My Marathi poems translated by me

1) Spam


Accompanying every attachment
My doom virus
Penetrates the very nucleus of cells-
In an instant,
It spawns forth millions of copies of itself.
Inscribing its own illegible devastating script
Into our genetic code.
Spreading like cancer
It annihilates our operating system

My Norton protected soul
Proves toothless to retaliate
Like some mutant fish
Struggling on a hook

2

We are the digital crows of words
With broken wings
Pecking at the mlecha skins
Of your holy cows

We are e-locusts
We will spam ceaselessly
Your scarecrow sensibilities
From our thousands of IDs
Let’s see how many of our toxic messages
You can delete.

3

I am a Postmodern Parikshit
This virtual fruit stares at me
Spammed by destiny

I know it contains a familiar worm
I know that the worm will turn into Takshaka

I have obtained knowledge in my mother’s womb
That there are no exits to the virtual World Wide Labyrinth

Hence, I click on the icon of this fruit
And wait for the ultimate sting


4

Digital Ghatotkach peddles
His merchandise in my bedroom

Enlarge your Penis
Viagra for less
Loans at low interests
Easy ways to loose weight
F*** Russian women
Take your Jackpot of ten thousand Dollars
Exchange your old soul for new
The dead mailbox of my mind
Stagnates like a public lavatory

In fact
I do wish to enlarge my penis
Cheap Viagra is also good for me
I even want to find out
The easy way to lose fat
Russian women won’t be a bad idea either
I will also welcome the jackpot of ten thousand dollars
How good it would be for me to have
A new soul in place of the old
So that I can play some sort of ghoul
In a stupid horror serial
However, I delete all these mails
Before opening

How I love my empty virginal mailbox
This is the moment of ultimate realization
This is the moksha

5

In fact, we are thrown on this vulnerable blue planet
By mistake

We do not know who
Has sent us to whom

One fine day
We will be taken for junk mail
We will be deleted
To prevent future infections


6

Actually
I should not have downloaded your attachment
The scan had found out
An unfamiliar malicious code
Of destiny inside

Even so, I copied you
On my hard disk

I love to open unknown emails
The idiotic hope that there will be something for me
In those mails
Makes me open these messages against my will

7

I have already lost Troy
Trojan horses have taken over my bastions

This is Hector’s cadaver
This is exhausted Ulysses

This is the gutted bedroom
Of Paris and Helen

This is my burnt out memory
These are the corrupt files

Written in undecipherable script
This is my locked cursor

It is no use restarting now

8

I have posted my zipped eyes
As attachments

Glance over them at least once
Before deleting them

9

My firewall
Is defunct
My immune system is out of order

Anyone can hack me
Anyone can read my secrets

I have become bare naked,
Exposed to the world
You will change my password tomorrow

Nothing will remain
What can be called my own

10

We will continuously send you
The wooden horses of words
For Helen
The onslaught of millions of Raktavirya genetic codes
From their bellies
They will reduce
Your system to ashes

11

I want to erase
My fingerprints from the moon
Tea-stains on the sun
The lines on the hand from my joystick
The unascertainable look
In the eyes of a hunchback computer
All the signs of my existence

Zipping and attaching
To my last email
I want to bombard thousands of unknown IDs
With my viruses of the Unbeing, Inauspicious and the Ugly

Because in the loss of thousands of unknown people
Lies my gain


2) The Tree of Total Eclipse
(Godhra carnage and the subsequent riots in Gujarat)


Who knows how long we have to live
Under the cyanide shade
Of the sky-high banyan tree
Of total eclipse
We have grown in our yard

No one dares to unravel the mystery
Of its source, spread and increase
Because we ourselves have sustained it
With the manure of smashed infant skulls
We have never looked at it with the eyes
Of the tattered weeping vulvas.
Under it
The dreadful stench of burning skin
Spreads
We, the typical orthodox onlookers,
Flee, plugging our noses

We will never get to the root of it
Because while digging for them
We will find
Deep within our own chest
Its arsenic ariel-roots

3) I am a Cramped Vaman


I am a cramped Vaman
In the bottle of mineral water
The blue lid makes
My breath
Flurry all over
Like a sparrow
Trapped in a congested room

Sometimes I stand with my hand
On the plastic transparent walls
You with your ambiguous pink face of curiosity
Envelop my entire world.
Between us

Is the Bisleri wall
Because on my world I see
In the huge letters
`Bisleri’ written upside down.
Standing with the tepid tasted water up to my waist
I devotedly pray to the deceptiveness

But at times,
I feel
We all look at the world
From our own bottles
Because people look at me
Just like they look
At toiling tribal labourers
From the air-conditioned windows of trains

Actually, I am not a genie in the bottle or the like.
It is because of the curse of some sage
I am passing my days as a test-tube baby
In this transparent plastic womb.
I know
Even after I die
My ghost will continue to survive in this bottle

Like an invisible bird in a cage






4) A Few Words for the Elephant I came across in the Street the other day


Overcome with compassion
I compare your colossal wrinkled hulk
With the fluid roundness
Of your disconsolate eyes.

