Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Aashim - new love poem

I LInger


Stars bright,

All accounted.





I float





Overwhelmed

by fleeting glances



I hum.



My place

Intoxicated

Intertwined



I hum.


sheep frolic

options emerge.


A glint

from a glance.


music softens.



I hum.



this liberation

stands


still.


Breathing

this Orbit


I hum.



Treading softly

into arms


I wait.


states of mind

melt concrete walls.


yours/mine\theirs/ours.



I hum.

with you,

I linger.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Karno Guhathakurtha - A ghost story

Pitter-Patter Drops
The water works commence
Pitter-Patter Drops.

Just a little left,
Only a little left now.
Still, pitter-patter.

Another day spent
Making way from the Gallows ……

Ugh, still more to come.

Night hath come, once more.
She acts mysteriously,
This specific night.

There is a Moon this night.
A subtle glow lights my path.
I thank thee, O’ Night.

Homeward bound, I am.
To the place where my heart is.
Oh, but for these Drops.

The incessant Rain.
She seems permanent,tonight.
Vindictive and vain.

Came on hard this night.
Cuts mine skin. The slivers fly.
There is none in sight.

From a short distance,
I see my abode – calm, fine.
Am nearly there now.

Aaah! I see it now.
Hot coffee and a nice book.
Home sweet, almost home.

Just a little left.
Only a little left now.
Like a hop away.

Sounds of keys. I arrive.
I enter my palace. Yes!
I breathe in and look.

Everything. Perfect.
The sweet scent gets me always.
Everything. Exact.

I take the staircase.
My room is on the first floor.
I need to clean up.

My room. Everything mine.
With its bed and a cupboard.
And an attached restroom.

No power tonight.
I enter the dark restroom.
Moonlight aids my vision.

I freshen up.
I feel cleansed. Just one more chore.
The mirror is tilted.

I look into it.
Nothing has changed. I see me.
It has been quite long.

Time has passed, since then……
The flesh hanging from my face.
My bones, visible.

It has been long since…
The 10th of May; three years back.
I breathed a new being.

Steve Jones did warn me.
Mixing chemicals can harm.
Boy! Was he right then!

“You’re doing it wrong”.
Maybe I should have listened.
My looks suffered. Heh!

Hmmm.. This is me now.
Oh well, should have listened then.
Now for some coffee .

Aditi again

Childhood and Innocence


Say Cheese

Looking for the green smell in crisp gold

The heart seeks solace in reminiscence

Nostalgia becomes that sweet pain

That balms the scars of today

Gone are the days

Of mellow smiles

That shone in eyes

That did not carry the burden

Of being grown up.

-----------------------------------------------------

Do you realize how old you are?

Act your age.

Act mature.

Act responsible.

Act sensible. Behave

How can you laugh so uncontrollably?

That too at something so stupid !

Keep a stern face.

Be Serious.

Stop doing this,

Stop doing that.

It does not suit you

Stop grinning this way.

Stop being so silly.

Stop making mischief.

Stop getting cheap thrills out of small things.

Stop playing pranks.

Stop laughing.

Stop smiling this way.

Stop. Stop. Stop.


This is what kids do,

Not adults.

At this age?

You got to be kidding me.

That's more like it.

Calm and composed.

Not an emotional sentimental Fool .

That's how we grown-ups should be.

An example.

Now where were we?

O yeah...

Such a pretty picture

You were a really cute child

And O my !

What a smile?


Precious.

Just too precious for words.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

A poem on India

Independence Day

India of the reaching out
Reaching forth
Reaching in
Reaching up and down and……
Over
Where my people have either too much or too little
O India

India of the bad roads
And wide, open spaces
Environmentally virgin and raped
Polluted, happy, sad, poor, rich
"Dvd, vcd, cd, id, icecream"
No other place has such sign boards
Full of poems
Where else but in India would I be able to understand
That clichés and mistakes and typos are also part of the attempt
And lead to interesting quirks in the
Writing of great poetry
O m' India

India of the "deathly hallows"
Where each minute someone dies
Dogs men women children the old
Dying
Mourning
Born, each minute someone laughs
Someone cries
Nothing changes it's horrible
The tears of the world remain a constant
Quantity
O Beckett.

