Category: Poems

When I was a child, winter quilts turned to mountains in my father’s arms
as he heaved them out of an icy silver glacier of a trunk.
They became snow white hills spread across the bed
as I jumped and glided over them, squealing with joy.
How big the tables looked as I hid beneath them,
pretending they were caverns or secretive dark stations
where ghost trains came and went, visible only to my eyes.
How big my tiny sorrows—an unsolved sum, a pack of new crayons I forgot in the classroom,
lost and never again found. How big the life in front of me, how expansive the space
between memories. Now as I look back, everything is finite
like the mouth of the tunnel drawn tightly on both ends. The promise of a future
slowly turning and gleaming back in the past.

Descend

The music that came from the sky
Had to already be in descent.
So, we only ever caught a faint tune of receding madness
Collected, like rainwater
Without petrichor or invigorating bursts of squall,
Into tamed chants buckled to frail human words,
A flower plucked and for all its beauty, already wilting,
The light of life already dimming,
Like a dream told upon waking,
Like fingers on a drumhead,
Feeling desperately for the warm vibrating aftermath.

They were in agony then, seeking a form fit for gods
To see again the clouds and the light
A whisper, a cry
Something to bottle the thunder and the strange rains
That fell sometimes of their own accord
On bluelands they knew not the names of.
Some drug for the half-crazed mind
That sought to paint on the air with its eyes and ears
And the rest
All the rest
Left for the wilderness of the heart
To yearn and never fully find
And in that yearning and not finding
The music
That kept slowly expanding back into the sky.

Awaken

Music, a creature now strung into waking
Raises its many heads, and hence summoned, looks around
And is no longer content with its own mellifluous being
But must demand more ears, arms, legs,
And other corporeal beats, bits, and pieces.
And right away, fate too must intervene, so art meets artist
Like clouds making rain and the winds thwarting it in time to rekindle the fire.

Lead us through the land and string us along
To the strange rhythms of a mystic land.
Electric guitar, send your current through the spine
And raise and lift what was dying and renew again
Create in the ruins the sounds from the past
And make a gateway so all may coexist,
Feet by feet, arm in arm.
Welcome the ancestors and the primal future.
Allow the free floating wind to howl sand and grate
And wail along the columns, lengthening itself into shadows
Of longing frozen in orgasmic pandiculation
An oblivion that must in eternity come to know of everything
With a promise to forget.

Painting the Silence

Disturb the silence
And leave a ghost of a ruin behind where the tunes must continue to haunt alone
Looking for the ones who created them and where they came from
If not the sky?
Life rushes around them at different speeds
And the tunes continue at the pace they were set to, in all their innocence and metered programming.
The wind, the ancient musician, roams through space
The water, a songstress, sings and roars, as does the fire and the land.
Why else gravity holds them so close if not to hear more closely
What they all have to say?
The birds too join in.
Men and women look at the sky and wonder how
There are many wars but only one stream of peace
And all that rests on chance and destiny, like love.

Leaves and lives fall into place like notes and sounds
And then they say it is just music.

Rise

After the first hint at awakening
Things are bound to fasten up and escalate to a finished state
That gets as close as it can get to the original sound
Without ever being it
And that too only lasts for the time being.

But that first eye of the nightwatch
On the waiting hill
Forever follows you home.

Birth a God

Music is what it takes to birth a god
So there can be life and death
Flood and draught
Happiness and sorrow
For things to rise and fall
For time to move again
One beat, one breath.

Song of the Spheres

The universe feeds energy to the machine
And watches it respond.
What is that which moves to music
Like the waves to the light of the moon?
This predictability of a pattern
And the breaking of it,
Between the moment and its eternity.

In zeroes and ones,
The spheres sing.

The glances they exchange on screen
Converge and diverge
And in their coming together and being apart is born again
The music of life.

Stars, Lies, and Languid Eyes

I see Akbar in a dream, waiting on a horseback
And the moonlit blue sky fading over paper pink flowers
Like a still from a movie set, forever crafted into predictable space.
The stars look down somewhere from far above
But are hidden to him just like the future is
Though you and I can read it in history books.
Yet I wonder how much he can see in the swish of the horse’s tail
And the back and forth restlessness of the hooves on spot.

Moments fly in space all at once
Like dust suspended in the sun.
Here is the randomness in mathematics, he says,
Flirting with all the borders, boundaries, and edges
And their crossing and filling up,
Holding close alike the silence and it’s theft.

The Origin of Sound

Music, that taste of eternity in a packet
Is a tease that promises to leave us hanging.

The stars still in ecstasy
Invite us to scream the self into a shared oblivion,
And make music of our joy and sorrow.
Our ancestors, they say, have developed a taste for
Astromusic, alien music.
The universe laughs at us with its secrets.
As furious, strong, and original as ever,
Distant quasars continue to dream.

The record that continues to revolve with the planets
On repeat like a cosmic prayer
In an otherwise silent room,
What can it manifest?

The rich music of the lonely.
The weightlessness.