You may be chivalrous and sturdy
Smash the huge castle doors filled with spikes
With your head,
But you are not crafty and depraved
Or else why would you allow someone
To savagely ride your royal back?

You may be intelligent,
You may even be the god of intelligence
But you are not cunning or else why
Would you allow yourself to be deceived
By this saffron swindle?

You walk puffing
Following the phoney mendicants
Through our confused streets
Like an old vessel, fanning the flies
We think that we have made your amiable proud soul
Into a mere impoverished device for the beggars.

The looker-ons and kids throng around you
But I vaguely touch your legs that seem like pillars
The rope-like tail, the back that resemble a wall,
Or your trunk that feels more like a trunk of tree
I am rapt trying to guess your true form.


5) Your Lips Strewn with Scorpions


Your lips
Strewn with scorpions

The flocks of lustrous doves
In your eyes

The disturbed honeyed ocean in the full moon
In your breasts

The odour
Of extinguished meteors in your breath

From millions of years
I have felt that you were around

While passing
Through the labyrinths of streets
In my eyes
Thronging with invisible crowds

Millions of times
My nights have foundered
And were injured
In trying to see you

For innumerable times
You have extricated and bloodied
My transparent breath

But is not frequently said
That lacerations are bound to the musical notes
agonies to ironies

Hence, I have taken births
Time after time
given the wings of butterflies
To innumerable callous words
Over and over again

So many times have I cast them
In the furnace of my life
I have molten their iron souls

I have given them thousands of facets
I have given the brilliant laughter of diamonds
To their eyes

Therefore, listen to me
Even if you invisible
To the eyes of my touch

I will see you
With millions of eyes of poetry
Till the end of time


6) Alta Mira

Line drawings of naked fertility goddesses carved
On the walls of a dirty train lavatory

An arrow points at the hole between the thighs
Put your prick here goes the anonymous message
I take my cursor on the hole between the fleshy layers
And click

There opens the dark cave of Alta Mira

The cave from which we have never come out
I rub stone against stone
Light a bonfire of dried leaves
Illuminating
The stories of hunting hairy mammoths carved on the walls
The fertile women
With huge breasts, broad thighs
My story or my picture doesn’t picture in these stories
I only play the role of darkness
In this never ending Darwinian arche-drama
On the walls of clogged lavatory of my mind
I click on the link for Alta Mira
Only to read
The tiresome communication
Page not found action cancelled
In the public lavatory
There is a prehistoric rock inscription
Sheela is a prostitute
Carved by some primate
in a college urinal
The Onida Satan
Has carved for us
With a huge mammoth tusk
An oedipal message
Neighbour’s envy
Owner’s pride


7) The Forts


Which never wake up
Lie ruined shattered
If you observe carefully,
You will find in them
Specters of lifeless powadas

A dawn

Delicate like the neck of Mastani
Caresses the steely chest of Sahyadri
Awakening the tiny skies
In the invisible eyes of trodden rocks

Birds return to the sugarcane fields.

But these primal forts with putrefied teeth
Yellow like hoary tomes
Still haven't slackened their lethal stranglehold

Words dressed in traditional nine-yard sari
Become old and droop
join the wari of decrepit faces.
Intimacy of the earth that they have
Today speaks the language of impulsive hatred.

Some hands reek of dead cattle
Some, of slaughtered men.

These forts, these old guerillas
Who will never awake
Still stealthily wait to pounce
Rapaciously upon the dawn
Tender like the eyes of a loved one

Beware O mavles
Of the ruthless jaws
Of your own forts



8) Empty


My mind in the afternoon

Is empty like an empty hanger hanging
In an empty corner of an empty room.

In a window is an empty sky.

Some empty people hang
On an empty hanger
In the empty room of my mind.

one empty sky
In the empty windows
Of the empty minds
Of the empty people.

If you take away the box
From the empty box,
What remains
Is my mind.

The eyes of the emptiness, the skies of the emptiness, the mind of the emptiness
My eyes, my skies, my mind






9) See the flaming wings of the tigers


See the flaming wings of the tigers
Flying out of my castle.

See the eyes of words
Hooded with the dusty wings of vultures
Resting on the leafless branches.

See
As my words spread their tiger wings
find their way through
The wet naked bodies sculpted in the wood

How
The reflections of the sea's ancient lust
Dancing in the mirror of the sky
Play in their eyes



10) We are the lost children of waters...


We are the lost children of waters.
We are the children of the earth, dark and sanguine.

We are the cattle exiled from the primitive forest.
We are the half-eaten berries spilt from the mouth of death.

Our true colour is the colour of sparrow's wings
The remains of sting in our hearts our only company.

