Month: May 2023

It’s starting as a Horror tale:
A king is dead, his son is sad,
Until the king returns as ghost.

And now, it is a Mystery tale:
Who killed the king? Why kill the king?
And how can he be sure of it?

And now, it is Bildungsroman:
To be or not to be the man
The haunting king expects of him?

And now, it is Postmodernist:
A play about another play
That plays within the actual play.

And now, it is a Thriller tale:
A court intrigue, a power game,
A mousetrap of a kitten belled.

And now, it is an Action tale:
The foiling plots, the swording duels,
The army at the kingdom’s gates.

And now, it is a sad Romance:
To meet and part and meet again
So much in love, so much in death.

And now, they’re out of genre shelves:
He sells without the branding shells.
The Bard’s a genre in himself.

Our cleaner pointed at the stack
Of journals, notebooks on my chair
And said she found them on the floor
Collapsed, with pages here and there.

Again, I saw, she’d stacked them wrong –
The small, on top; the big, below –
Forgetting there’s a harmony
To how they stand and how they flow.

Precarious as Buddhist cairns,
These catchers of my mental fart
Accrue as vital vertebrae
That form the backbone of my art.

I smiled and thanked and shook my head,
Forgetting she could see the last.
She waited, saw my Jenga tower,
And smiled and tied her saree fast.

A good chance I will die alone.
A good chance I will die unknown.
A good chance all my poems die.
No head of Orpheus will sigh.
No tombstone epigram will say:
He wrote a poem everyday.
I know there is no happy end.
I trust you with my art, my friend.

My mother sees me gardening
And knows the reason I’m there:
The claypot with his ashen bones
Is somewhere near the jasmine roots.

My mother sees me with his watch
And knows the reason I’m there:
The lonely ticking second hand
Is keeping tempo of my dreams.

My mother sees me shine his shoes
And knows the reason I’m there:
The leather is still splitting out
To fit my unaccustomed feet.

When mind’s a pharmaceutic fog,
When sleep’s the most productive task,
Recovery, the project sprint,
A poem seems a massive ask.

And yet, it takes a single word,
A single phrase, a single line,
For fogs to gently dissipate
And wakefulness to gently shine.

That time I hurt my ear so hard,
The doctor told me Silence sounds
A little different to everyone.

The thing we hear when nothing sounds
Is how our body sounds to us.
So, Silence means we hear ourselves.

The Shaolin monks would nod to that,
And maybe jocks in water tanks,
The ones who’ve taken blows to ears,

And maybe those, like me, in beds
Recovering from accidents,
And med-retired patriots,

And those with Lyme and Ménière’s,
And dozen other named defects,
Who hear themselves always abuzz.

When Silence stops being silent us,
Becoming quite a violent us,
Are we who we were used to be?

Do I rebel so constantly
Against this newly ringing me?

So, every time I fear my fears,
Remind me – This is why I’m here:
The things I really need to know
Are in a place I dread to go.

And when I’m bored of boredom’s years,
Remind me – This is why I’m here:
The things I really need to do
Cannot be done in month or two.

They justify among themselves
Their unrequited love for God:
They love because they know they can,
And will is easier than won’t;
They do their prayer parties ’cause
To do is easier than don’t;
For what will fill the emptiness
When emptied of His emptiness?

In talking to a younger me,
I realised how far I’ve come,
And how the journey of these years
Has made me unempathetic
To those who yet have not begun.
Forgotten are anxieties
That paralysed my every step.
Forgotten, disappointments faced
If, at all, I took a step.
I’m so so far from where I was.
And yet, and yet, I am so so far
From where I want to be at last.
You’ve got to love the journey, sis,
Despite the humps that break our cars.

My air-conditioned valley view
Of sunny, shady, sunny greens,
Creates a flickered fantascope
Across our windshield, which careens
Away from screaming motorbikes
That have no time for scenic scenes.
No more does Mother want to wait
To watch me watch my clicking screens
Which try and fail to capture hills
Against the blurring biker teens.