And in all this vacant space

The First Force, The First Sound
A breath taken and never returned.

I

There is a floating thing in the wind that keeps us. An underwater stillness. And just when you think you are surfacing— the camellias combust under the blue, open like extraterrestrial eyes looking through measured windows of street houses, for life that has left us alone in this first death. Lost days like sparrows teem in a confusion of distracting blossoms and bushes.

She is not at home, she says. She is not at home in this world. She is the fourth wall closing in today, tomorrow, and yesterday into herself. Some days, her grief is slow like molasses. God leaves the world to trees. Some thoughts get caught up in the thorn bush one random evening and cannot find it in themselves to go on under the one and only sky— Other days, she hides time, and I am nowhere and everywhere. I grow older quickly and realize I have never been to the room I was born in.

I am there today, with the lost birds. They tell me they are not lost. So, they cannot possibly be found.

Antelopes keep running through the forest in the rain.

She stays up late nights crying kin min, kin min. Our family songs turn into talismans locked away in a suitcase wrapped in layers of mildew and a dark wooly heaviness that she slowly cries away like a chant meant only for our ears. One by one, trees leave her forest. She dreams of a house with wind and rain. And I smoke into daybreak signaling to the lone swimmer of the sky.

Whose is the last cry that breaks the dawn?

The birds are silent.

In my 3 am dilation, my lonely hour, my agony hour, I analyze her sky, placing the hours in a row. She lies awake on her bed, her hair tied up like an hourglass of quicksilver.

I cannot imagine this— sunlit spaces, mayflies, and water lilies. This is the Summertime Broadcast of My Mind.

She, the maker of my horizons, the constructionist of my roads— my blank record and this night— she listens intently. This place isn’t what we think it is. I am not who I think I am. We can never be as sure as the ground is. In this osmosis of thing and spirit, lovers only exist where they are not. Burn this too in My Death Fashion, touching everything. Rabid eyes stare. When are you going to tell the truth?

So, I tell her about Queen Anne’s lace. Within,

the grass

springs

up—

an elusive space for wanting. We lie down like shadows. We change places under the sun. Truth fades in and out of sleepy towns, palimpsests, and alleys.

Mother

breaks

down

in blossoms , cryptic codes

and grows a bit like a new found daughter.

II

Riding through the columns of light and dark in a city barely awake, we could be a parenthesis, (an after-thought). You must make a home of this place. My father, clutching his suitcase tied with a piece of my mother’s saree, is right here. This place will not be yours until you do. I see houses made of porcelain falling one upon another, boxes on boxes, suitcases on suitcases, filled with a flurry of dry flowers. I think of my basement, the burrowed burrow. Of me and my brother. And of the mole trying to skip spring cleaning.

I didn’t know it at the time. I was too busy rocking and rolling, my head still in a cloud of smoke, my bones free floating in a stream of black ecstasy that falls every night from the tallest city lights in showers of young old downtown gold, blurred, molten. In my mind, I was still retracing my every move in concentric circles of pleasure, unable to foresee the valley my father was planning to name after me. Here, take it. A heart made-up in all the wrong places. Here’s the box. The emptier it is, the heavier it gets.

I go back home and change into time; I find home, it was you; and you, all your homes; are me.

Ta kakisimoyahk

There is a place inside. Make a home there. Worship, drown and emerge with the bloodline of afterlife, acknowledge that pain was all along what tied us.

Ta kakisimoyahk

There is a place inside me. A quiet dark place. You may start a fire here between the river and the mountain I may then conjure again, that insistent voice that rose as the ground shook and the gods took turns to bite off bits from our nest, leaving us open to the rain’s love and the sky, too big, as it fell through our eyes and became a black river and then a forest full of black birds, that we carried away with us, furtive like our fears.

The night came alone, as always.

She stood for a while, under the jacarandas.

III

I try to dig up the voices that make a place and water it and when the time is ripe, lift the land, spacing it off to the sky— an offering to be torn apart, again, shred into fine dust, falling back, full circle. No one knows we were here. Sun stretches the day to its limits. Like an eternal lemon candy. Boys in tanks snort ride the summer on skateboards. In offices, we acknowledge the land, declare it stolen, carry on with shame, one foot at a time. It’s the seasonal injustice. Everyone catches it, like the flu. The voices come back, this time quiet, forgiving, making our ears red. We shift in our seats, take a bus elsewhere, carrying ourselves along. The light gets heavier. A new breeze walks in, and seasons change like clockwork. Servicemen jaywalk across the street, impatient, unwilling, obtuse. I uncover my burger like it is some exotic flower. The sun beats down in orange bursts and pills. The walls of my eyes turn citrus yellow.

Once more we must change places under the sun. Make our own beds.

We know now where we stand.

The water does recede, with the answers.

Fireflies keep escaping into the night.

Slow things take time in their soft warm hands, till it rises and expands.

Slow things demand time. I have no time for slow things and yet I am slowing down to make time.

I want to go back and take it slow. Once we were all children released from the mouth

of a gigantic green spaceship and told to run off red and wild into the world. The scenery flowed by us

and we were breathless and wondering like stars, and it seemed like the world teeming with so much color would never end.