We are the dew of transience on the babool shrubs.
The insignificant taste of blood and darkness is our taste.

There are no echoes of our screams in these insensate valleys
suddenly somewhere the shattered mirrors shake with laughter.


11) Surat


A city in the middle
Of a huge ever-growing obese market.
An involved net
Of shortcuts and flyovers
That traps the babies of the sun.
Here refuse piles up even on the sun.
Even the sun’s daughter is reduced
To a mere gutter.
In fact, it is the gaze here
That’s infected with leptospirosis.
A sack of plague spreading rats
Thrive in the voracious bellies.
Here the line that separates
The homes from the shops is pretty unclear
You can’t tell where a shop ends
where a home begins or where a home ends
And the shop begins.
Here the statues of various leaders
Point in various directions.
But Surat doesn’t go anywhere
It merely sits
Amid the deafening discordant concert of horns
Clouds of toxic smoke
With a garish red lipstick
Waiting
For one or two more customers
Even after all the customers are over


12) I Snap the Stitches

I snap
The stitches on the filthy wounds of language
The wounds gape

My diabolical three headed poem
Is born from some unheard cave
Of the language

The shadows of her screams
Dancing on the walls
Are its meanings

Close to me I hear
The hair-raising sounds
On her iron breath
In her broken eyes
Are the dreams of the rotting sea
She devourers the sweet innocent kids
Of your sentimental lyrics

She comes and sleeps
By your side
Like cancer
Drinks to the last drop
The blood from your hairy breasts

She chants
With her each disgusting mouth
The horrible hymns
Of the Unbeing, the Inauspicious
And the Ugly

Would you like to sow this foetus
In your clean and decent garden?


13) A NOTE FOR A CERTAIN COMPUTER OPERATOR


Like a corrupt floppy full of dirty pictures
My soul has gone corrupt

You cannot store anything on it now

So in the desolate monitor of your eyes
The message box reads
UNABLE TO READ FROM THE SPECIFIED DEVICE
RETRY/CANCEL

Now it is beyond repair

If possible, format it
Or quick erase it
Or just dispose it

In the recycle bin



14) TODAY’S DETERIORATED SHORT MESSAGE SERVICE


A morning
gets up dog-tired
from the rumpled bed of yawns

Sings
in an exhausted voice
from the tamarind tree of tiredness

with great effort she manages to boot
her drained soul.

From the bronchioles flow interminably
the exhausted grimed goods trains
with thirty one onerous carriages.


The message that system resources meagre

from its over heated tin heart.

A fagged out
noon
sleeps as if dead

in the dishevelled bed .
From its open mouth dribbles out
the saliva of death.


Its brain restarts ten times
in an attempt to defrag.



An asthmatic evening
drags around with elephantiasis feet
in the city of yawns

behind the heavy eyelids


putting it’s own mind in the pocket
in a vibrating mode.

One pulsating darkness
blossoms all of a sudden
on my leafless naked fingers

like some wild black bitter fruit

and an exhausted poem
drops into my tired brain

like an idiotic SMS
from an unfamiliar sender



15) WHILE NAILING THE COFFIN



One by one
I drive nails
Into your cold flesh
One exactly
Between your breasts

Another slightly on the upper side
The third a little on upside
The next one in your pupil
On your lips
One exactly
Between your eyes

Because you are my coffin

You are truly my home
It is in your breathe I seek
The vanished Faith of Abraham

I crucify you
Wholly keeping with the true Indian Culture
I set you on fire
My warm tears
In your ashes slowly cooling down
Become Frankenstein phoenix

Let me commit johar
In your pyre
Jammed within walls

Or let me be a black bitter fruit and grow
On the apple tree growing on your unknown tomb



16) FRUIT SALAD


My head placed in a red canvas bag
Like a sliced watermelon
On the luggage plank of a train coach
With my pieces of my fingers
Like pieces of ginger

In the banana peel
Is a carrot
Slightly peeled


17) THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MOSQUITO NET


In fact, this is a net to trap humans.
Humans drift towards it
In an attempt to save their skins from mosquitoes
Are trammelled
In its maniac probing.

Mosquitoes make an ariel survey
like our leaders
Find out the way to our blood.
When I stretch out in the net
From my mouth grows
A lush green bonsai banyan.

Tube-light filters through the sieve
A ceiling-fan air
It silently breathes
I sleep
In the shade of the bonsai banyan.

My etheric body
Tries to get out from
The sieve of mosquito net

In the darkness of night
Arrives the impish mutant spider
Who weaves this World Wide Web

But my subtle digital body
Has already escaped
After being filtered
By the sieve of mosquito net.



