Saturday, June 28, 2008

Bootless










Those days alone in the smell!
Cry, scatter alone, a-lone!
Exclamation to exclamation!
Marching nights on whitenesses!
I have been caught out by words at deep mid-wicket!
Formation to formation
Yet still with deformity in the spinal chord
Another pig swoons in the water-cloak!
I am window-tight in a forest of pamphlets
All the funds of life
I will collect in the remainders...
Elected knee-caps in a democratic series of silences!

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Denial




Trifles jotted in the wires
Moon-fight within the glasses.
Once a perfecting rainbow
Another bullet is lampooned.
Twice the openers make noise
None but rain-pipes to darken.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Gilotin


Hands dipped in hot, boiling milk. Utpala. Even an un-man like me! When the second bullet had struck, I knew, this was to be the end. Still inched forward with the body on wet soil, holding all the pressure onto the elbows, crippling on as ever. In this bullet-hit hell of a body, for the first time, in the (w)hole of 32 years, I felt some sort of an instinct, boiling up to a considerable height. If home can be reached, I will put in one final effort, even if it is the last gasp. Neither eroticism nor exactly self-love, it was like a desperation to create a future to resistance, that had been clawing my blood-smeared hell-body! A man like me would do something to deserve a bullet sometime! Could Utpala ever imagine this in her wildest day-dreams?

Perplexed hands then, Utpala's, dipped in hot, boiling milk. Hands almost fully white, further whitening, Utpala's. Day in and day out, this dipping, this dripping! Some inexplicable comfort, as if, Utpala's! Each time, when she lifts her milked, whitened and further whitening hands from the bowl, a child gets designed (ah! only to be a figment!)amid her finger-lines. After that, a strange anger, Utpala's, which can kill and does kill as she strangulates the mis-imagined child, dipping it into the hot, boiling milk. Utpala can create as well as uncreate.

Had to stop in this bush. The body, nearing stagnation, could hardly move on. But, still enough understanding left to realize that I had had an erection. The thing had stiffened so much, that it was becoming exceedingly difficult to crawl forward. Could not even stay on my back. There were bullets in the shoulder and underneath. Tried to dig a hole with both hands. The soil was soft due to rain and went in comfortably. Then I opened my zip and entered the thing straight into the hole, I had dug. It went deep, out of visibility. The pain started to soften. My eyes were closing in ease.

Hands dipped in hot, boiling milk. Utpala. Almost the dead of night. Subimal arrives pretty late these days. Must be some secret meeting again! With a pain that had started to soften, Utpala lifted her hands from the milk. There was something in her hands. Utpala observed. A bullet. Bloodless. Utpala looked at the blank wall, which was in front of her. Then, she threw the bowl full of milk, towards it. Little columns of milk started to make their way down in the form of streams. The wall had become partially wet with milk. There was some heat too and perhaps the surface of the wall shook a little as there were little twig-like rings of smoke, making their room from it. By that time, Utpala had closed her eyes and got stuck into the bullet with her sharp, boiling teeth. Even the bullet had to be silenced, silence.

Angularity


The thread was being moved through the surface of the grass. Perhaps, somebody had been flying a kite somewhere. As our feet came into its tangle and we got stuck, we looked down, only to see the thread being pulled away from us, across the vast stretch of the maidan. I was trying to kiss her, but the thread had got in the way of it. The kiss. The lips. The family. Like upturned shoe-soles in the sea-beaches. Cross-currents, there were in the quicksand. The thread had become a pointer. Trying to take us along--an anchor? There were little pockets in the grass. Little errors. The thread was strangling them one by one, striving to establish a pause in the two of us. We looked up. Not a single kite in the sky.
There had been one such thread, sometime back. Taking life. A pigeon's left wing had come under its power, impairing the ability that may have led to flight. Then, the dog's turn arrived. I could not do anything for the bird. The thread was the similarity between the two events, the lack of a kiss over there, the difference.
Now, I could see the thread, up in the air, going round and round like a web and linking the remaining tree-tops all across the maidan. It had started to emit a tremendous energy of darkness, blanketing the blueness of the afternoon-sky with a dusk-like madness, as if the whole sky was about to turn into a giant wingless kite. She had been mute all along. Not even a sound had come out of her. Could she peep into my thinking? I looked at her. She was looking up towards the sky. She finally broke her silence, of my thoughts and of her words---"Can we get married now?"