But then from time to time, it did. And so we started looking back,

tried to slow down, wanting to slow down, without knowing how.

My old heart is racing these days but not in a good way, say the doctors. I can’t wait for time.

I am restless. Like a moth, I have not found my spot yet, to land and play dead on.

Cars rush on the roadways, endlessly, endlessly, like so many jitterbugs, glittering.

The Christmas lights dance in straight proportioned lines, mathematically,

sending signals to the sky, that the darkness intercepts, then absorbs without meaning to

as I close my eyes. I say I want to slow down without anticipation,

not like the stealth of a tentative feline waiting to spring,

but like the unwinding of a spent emotion with no fallout, no recoil.

Like stretching my toes till they curl into space

as inevitable as gravity in slow motion.

Like the memory of a slow kiss landing on my forehead, two soft lips never leaving.

Like staying for a while, pretending not to nap on the sofa, no one ready to leave.

Once I waited for him in the dappled light, answering an epiphany that I thought never came true.

Only it did. I want to take a breath for that moment and keep it for a bit.

I want to lie down and prepare for moss and grass. Feel the sunlight, a slow burn on my thighs.

Here I lie in this warming of cold feet, till I am one with the wood

where nothing is too hot nor cold, but simply is

equal for the moment.

Your body loves you
Loves the world of birds and trees
Loves to lie down with it
In life as in death.
The world would gladly let you be organic,
full of love and naturally perfected abundance.
The body shields you.
Your skin lines a purpose in every fold.
Every bulge out of place
Is touchable love, hurt, grief, guilt
a magnum holding onto itself
to unleash only butterthoughts
into the world.
In an ultimate act of forgiveness,
the body hides in the mind,
hides the world in itself,
dreamstepping into present.
Here is the true desire to be,
forever simplifying itself into
the single-syllable language of
breath.

The world feels alone too, needs a mirror in the dark,

One word of its own, one mouth. The world needs

Other worlds to belong and be contained in. The world has had enough

of never having had enough. The world needs to eat

its own tail to believe in its end and beginning. The world

needs unconditional love, art, and adventure. The world

has had its share of the absurd and dreams of black holed

escapades. The world breathes and imagines its own ending.

The world wants to write code and poetry.

The world dreams of disappearing someday.

The world wants to think and forget.

(The world wants to look cute doing that.)

The summer I changed into myself, I was unafraid. To so wordlessly step outside the circumscribed light and trust the green arms of becoming is to hear without seeing the thin murmur of transparent pictograms hiding in the sun. If you, like me, have no time to spare, let us walk from the kitchen to the bedroom, lie down, geodesic, oblating before the natal goddess. I can place myself like a magic pill on a green tongue parked behind red lips. I am talking about that elusive inheritance of submerged foolish and untenable desires, that dream of turning into water lilies someday. I say, begin in a sort of craven greenness. The valence of our thoughts till now soused into a midnight blue, is ripe to be crooned into a dense dark plenum of sound. Let’s imagineer into being lotus hills, a frisson of sunset highs, massage the stiff shadow till it rises like a spine and then bends down like a torrential black waterfall radioing sunflowers, screaming acid and rain. Hang the moon, so cursed to rise and fall, over and over again, and sprout a new mouth that opens like a persimmon in a dream, a signal to enter—

When she twists, I think of tiger ribs stretching, trancing with their electro blue jungle streaks moving slowly against the walls. Ribs turning red in the dark, droning like a thick mouthy rainforest, eating night fruit. Basilisk-like, heavy with the still movement of dark thoughts, reverberating with contained hisses of hellfire. The spine, momentous, arching like a reptilian god, drawing life with death, writing circumstance in blood and stride. There is no way of finding my footing here. I, who do not know my name. I, who lie, broken in curves, my legs thrumming in a sea of aftershock. Circle me, and once more, and again, somewhat menacingly break off my last sky in small, fissured bites like it is nothing. From the mouth, take the word, wield it against the throat. Electric Blood, jump at the wild call. Rain, map my unbecoming. Leave me to soften my own destruction till all body, a coalition of storms, is one slow line cut in two and between— a sun is born.

Unconsume yourself, open your pores and breathe out, says the yoga instructor.

I think that’s wonderful. I am eager and diligent and carved like a crescent into the heart of a curve. I face you.

We should have continued looking at the waterline that evening.

Somewhere between the water, the eyes, the light, the light—

You could not say. God was next door.

There is sun and water in a cup. I am leaving them here. Anoint the mind.

Break all your poems into songs. Warm and sweet, burki by burki.

Melt the text under the tongue, roll the letters, round and around.

Lisp yourself insane. Delight in the gentle tearing of meaning.

There is a war being fought somewhere. Send us word. Send us language.

Notice how every bell peppered fall breaks into a familiar tune.

Stay still till you are an autumn window.

Allow yourself to catch leaves and some noon fire.

And that dark healthy love. If you can, help it. If you can help it.