18) A HYMN TO BE CHANTED AT THE TIME OF REBIRTH


With the mysterious laser power saw of my breath
I want to hack
The dire black totally eclipsed banyan
As its seismic cyanide aerial roots
Have gone deep
Into the every speck
Of my salvation-seeking soil.
In that open space
I want to sow
The ejaculated sperms of the sun
The radioactive egg
Of the chicken-eating moon
I want to take harvest
Of apoems
Aimless
But having golden wombs.

Then I will have the luscious red fruits
Of the intense desire of bats
To be absorbed in the sun,
Of the taste of flesh,
Of the Eucharist lust
To booze blood,
Of the desire to pluck
The white mushrooms of Time
Grown on the damp rotten wood
Of my lungs,
Of the blanched dreams
Of turning into the bleached cranes
Flying away from these wilds.

I want to transmigrate
To my own body.
I want to draw cryptic good swastikas
On every iota
Of the world’s body
On every moment
Of the every world
On my body.

I want to kill
The old mahut
Who rides the diaphanous backs
Of the vanished rivers
Since he prods
With his desiccated goad
Concealed in his loin cloth
The blue thousand-petalled-lotus
Of the disappeared rivers
blows out
The orphic eyes
Of the invisible rivers.

I want to wipe off
The tales of the non-self
Of the graveyard night
Scribbled in Chinese
On my Yorick skull.

I have resolved
I, by all odds, don’t want to become
The headless aghori
Wandering dressed in night
With a beautiful useless trident in his hand
In whose hands
There is an inventory of unsolved queries
Written on his owns skull.

I surely don’t want to become
An aghori baobab tree
Vulturing near the naked corpse
Of the paddy field
Which sits up with raised ears
At the slightest noise.
The salivating cadaver of grainfield
Drooling with its pink tongue.

Hence I want to perform
The ravenous austerities
To appease the occult sun
Concealed deep inside the womb of earth
The occult earth
Concealed deep inside
The womb of the sun.

After cremating
The carcass of God
In the laser crematory
Of my breath
I want to worship
The active godhead
Of the famished cosmos
I want to fly away
Turning into a bunch of perfumed aureate butterflies
When the silken winds blow.


19) The window without a wall

I await you
Near a window without a wall

I feel
You will come in nonchalantly
From the back door

Of my house without walls

I become a word without language
And wait
At the edge of utterance.
In front of me lies the mute embrace

Of a diaphanous valley.

From this wall with no windows
I view the earthy wings of autumn

From the wall with windows
I see a desolated path lost in mists.

I become simply a sigh

And wait near
The window without the wall.







20) SHARK



In the bitter fleshy water of mirror, flow my shark fingers
From the vegetations dark as hair, under the pool of my eyes, below the rocks of my thoughts
They drift away feeding on the minuscule fishes.
I hatch the sorrows of crooked white eggs in the brown nest of my eyes.
The earthy wings of its spent dried hunger soar upwards in the virtual space of the body.
Carrying the empires of deserts on its back,
Its reflection swims in the symbolic mirror of my mind.
The slack footprints of sphinx can be seen in its skies.

I am aghast seeing the round ravenous brutal eyes of my fingers
Their herds of vulnerable carnivorous lusts
Flow trough my bitter green blood
From the sweet rivers on your palms towards the virtual islands of your self.

O lord who would trammel them, see the real blood on their noses
Not the reflection of blood, but the real blood on my harpoon.
Pity these flesh-eating mute beasts.
Let their teeth dig deep into the bitter flesh of the watery mirror
Let their ungenerous belly be full with the shoal of reflected fishes.
.

21) Auranga


Like a girl going out for a casual stroll
You come loitering
Outside the outskirts of our village
Then you go away
Without looking anywhere
With your sweet peaceful eyes

I dream of a host of sweet-water fish
Wandering among the vegetations and creepers
At your bottom
Of your calm sanctum

From the shores
I cast with my poor hands
The rags of my net
On your quiet surface
With a hope of catching you








22) THE FROG



This yellowish green fat frog
Lives in the hole he has made in my eyes

He jumps up on my forehead
As soon as it rains
After completing his sleep of some million aeons

He sings bloating his throat like a balloon
His hoarse cacophonic love songs
For females

Listen carefully

From the other side
Of the stagnant pond
Comes a reply



23) Maternity homes, hospitals, hotels, shops, temples
(For the Station Road, Navasari)


Maternity homes hospitals hotels shops temples
A police station below a peepal tree schools banks
Faafda, Jalebis, tea coffee snacks on hand driven carts
Tuitions smoke traffic whores mental hospitals.
As if the whole world is attending the funeral of this road.

An exhausted morning carrying the burdensome schoolbag
Of the entire day waits for an auto rickshaw to take it to the school
Youth teem out from a decrepit creaky bus
Gather drifting like leaves in a river towards college
Taking it to be their shore. The bald white vegetarian renunciation
Seeks the lost end of this road with bare feet.

Who know from where does this road begin
Where does it end. The traveller of eighty four crore vaginas
This road returns and ends repeatedly
From where it had started.