Thursday, June 12, 2008

VIGIL


A watch-tower. No sounds elsewhere. No such, sounds outside. Pin drops to darkness or silence--untellable.

A mangrove forest, in the making as yet. Channels of water shivering through its body, inching towards the sea, that is (can only be) distant & dark in this blankness. Not much sound elsewhere.

Here arrives a couple of eyes, with the intent of seeing, sorry, watching. Is it not obvious? The watch-tower is for watching, pricking on!

No such man to be watched anywhere. Neither women. Only putrid sounds bubbling in what he (not us) would like to call his head! He calls out. His eyes. His mouth. Sounding out. Sea-waves--the only responses!

Then the tree-heads start nodding in obedience. Each tree vomits out a soldier under its shadow...Now a whole grove of soldiers, in the offing. Getting set, wounding the silence, which can also be darkness, by the way. Now the secret channels resemble trenches.

Now the WAR--the event, the spectacle, breaking the solemnity, that could have been allowed to be silence before.
A couple of eyes wink now--once. Then again. One by one. Together again. The battle-field now looks completed. It is time for the eyes to burn out, be finished. All this, as a resistance to the walls. Every man has become a watch-tower. Soldiers start vanishing, first one by one, then all together. Foredoomed.

Friday, June 6, 2008

Drowning




A trick to find a lost key:
Coming back into the room
With a mind within the loss
Not looking for the key
Just dropping the present key
& then getting out within--
Time
Told
Retold
Finding the lost key
Coming back into the room
Once upon a room
Dropping the present one--
& all against the sea
One-two & three
It's the trick to spell a K-E-Y...

Basics



I see water
-A face
Then I 'face' water
I see....
I write
'This is a window-pane
& this the premise from which
my story would start!
It would have to start from here'.
& as I finish the lines
A stone breaks the window-pane
I see water
Face
Trace
Stop.

Once




The deaths carried by sounds,
Are the deaths that we evade.
The depths trodden by life,
Are the depths that we create.
Just let me be your soul,
That lulls the dust to sleep.
And
Then
Awake
Afresh,
When all the sounds are dead,
You have no hole to dig
You have no skin to scratch
Just scratch upon your sin
A still-image of life!

Before


Before
A wonderful sunshine
Before
The world is unmade
Before
A green grass on corpus
Before
The sea-gull is listed
After
I want to leave for
That's the time it comes in
That's the time you get off
That's the time he speaks off
With belting rain in seashore
Before
The world is unmade
With belting rain in seashore
Here I come for that time
Before & after withdrawn!

Woundstruck













Loving a night, she moves out.
One own night, hers only alone.
One minute detail still, as if long left,
As when she will cusp the frame,
If at all, that can ever ring inside the ridden names.

The myth in a chocolate-box floats along
Like her cloaked vains, water-tight.
No like, not ever like, never like the likeness
Of what the world knows like.
Her myth, hers own, a rapid myth of jungle-nights,
Mumbled strains of a loving waste,
As & when the keyhole bends
To taste the bricks of the cornfield-dust.

She is still.
----
Only still.
---
Now the time.
-----
The lacking time.
------
Up in arms.
----
Mine to shame.
------
There she picks.
------
Her closing clue.

Ring


Bunch in keys
Foreseen glances
Once, twice and thrice
Upon the times
The keyholes breathing silences

I have always been in love with grammar-books.

Marker


A book it was
A page in it
Ooze aloud
To break the rift
A dusk it is
The ink I am
A book in pain
A worm in it.

Dali

A clock I married
---garlanded.
A wall, I hang
---wall-hang-ed.
White, the colour
---pinpointed.
The clock I killed
---is granted.

Box


Blood-vein, I gape,
Thinking, that night.
Inside, not rain
I fake, ignite.

You-deep, skull-crack
Gasping, kindred.
Rusted, haunting
Humdrum, sunset.

Thursday, June 5, 2008


Crosstalk it was
all rain long
in the grass
and the name
in the slush
I jumbled the drops
crossdrops they were
all this when the sunlight had chopped off my nails...

EGGLETS-3













Disturbed swings
---You thought,
Swings are distributed
---Only this much
I could return to.

EGGLETS-2











Wings in the wound
And the sound afterwards
The weakening blood
A presence was heard
Touching upon buttonholes
I learn how to smell.

EGGLETS-1













Only when you tremble out
And the similarity in the sky
Murmuring eyes joining with
But the polarity of strings
Wooden roads in a freeze-shot
Thus, a table changes its relationships with me.