India of the jostling
Terrorists and betrayers of the innocent in the attempt to catch terrorists
And the terrorizers and the terrified
That bans the minority's student group that turns violent but not the majority's student group that does so too

India of the varieties of all the insane and sane
Beautiful
Terrible things in the world
Where everyone is crucified except the rich
And they are empty
But don't care because money lines their empty hearts
Even Buddha wouldn’t forgive them but they couldn't care less

India where I can freely plagiarize
Dylan &
Piss on the road or shit
Break traffic rules and not get caught
Give money to beggars and drunkards
And be politically passive and correct
And politically incorrect and an activist all at the same time
India of the largesse
Divides & integers

India of her independence days
Where they should hoist flags in international schools like the one I teach in
But don't usually
And hoist them where they needn't, in regional schools like the ones I learned in
Where all is inside out
Upside down
And freedom advances steadily
Like an ever vanishing mirage
Of rainbow hues
Made by the splashes of petrol wasted on the roads
Reflecting the ozone-layer affected sun

Once I wanted to save India
Now I love it helplessly
And want to leave it
Though it will never leave me

Yeah, India of the metros
Of flies and crows, not mynahs
People endlessly queued up
And no Dalits anywhere in sight
Cowshit, dog patties, human excrement
Skyscrapers that mushroom cloud up everyday
Beyond the reach of the lousy common man
Who never existed
Middle class mayhem and in between suddenly occasionally patches of white and blue skies mocking the entire tapestry of crap
"Howl." India.

I remember there was another India in my past and in history
And a future one in my dreams
Things I won’t explicate on.
This is today.
I salute
Another independence day
Free of nothing. Free
of everything, especially
Free of saying it's all gone
Down the tube
When it's only in the pipeline & arriving faster than the speed of all light still.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Arka Mukhopadhyay - Morning/ A Single Poem of Linked Haikus.

Sudden shock of crows
Tearing apart the fabric
Of a slate-gray sky.

Early morning flight
Brings in weary travellers
From a distant land.

The paperman throws
Stories of yesterday's world
Within my four walls.

Sounds of distant death
Shatter the silence within
My half-waking mind.

In some dark corner
I hear the lizard ruling
Its empire of death.

Jibanananda - two translations by Arka Mukhopadhyay

1.Sky-sublime

Suranjana, do not go there,
Do not speak with that young man, there;
Come back Suranjana;
In the night of silver star-fire;

Come back to these fields, these waves;
Come back to my heart;
From distances to distances - farther distances
Do not go with that young man any more.

What speech with him? With him!
In skies beyond the sky
You are like clay now:
His love sprouts like the grass.

Suranjana,
Your heart now is the grass:
Winds lie beyond the wind -
Skies lie beyond the sky.



2.O Heart!


O heart,
Quietness?
Are there but dead forests everywhere?
Up above, the moon
Scythes through clouds, forever seeking a path.

On the owl's wing,
The firefly's body
On the blades of grass, there is a dew-like grayness.
Does nothing shine?
Is there no more sound?

Still, life dancing like a thin myna
On two yellow feet, says:
How old are you now? Forty?
Many hours of desire came and went
And yet without consummation?
Who are those on mule-back, in the sun,
In bloody, tireless voyages through mountain tracks?
Must Patanjali come and tell you
The difference between those
That but sit and fall into death's pit,
And those that fall off mule-backs,
Vomiting blood?

All the dead forests,
All the dead forests of my life perhaps say:
Why must you go to the world's sunlit din?
Why needlessly do you want to walk
Beneath the sky, blue-throated
From drinking the poison of creation?
You won't, won't find anything anywhere;
Death alone lives, as eternal peace
In the endless darkness
Of dissolved forests.

Yet, I say,
The few days that I live, let's walk in the sun;
Let's see how the grass of this earth;
From creation's poison-tip and
Crushed humanity's darkness
Brings forth the blue universe;
Let's think - let's think -
If you but dig into history - penetrating
The many, many deep mines of sorrow -
You can hear, like healing,
The sound of a hundred waterfalls.

Pig's snout on a stick.

Life, what they all hold ‘most dear.’
Their many hands, clutching mobiles -
The many mouths, moving, the teeth, the tongues, the lips, 'moving' -

And the children excited, laughing, shouting, running, weeping -
Tears: a luxury the news just brought in.
The grown ups, grown up: as it becomes clear -

Apocalypse is undoubtedly a wake.

