Riding Hood on me
And called her band of Seven Dwarves
To play the Pied Piper tune
And danced with me forever aft.

Some dreams begin on coloured sheets
Arrayed triangularly on
An ancient clothesline hardly used
Except on Ganapati days.

A pinch-out zoom reveals on them
The oily fingerprints of past –
Some tinier than memory
Of when the ladoos seemed so big.

Another pinch-out zoom reveals
A grain or two of guilty glee
On faces of two hasty boys
Who wiped their chuda ghasa hands.

Some three-four pinch-in zoom-outs show
The chairs arranged as temple frames,
The wardrobe hanger temple arch,
And cotton saree walls and roof.

A pinch-out zoom into it all
Reveals a china clay Ganesh,
Whose gangashiuli garland hides
The modak belly we all love.

A swipe to left reveals the bowl
Of disappearing boondi balls,
Correctly placed within the reach
Of that prosthetic probosis.

A swipe to right reveals the books
Which parents want the kids to read
With jasmine petals cringing at
The boring subjects underneath.

Somewhere beyond zoomable dreams
A father chants remembered words,
A mother hums forgotten tunes,
A grandma grumbles at them both.

Somewhere inside a beaten man,
A little boy is tugging hard
To keep the coloured clothesline taut
With flags of hope against the dark.

Economy of brevity
Erases opportunity.
Elaboration soon dilutes
Essentials into absolutes.

She had a falling out with me
The day I fell in love with her.
The fault, I say, was in our feet.
Our gaits were unfamiliar:

I was iambic, out of step
With her trochaic tendencies.
I climbed to slide and jump with joy.
She dove to soar and glide with ease.

She planned pentasyllabic fun
For my monosyllabic moods.
And when she needed space and breaks
I walked into prosaic woods.

It’s good we weren’t meant to be.
I’ve found who’s meter-made for me.