If you happen to dig up its grave after thousands of years
Then this very ashen tar corpse
Will stare blankly at you with steadfast eyes.





24) PAPER


Paper roads
Paper houses
Paper men
Paper vehicles
On the paper trees
Are fruits of paper kites.

Who has left behind
On this paper world
The illegible message
In an unknown script

Tomorrow with the passing of time
This paper will turn yellow
White ants will reduce it to a sieve
Then, even if you merely touch it
I t
I t w
I
Ll b r
E a


25) SUMMER: A MOSAIC


The ball hit hard and high by a cricketer
Becomes a myna and flies away

Saliva of a panting dog
Turns into thousands of diamonds

Thousands of sweatblind faces
Writhe in the rotting hell of trains

Clothes hanging in the balconies of the apartments
Like the thoughts from middle class minds

The summer prowls around smelling
Like a sexed tomcat.

But from the sieve of a dried peepal fly away
The flocks of white doves.





26) One Dozen Definitions of Poetry

Poetry means the grass growing on one’s pupils
The Mendicants hanging upside down in the caves of ears
Love messages carved on the walls of the nose
Black basil plant growing on the tongue

Poetry means the spine of thoughts struck in the throat
The confusion in the mind of deafdumbblind heart
Diamonds struck inside the guts
Ice piled up inside the chilled stomach

Poetry means reflections of a withered droopy penis
Manuscripts hidden inside the hollow of thighbone
Rivers flowing out from between the first finger and the thumb
Poetry is man’s belatedly grown tail
On which he sits after winding it up
In the court of demons


27) Excerpts from Jarasandha’s Blog


(i)

When Bhima seized me by my legs
In his merciless iron clutches
I thought he was going to dispatch me
He ripped me in half instead
From head to toe
Like Dante did to the Prophet
In his Inferno.
He simply tore me in two.

It was on the advice
Of that Dark Charlatan
That Bhima flung my two halves
In opposite directions
So that they would never ever
Be one again.

He is the one responsible
For my demerger

The Pandavas’ sala
That Ranchod

(ii)

The two halves of my being
The two halves that would never unite
Are still very much alive
Pulsating with life
Because someone daily reminds me
That I am already dead

(iii)

I am lying just like that
In the Hell’s cheap hospital
The left half of my body
On my right
The right side of my body
On my left
The left side on my right side
The right on my left
My left ball on my right side
The right ball on my left
The left half of my brain
On my right
The right half of my brain
On my left

This is the reason why
Perhaps
I speak the language of the Right
With those on the Left
the language of the Left
With those on the Right

My left right language
Come together from opposite directions
Uttering the interminable throbbing dialect
Of suffering

Some people prefer
To call it poetry or something

(iv)

Bhima tossed away
One half of my soul
Into the fields
The other tumbled
Into a cyber café

Eliot’s ghost haunts
One part of my being
The other one intones
The Anubhavamruta

(v)

I don’t have one undivided tongue
I have two half tongues instead

My Gujarati tongue craves
The touch of Marathi
My Marathi tongue pines
For Gujarati

(vi)

I order for desi liquor
In English wine shop
in the desi shop
It’s the English liquor that I order

(vii)

In fact
Ardhanarishwar
And Narsihma are my forefathers
But they are imaginary
I am real

(viii)

Look, this is my map

One half of my body is saffron
The other is green
Both facing away from each other

There is a historical white strip
Of the Partition
Which cements my both parts

There is also a sham
Of a heart
With twenty-four spokes
Defunct
But very much alive


(ix)

In fact, I wanted to go to heavens
In flesh
One half of my body
Did actually manage to go there
But the other half
Missed the flight

(x)

Frequently
The halved organs from one half of my body
Arrange a limited overs cricket match
With the organs of the other half

Obviously
My soul plays the umpire

Look, here is an appeal
For run out
I signal
For the third umpire

(xi)

Only in you
Is this Jarasandha
Complete

So take me deep down
Forever
Once and for all end
My two separate lives
My two separate deaths


1) My Experiments with Potion of Death


I observe
Peering into the stainless steel glass
A floating eye of a myna

Within is the tasteless, odourless, colourless
The sky of death

I gaze into the glass
To stare at my own reflection


28) Harry Potter’s Mislaid Love Letter

In mid air
Have I scribbled
In an enigmatic transparent script
This invisible love letter for you

Only you know its mystery
It will remain here
For ages to come

Only the reader
Who has something of you
In the soul
Can decipher
This sibylline language

Death has left this mark
On my forehead
Commingled a mysterious satanic force
With my blood

It will take your memories
Beyond the Red sea of Death

Every time the latent witch in you
Awakens to my call

She will find before her eyes
This misplaced letter
I wrote to you


29) The Vampire Tree of Grief


The vampire tree of grief
Rides your assailable breasts

The eyeless white termite of time
Eats at your depleted lungs

Yet you did not cower under it
But flowed rampantly
your current
Dragged away
This half dead horse with it

On an unknown shore
I find my naked body
That has grown stranger to me
Swamped completely
In your boisterous spume



30) Some Preliminary Lessons in Cheirology

(i)

Walking alone and aimless
On the deserted streets
Of the lines on my palm
I watch
The automatic shoes on my feet
Taking me along with them


(ii)

My fifty thousand male fingers
Rise erect
But a bit late

Like a submerged river
My ambiguous line of destiny
Runs over
The mount of Apollo
Over the geographical map
Of your body


(iii)

I walk all alone
Over the blue desert palm of the sky
On the trail of the line of head
Over the mount of eclipsed moon

There I gather the hollow skulls of words
And blow them like conch shells

(iv)

In the train that goes
Over the tracks of the lines of my palm
A night with pitch black eyes
Stares at me
With wide open eyes
From the window

When she closes her eyes
I caress her
Wet eyelids

Then I take her palm in mine
And tell her fortune


31) Hair fall and Photocopies


You will come across
The secret black and white codes
Of my being
Lying anywhere

In the bedroom, or the kitchen or in the lavatory
In the classroom, in the train compartment
Between the keys of a keyboard
On the mouse-pad
In the staffroom, in the caves on the moon
In the snake hole
In our house, in their house
In his house, in her house
In my home, in your home
In the gaps between the words
Among the pages of a book
That makes you scratch your head
Anywhere just anywhere

Obviously I know
Where this road leads
But don’t forget
That in my every hair
Is my DNA

Or whatever


After thousands of years
In some rocks

A scientist will discover
My fossilized hair

he can generate
Yet more photocopies of me


32) Staring out of the Window during the Geography Class


You may chance upon
A geographical map of Maharashtra
Embedded
In my left pupil

This is the yellow Deccan Plateau
This the rocky Sahyadri
This is the Tapti valley
This is the Konkan, this the Vidarbha
And the Marathwada

In my right pupil
Is the map of Gujarat

This is Saurashtra, this is the Rann of Kutch
This is the Narmada, this is the forest of Dangs

look here

This is me


33) In her Kitchen Trash Can


Your pelvic bone
Recently rinsed
In her kitchen thrash can

Wrapped in the pages of poetry
Used condoms
At whose tips
Has accumulated

The liquefied encephala
Of Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan

Yesterday’s chappatis
Half eaten by ants
The left over moong usal
Whiskers of Salvador Dali
Dilip Chitre’s socialist cigar

Gram dough
Mixed with RDX
A rubber heart
Made from a motorcycle tube

An empty canister
Of Asthma inhaler
A wisp of tangled hair
Darkened banana peel
And
A copy of the Origin of Species
Stained with dal
Because of being read
While eating


34) A Poem of Green Hands


On my bare naked hands
The icy green blood
From the carnage of multitudinous
Innocuous mute trees

Whenever I lacerate the white backs
Of a blank sheet of paper
With my sharp pen nib
I calligraph heartless lines
Of tongueless poems
On the cemeteries of voided spaces
Vacated by annihilating
Thousands of forests

Unsuspectingly
My hands become part of the cabal
To denude this planet
I too become a partner
In this crime

But my lush green hands
Covered with the bleeding screams
Of the helpless trees
Know quite well
The yellow sorrow
Of a leaf nipped off
The crimson excruciating pain
Of a petal being crushed
Wet sting of a branch being broken
Earthy agony
Of being uprooted

Precisely these things
Flow out on the white corpses
Of paper
In form of chlorophyll
Of poetry


35) Third Degree Torture for my Old Poems

One fine day I decided
To inflict third degree torture
On my old poems

I took the words
With unshaved stubbles and filthy rags
In my custody
On remand
And mercilessly flogged them

I made them lie
On the slabs of ice
On their dirty buttocks
I scribbled with blue and black bruises
Wicked lines
Of new poems

I stripped them
Of their mouldy hides
To gaze at their bleeding dark souls
To soak them in saline

After thrusting
The terrible Tiger Balm
Into their anus
I captured their screams
Flying in various directions
With my precise cages

I might let them go
On payroll
Only to finish them off
In an encounter


36) Self Reliance

Means freedom.
I am my own charkha
My own yarn
My own khadi

Resolving not to beg
To meet my daily hunger
I decide to take
My own present
My future
My past
In my own hands

I hold the proof
Of my animal self
In the palm of my hand
And decide to detonate
The flimsy hypocrisy
Of civilization

Very early in mornings
I open my palms
As I open my fatigued eyes
Clutch at my awakened soul
And heave


37) James Bond Announces Retirement


I simply want to stretch out lazily
On the voluptuous blue beach of Hawaii
And quietly sip
Martini of my renunciation
Or Vodka

Apart from the sea or the sky
I don’t want anything mirrored
In my tourist sunglasses

I don’t want to do anything now.

Age has arced
The women I slept with
Like a bow
My friends evaporatedInto this incomprehensible world
My one-time enemies
Have transformed
Into potbellied asthmatic old men
Their malice deliquescedInto their arthritic knees

Once I used to give away my friends
To my enemies
My enemies to my friends
These days however
I can’t tell friends from foes
The CIA from the KGB
FBI from the Al Qaeda
MI-5 from ISI
Friendship from betrayal
Perhaps I have grown old

I have already returned
My licence-to-kill to the Queen
I have already given up
The folly of picking up women
I have discontinued
These makeshift remedies
For desolation
Today I am not sure
Whether those I killed
Were really terrorists
Or f***wits like me

I have sold off my rusted Berretta
I am dreadfully weary of blood
These days I can’t tell
Whether this damned blood
Is that of a villain
Or my own
Or tomato ketchup from Hollywood

Yes, probably I have grown old

That’s why I want to submerge
Tepid memories of the Cold War
In this liquor
Whose fragrance is the honeyed breath
Of aroused young women

I no longer intend to hound spies
Or women or myself
At breakneck speed

I just want to recline
On the beaches of Hawaii
Watching quivering smooth buttocks
Of bikini clad women
I only want to sip peacefully
My detached martini
Whose flavour is like that of death


38) Rock Doves


Rock doves fly away
From the skeletal cage
From the cage of horizons
Only for moment
We have in our hands
The light on the stereotyped faces of the apartments
The light of the tower of Babylon
The morning, the noon and the evening
Toying with the expressionless faces
Of the cars, vehicles and the traffic
Only for a moment

Nothing in the world belongs to us
So completely

When we will wing
Like grey pigeons
From the skeleton cages
Disappear
In the velvet-textured void

Will then at least something
Be truly ours?
Something at least?







39) Through the Deceased Window I look


Through the deceased window I look
At the world white as hospital
With my hairy pupils

We see them at war
With their shadows
These Leprous butterflies
With glaucoma in their eyes
Perch
On the flowers of this mortal world

Even water with its filthy cracked fingers
Savagely scratches
Its own diseased transparent back
What we mistook for honey
Has actually turned out to be venom
That’s the thing
That flows through or veins


40) Moist is the Heart

Moist is the heart
Of the red rusted rock

There she came
The black female scorpion
With the same moisture within her

And vanished
After laying thousand white eggs
On my back


41) In the Blue Flower Vase


One fine day
In a blue flower vase
I planted
A hand
White as milk


Seven were the fingers
That grew on the hand

Even the cactus blossoms forth
Then why not this hand

Yield at least
A tiny yellow flower

Instead
What burst forth

Was a huge sunflower
Cunning and crafty


42) The Baobab Thriving On My Eyes

The baobab thriving on my eyes
Clutches my brown pupils
In their roots

One day
I will definitely bring down
The corpse of the moon
Hanging from its leafless branches

It will torment me I know
With a million questions
Some with the wings of doves
Some, of vultures

Will I have answers ready for them?
Or will my head
Burst into thousand bits?


43) The Things You need to Know in Order to Float


The eyes barf
Darkness and sulphuric acid
Relentlessly

Wrenching out my guts with it
My soul flows away
Like a dead foetus

From an overlooked corner
Behind the burned-out fuming eyes
I stare at the vacuity
Of my own eye sockets

The whole world has drained away
I transubstantiate into the untouchable dark absence
The shackles of space-time come off
Turning into a mere amorphous throbbing

I begin to float


44) From an Abridged Travelogue of a Tortoise


From eons
I have fostered this insatiable concupiscence
For unhurriedness
Concealing my self with my self
Becoming a rock among rocks
I have traversed
This interminable bouldery terrain steadily

In quest of a nameless waterhole of darkness

Shielding my soft fleshy abdomen
With my back
Covering the fortified back
With my vulnerable belly
I have transcended
This moment and eternity

Over the ruthless sharp facets
Of the rocks
In search of that embrace
Of some primitive pool


45) All This Fuss about Skin


1)

To tell you the truth
I am infuriated
By all this fuss
About this wench, this skin

In the beginning
How she beckons us
With all her half open
Moist mirage lips

Only to meddle
Between you and me

2)

Not for nothing
They call her
The biggest organ
Of our body

The bitch keeps
The maximum supply of the blood
For herself

As if that’s not enough
She maintains the exact record
Of every passing year

3)

The thing that we call Man
After all is nothing but the skin
Because what we see
With the skin called our eye
Is nothing but skin
What they call clothes
Is nothing but artificial skin
That we use
When we fall short of the natural one

4)

On always suspects
The thing that we call the World or whatever
Is anything but the loose wrinkled hide
Of the old man called the God

After He gives up his ghost
We will graze his hide
make pretty purses
And handbags
For our women
5)

