Take a hitch

Take a hitch in her lyrical loin string.
Look into her cloth bundle contents

And reach the end of backyard well.
Here waters dissipated last summer

And frogs dissipated in their croaks
In water snakes mistaken for ropes.

They hallucinate on snakes as ropes
Dissipating in crevice of well stones.

We turn participatory in dissipation.
In rhetoric, we forget cloth bundles.

They are untouchable, bath-worthy.
After 3 days she will narrate a story

A turmeric-yellow story sad to hear
And lips shall tremble in fear of love.

(Taking off on Samuel Beckett’s poem Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin)

Flies and butterflies

There is a film shoot on kerb.
Gawker crowds are fruit flies

By a  ‘I love my city’ signage.
Cops watch like cops in vain.

What actors do with a pelvis
Is the shoot for giant screen .

They dance in robots’ torsos
In repeat motions of pupas

To turn butterflies on wings,
To sell dream in movie halls.

3 AM

“Duration ‘is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present”–
Henri Bergson

All we do is prolong memory,
In our small in-between sleep

While sea crashes on its time,
At 3 AM when heart can stop.

All that is sea crashing waves
And the fishes’ dead memory

Its chain of links is a duration
Extending our past to  future.

Heart can stop in  3 AM piss,
Bringing duration to its close.

Man in woman

Man speaks out ,as  woman’s man
As  half of man ,in half of  woman.

Kitchen mom grates coconut white,
Over the incubation of man in belly.

Body is woman big with a stomach
Holding a mustache of ego to belly.

She is earth-pot, holding his ashes
In quick river down cold mountain.

Straw

These questions come and go
With no obligations to search

Needle answers in haystack’s
Dried straw of collapsed walls

Filled with a  life’s emptiness,
The autumn sky’s gold debris.

We have reached our answers
But have forgot the questions.

We now paint an orange disc
But cannot paint back stacks.

Cry-baby

Eye’s tears smell sadly,
Glisten like pearl drops

Good old sun dropping
From his daily farewell,

Temporary day’s death,
A far cry from last one.

Deaths are our crybaby,
Permanent after  dusk.

They do not smell rich
Nor smile as baby soft.

Women on men

We are today being international,
Being news grabbed by the hour,

Of our bodies, when a night falls .
We are TV’s phenomenal bodies.

Our body is public and literature.
You are phenomenal body freaks.

And your eyes are filthy fingers.
You are tickling private comedy.

Stillness

We would live in this mosquito
That buzzed on a small stillness
In the larger stillness of a room.

We partook its buzz on stillness
Our blood carried ,on our bones
As smudges on walls of a room.

The room carried us, in stillness
And in mosquito buzz about us,
Little deaths of both our bodies.

Mom’s spring

Song was for a cradle’s swing
For her baby on tree’s breeze.

Mom had bricks on her head
To build a stomach’s way up.

Mom’s song was for her baby
That went winging in the tree.

There was no breeze in bricks.
Her spring blew in baby’s hair.

(tribute to a female construction worker)

Marble

This lady is dead but never born.
She lives in a cold old testament.

The lady is veiled, pure and dead
From a piece of Italian mountain,

Dead as the marble of her maker
Who lost marbles to proud death.

All old things go cold as marble,
Making death rather extra proud.

(Veiled Rebecca is a beautiful marble statue ,made by an Italian sculptor Benzoni, based upon her Old Testament character . The statue is found in the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad )