Category: Poems

I turned a morning nice and calm
Into a morning full of stress,
Because someone I trust and love
Accused me of a pettiness.

I wonder why I’m worked up, when
Secure I am in innocence,
And why my fists are clenched to punch
A crack through their distorted lens.

And where is meditation’s fruit –
So many hours in Silence spent
To learn to keep my mind in check
For times it fills with ill intent?

And while I sit and scribble lines,
I feel it bubbling up again:
The urge to scratch and tear and crush
These verses so pedestrian.

I want to take this crumpled page
And chew it into tasteless yuck
And spit it out on to their face,
Iambically, “What the f…??!!”

A storm is brewing in the sea.
And power’s gone for hours now.
I wait, I wait, I wait to see
The showers crush the flowers’ brow.

What right they have to pretty be?
So pretty fresh, so pretty red?
The rest of us in us we see
The ugliness of pretty dead.

A storm is brewing in my eyes,
So wet and salty, thanks to sweat.
My power’s gone for hours now.
I feel so helplessly upset.

I find him scribbled here and there
On margins of important thoughts
In books on western ways of life,
Attempting to untie some knots
Inside his head about himself,
About his choices and their fruits,
In words that overcompensate
With long, obscure Germanic roots,
Inadequacies plaguing him
And bringing down his confidence
To do the things he knows he can,
But finds himself upon a fence.
You switch his lettering with mine,
You’ll find me in his every line.

I stepped into the giddiness,
An infant drawn to fairy lights,
So mystified by twinkling eyes
That stirred me into clinking ice
And melted down my rigidness.

I let it lift me, slowly first,
A surfing moon on sunset waves,
Until it wasn’t slow at all,
My heightened senses now aware
Of gravity in recurrence.

Like finding on a Ferris wheel
A figment of forgotten fear
Of churning guts and whirling heads,
A wanting of the praying kind
To slow it down. No, stop it all.

I stood her up again today.

Some days it takes Herculean strength,
Some days a willingness to wait,
Some days a medication sweet,
Some days a yogic crow-like gait.

But mostly it’s a matter of
An extra hour of sleeping in
And half a spoon of coffee more,
To have a one-shot morning dump.

If you look close enough
The Christian Cross nails it.
It sums up Life succinctly,
Subtracting all the noise.
A + and a – concatenated,
Like so: +–, but without the space,
To signify that you can’t separate
The plusses from the minuses,
The ups from the downs,
The gains from the losses,
The joys from the sorrows.
Because they come together.
Always together.
Inseparably together.

When Little Som was two and half,
He had his first illusion dashed:
The laddoos did not come from Gods;
A dabba had them neatly stashed.
He went inside the pooja room
And swiped the laddoo sitting there,
Declaring to his grand-amma,
“We will not give the Gods a share.”
As Grand-amma was part way through
Her rosary of hundred eight,
She did not stir a muscle’s breadth
And reasoned it was fine to wait.
But Little Som had much to lose:
He started losing patience first,
And then in minutes, temper too,
And, finally, the worst of worst:
He lost the fear of Gods’ revenge.
Though, any self-respecting kid
Who’s heard the tales of Hindu Gods
Will know the things that Devas did
When something that They thought was Theirs
Was taken by a daring man
With big-big eyes and hairy head
And darkened skin of Deccan tan.

They started with his grand-amma,
Who went to sleep but did not wake.
No sign of fever or of pain,
A boon for her devotion’s sake.
But then the cruelty of Gods
Erupted in a squeal of brakes
When rushing to the hospital,
A scooter slipped on cow dung cakes
And crashed into our Little Som,
Who lived to see another day,
But not to walk on his own feet
Which he was told will soon decay.
But when are Gods so simply pleased?
They sent a fever and a pox,
The first of which put Amma down,
As per her faith, in wooden box.
The second left a lot of scars
On Little Som’s demonic face,
So much a sight of ugliness,
His Appa sent him in disgrace
To live among the temple kids
Who sang and begged their daily bread,
While Appa found another wife
And had a fairer baby made.

“O thank the lord, go thank the lord.
The numbers started falling down.
The wave is passing out of here,
The deaths are moving out of town.”

We stood behind the mango trees
That line the border of the grounds
Where Hindus come to burn their dead
With holy chants and drumming sounds.

I asked him what the number was.
He asked me how I didn’t know.
I shrugged and said I skip the news.
He shook his head, “It’s twelve or so.”

I laughed a laugh that sounded rude;
Indeed I saw some angry eyes.
“How large is this ‘or so’ of yours?
Is fifty-five its unit size?”

He started pointing at my face.
I pointed at the rising smoke.
“For every morning, last two weeks,
The sky was burning when I woke.

“The sky was burning when I lunched,
The sky was burning when I slept,
The sky was burning even when
The clouds, in passing, flashed and wept.”

He saw the smoke and saw my eyes.
“It could be something else too, right?
It cannot be the only cause.
Perhaps some lost their cancer fight?”

I knew he knew, but asked him still,
“How often does the sky look so
For days on end with no reprieve?”
He let a sighing “Never” go.

I knew he knew, but asked him still,
“How many holy grounds are there?
On just this side of Berhampur?”
He mouthed aloud a silent prayer.

In brief times of domestic peace,
The sharpest raid on homeliness
Filters in from foes forgotten,
Who steal, despite a poisoned defeat,
The immediacy of homely air,
Unhomely made by stench of death
Of sewer rats in lofty corners,
Which can’t be reached direct without
Raising ghosts of webs and dust
From stacked remains of homely things,
Once used and useful, but no more.

I went to buy a coconut
To crack it as divine tribute.
But on the way, I saw a truck
Mistake a dog for hairy fruit.

I went to see the God of Death
Who nonetheless was satisfied.
He asked me if I’d rather have
Instead a mum and child had died.

I saw my coconut in hand
I saw again the highway gore
And fought the sudden urge to crack
My temples on the temple floor.