Skin me
Make chappals
From my leather
Trample me
Underfoot

Because from now onwards
I am going to wear my body
Inside out like a shirt

So that now you can observe
The skeleton turned out
The dangling intestines
The spleen, the kidneys
The stomach, the liver
And most importantly
Concealed just behind my lungs
The boring exhausted
Booster pump

46) A Mess of a Self Portrait


Two defunct clocks
In my eye sockets
One shows its fourteen past ten
While its ten past fourteen by the other

I will look at the eye
On my wrist and tell
How much time is left

In my mouth, the clean white
Indian style commode
You will come across
The picture of the entire cosmos

My ears are the keyholes
In which my wife
Has forgotten her keys

Outside, on the branches of my dusty tamarind tree
Have grown thousands of empty windows
Without frames
Which contain the thousands
Of my invisible portraits

I know I have made a mess
Of my painting of the room too

In the place of the ceiling fan
You will find my head

In the place of my head
A whirring ceiling fan

If it’s getting too hot
Just turn up the speed
Of the head on the ceiling


47) The Eyes Flying Away from my Sockets


The eyelids of my mind
Are dry like your vagina
Covered only
The sediments of white brackish minerals

Your frozen heart
Lifeless like my organ

Let me offer you worship
Of my chopped off hands
Let me place them
At your feet

Let me sing
The old obstinate no-moon night,
Buried within my chest
And a gradually rotting moon
For once
let the eyes fly away
From my sockets
Into your skies

48) One Mardekaresqe Night Punctured with Lights

An impotent skinny Maruti
Ogles in a Mardekaresque night
At the lewd hardcore sites
Of her sandy dreams
The filthy five MB clips

In the broad daylight
A lecherous fully aroused Sumo
Mounts on the back of the scrawny Maruti
The scenes of laughing tyres
The mechanical thrusts
Shot from impossible angles
One’s invisible organ
Inside the other’s silencer

Suddenly from nowhere
I drop in and chuck a stone powerfully
At the obscene cars
They scamper away screaming
Into the by lanes
With their organs trapped

This wakes up the car
With a jolt
Profusely sweating
In the night punctured with lights
Panting heavily
But
Her gears haven’t changed
One bit.

Notes

Aghori: A tantrik Sadhu supposed to be practicing the infamous left-handed way of tantra or black magic including ritual eating of dead human flesh.
Anubhavamruta: One of the finest compositions of Dnyaneshwara, the fourteenth century poet saint of Maharashtra
Ardhanarishwar: An androgynous form of Lord Shiva in which his better half Parvati, is literally the other half of his body
Bhima: One of the Pandavas, see Pandavas
Dal: is a preparation of pulses, which have been stripped of their outer hulls and split, as well as a thick, spicy stew prepared there from, a mainstay of Indian and Pakistani cuisine
Desi: Literally, indigenous, here applied for locally brewed liquor.
Fafda: typical Gujarati snacks, a fried yellow strip of flour
Ghatotkacha: The son of Bhima and the demon Hidimba, famed to have announced a scheme of exchanging the new goods for the old in the magical `market’ for Kauravas.
Jalebi: a common Indian spiral sweet dish, usually eaten with fafdas in Gujarat
Jarasandha: The king of Magadha in the Mahabharata. He was born in two separate halves to separate mothers. The witch named Jara joined him. He was blessed with magical powers of joining again after being cut in two. However, on Krishna's suggestion, Bhima tore apart Jarasandha in two pieces lengthwise and threw away the pieces in opposite directions.
Mahut: An elephant trainer, or rider
Mastani : a courtesan loved by Bajirao the powerful prime minister of Maharashtra
Mavles: the warriors of Shivaji the great warrior of Maharashtra who laid the foundation to Marathi Empire in 17th century.
Moong Usal: Moong is the seed of Vigna radiata which is native to India. Usal is prepared with whole green gram with some spices.
Narsiha, Narsimha: An avatar of Vishnu with head of the lion and body of man.
Onida: A brand of electronic goods in India whose one of the advertising slogan is ` Neighbour’s Envy and Owner’s pride’ and a rather good looking Satan as their model.
Pandavas: The sons of the King Pandu in the Mahabharata. The epic deals with war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas over succession of Hastinapura
Parikshit: Successor to the throne of Hastinapura. He was cursed to die of snakebite and he was killed by the snake king Takshaka
Powadas: Medieval heroic songs Marathi
Ranchod: A name of Lord Krishna, literally meaning `one who ran away from the battlefield’.
Raktavirya: The demon famed for regenerating from every single drop of his spilled blood. Killed by Goddess Durga
Sala: Brother in Law, a wife’s brother
Takshaka: see Parikshit
Vaman: The Dwarf, an avatar of Vishnu in form of Dwarf
Wari Procession going to pilgrimage to Pandharpur, a holy place