Fear is a smell:
Lavender, for no reason.
And one wonders why
One wonders why
The clouds still amble lazily
Across the gray-dark, rain-laden sky -
This friend of mine, meanwhile, dressed in fluorescent pink
Complains how the unheard explosions blew her plans
To sing in the "Glorious" choir that evening, away –

Yet, as death and life go by,
Hand in hand,
Sundered strangers,

No one really seems to want to die.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

THE ACCURSED - By Avy

Accursed are they who live
heads turned away,
twisted backwards,
swollen eyes peering
inwards,
tongues grey with night-moss,
licking
dog-like at the sores of others,
leper-fingers feeling-less,
pointing
to what lies beyond the circles
of dead penises and dry vaginas
excreting
desires denied;
accursed in their certainty
are they,
the devourers of pink life.

THE INCORRECT CORRECTED - By Ragini Ramanathan

They rot on the streets,
Completely homeless.
Let them rot in camps!
They are nothing but pests!

No!
That's politically incorrect.

Lesbians, gays they're everywhere,
We throw stones, curses and sniggers.
Let's lock them in a cell!
Our aims will be better!

No!
That's politically incorrect.

Our mothers, sisters, wives
Our slaves.
Lock them in their homes!
Let them never see daylight again!

No!
That's politically incorrect.
We corrupt, we loot,
We cheat and succeed!
Let's take over the world!
Let it fall at our feet!
No!
Because we're politically correct

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Samia's new poem

It is to our end I drink

To our beginning

To steer myself away

from those tired stagnant waters

To our new beginning

My friend

My love

Our last ritual

For nobody got closer

than us

to me

We live now

like we should

and you know it

Free

Thinking

Drifting

Breeze

I do not know

What will become of us

Ever talk

while sipping tea?

It's time the frills disappear

We

now stand here

Still connected

through something

even though it does not appear

A toast to you

my dear

May we meet again

as old, old friends

on a sunny day

in the green breeze,

when time would have made us

what we have always wanted to be.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

News

Aashim says he wants to start his own magazine.
Ashwin is hard at work on his diploma film that promises to be both lyrical and poetic.

Roshan Ali

As you all know Roshan has gone more seriously into writing than ever before.
Here is his blog - visit it to know how his writing gets along more powerfully than ever before under the star of lycralyricism.
http://www.fromsoultosand.blogspot.com

Vaibhav scores big

If you can check the latest Down To Earth issue..... some pics I shot and stuff I wrote/copy-edited has been published ..... hehe.....


Vaibhav
email sent to me on June 20.

Pratap's new poem

Echo’s Unheeded Warning


The loneliness.

Of walls built into strongholds.

Green fields. Once nourished with golden light,

Now barren, dead, quiet.

In the silent stillness, grey constructions,

Loom over murky skies;

Smooth stone facades reveal nothing.

Buildings multiply, the city grows – evolves

Clouds engulf, conceal,

the light of a perhaps wise past.

The golden lining really a shadow.

Where does the future lie?

The city expands.

Clanking factory wheels and crankshafts multiply.

By the second. Time saved is progress made.

The scheme.

Mass produced, cold steel boxes of intellectual misconceptions

Packed and mailed through my trusted synaptic network.

Birds lie belly-up under ailing apple trees,

As rotten as their fruits, clawing at the sky;

Pungent air, thick with viscous poison,

We suffocate, breaths rasping. Pleading.

The sun implodes into white light - the original emptiness.

The end is not near. The melting landscape whispers helplessly so.

We must yield; submit to the Shadow whose wrath

Spits incessant fires from hell. A juicy boar on roast.

Take it nice and slow. Don’t forget to let the skin

become golden crisp; and leave the meat tender inside.

Delicious.

The city explodes. Devours my green pastures.

Walls coming up by the second. There. There. There.

And there. All around, their steel sheen beyond my control.

A few steps too far in, or perhaps many. I cannot turn.

The only way is forward. Inside.

Sucked in like an acorn into the voracious depths of a black hole.

I can only hope what my colossal journey reveals will be beautiful.

If it doesn’t, I shall look out for the raven that waits patiently,

To pluck my eyeballs out of their hollow sockets. And I shall say,

Thank you.

Aditi's poem -after a long time

Fragile smoke

Twilight bliss

Some shadows

In some light

Fraying hope

Of a reunion

Long awaited

Parched eyes

Inked with

Unrest

Of white nights

Dizzy hands

Humor the anticipation

Ticking

Mocking

Sniggering


His last word

His last glance

His last touch

Before they parted

Still etched

In her moist breath

Black wisp's caress

Silent tears