Category: Poems

The criss-cross of the Calendar
Is quite the net for catching days.
And yet somehow I’m always tricked
By Wily Watch’s rounded face,
Which promises to come again
In half the time the sunrise takes.

Wet sand. Dry sun. Polythene.
You. And Me. And Us between.
Paratha and a coffee cup.
And lastly, tender coconut.

Let sickness try to have our day.
It cannot take this hour away.

At eighty-six, he wants to fly.
The passport office clerk’s amused.
Is there someone he wants to meet?
No, just somewhere he wants to go.
Is there someone to go with him?
Yes, just the one who’s with him now.
They must be waiting outside, then.
Yeah. Waiting. Outside. Sounds correct.
It’s okay if he calls them in.
It’s okay. She’s a little shy.
His daughter? Or a niece, perhaps?
His daughter, yes. In-law, but yes.
Alright. His son won’t go with him?
No no. His son has gone ahead.
He said he has no one to meet?
No no. He has no one to meet.
It’s not her business anyway.
Yes, not her business, but okay.
The visa guys will ask him, though.
The visa guys will ask him, yes.
She’s done. She’s heading out for tea.
He’s grateful. Coffee’s more his thing.
The passport office guard salutes.
The clerk signals a smoke and winks.
The guard is ready with the match.
That old man wants a passport, ma’am?
He has a right. She hopes he’s right.
He’s not at all alright up there.
She coughs and waves and signals why.
He brought an urn with ashes, ma’am.
The man returns. He’s left his pen.
She eyes the urn in crimson cloth.
He says they keep refusing him.
He wants his foreign ticket too.
And now they’re left with no excuse.

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.