My poems not included in the first collection

I) My Simple Congenital Thirst


Pale fingers exfoliate like hair
On the edge of my amnesiac skin
Reaching out
To the dried carcass of the sky.

My simple congenital thirst
Branches out
Of my pores
Shedding eyeless brown leaves
On the famine
Of my earth’s black mouth.

The parched sky peels off
Like a cheap blue paint
The decrepit arteries of the dehydrated soil
Crumble
Like the ruined drainages
Of extinct civilizations.

My stultified heart a palm
Whose fingers have come off
Can still hold nothingness
Like Shiva’s translucent semen
Can still keep count
Of my deaths with its mute thumb.

I have planted
The stillborn foetuses
Of my eyes
Near the ancient roots of peepal
The male rocky hands
of the last earthquake
Will awaken
Their disfigured faces

They can still startle you
By sprouting from unlikely places.



II) Traces I will Leave Behind


Every breath that leave my body
Is an encrypted confidential message
Only death can unscramble.
It is useless to hack it.
Death is the only ultimate interpretation.
There no text remains.

Paper boats leave
The abandoned dock of my being
Sailing soundlessly
On the invisible rivers
Of my ancient breath.

Traces I will leave behind
Are crumbs fallen inadvertently
From the absent minded mouth
Of death.
Let harmless sparrows peck
At the grains of my words.

I will not leak the secret
Once I am gone.


III) Stranded


On a murky corrupted afternoon
As the harsh rains hurt
The sparrow wings of time
Hiding in the tired wet boughs of an unknown tree
Or in the gloomy unmanned windows
With its intolerable soaked translucency
I m stranded
In a small grocery shop, without an umbrella
Unable to go to my dank dark house
Or return to the dark edge of memory
Where I came from
I wish the rain would stop breathing
I wish its heart would die a brain death
I hear it flogging mercilessly
With its silver black whip
I have a reverie of a black-and-blue world
Running for cover

I hear the disquieting reminiscence
Of an alluring voice dripping wet
From a distant branch calling out to me
I at times wish it would rain on me someday
Leave me stranded
Between the betweens of the world
I at times see in my trance
My ancient sarcophagus
In your eyes
I dream of my stranded tomb
Between the moist love
Of your tender breasts
I see my parched fingers thirst
To touch your mad eyelashes
Soaked to the skin
In the heavy sterile rains
Of my tropical rain forest desire.
Stranded in the terrible blank space
between
the agonized craving for silken darkness beyond oblivion
and the anguished craving for ripe secrets of your mouth
I stand helplessly waiting for rains
to flood my gutters and streets

13 June 2003


IV) My Mouth is an Old Useless Tunnel


My mouth is an old useless tunnel
In which the abandoned corroded railway tracks go in
But don’t come out.
You are the light at the end
Of my mouth.

My face is brittle like a mummy’s
When I try to take it off like a tedious mask
It falls into thousand pieces
On the floor.

Let me remove my hands from my elbows
And offer them to you in a dish full of oranges
And grapes.

I want to make a garland of my ten heads
Interwoven with sliced watermelons and pumpkins
For your neck.

Allow me to take out
The funeral procession of my brown eyes
And bury them
On your nipples.
I will wait for marigolds
To burst forth on their graves.


V) Wait for Me


Like dried teak leaves
My eyes have come off

Bored crows people
The forsaken branches
Of my leafless fingers.

The sun has dropped his smooth round skull somewhere
On my treeless grounds.

I am waiting to grow into a great babul tree
In this wasteland
Where no sun grows on the trees.

My eyes gather near your feet
Blown by the barrenness of the winds.

Crows look at you
As if you are unwanted stranger.

Somewhere a monkey stares at you
And you do not know.

In the crowded thorny shrubs in my lungs
Hangs a no moon night
For
In the shifting sands of life
I have buried all my twelve moons.

My thousand eyes
Dry like leaves gathered around your feet
Blaze like the intestines of a deadpan earth.

The bored crows
Fly away into the soul
Of white inert sky.

The smooth round skull
Of the sun crumbles into dust.
I am waiting to die

Like this huge leafless baobab
On which the monkeys wait
For the fruit and a leaf.

Dust gathers on the tired tamarind tree
That has forgotten its own taste.

Dust gathers on the brown soil of my eyes.
Dust gathers on the round abandoned skulls of the sun.

Monkeys look emptily at the shadows
Of the crows which are no longer there.

Gather the ashes of my eyes in your palms.
Weep the tears blue as the earth
On the silence of my pyre.

Remember me as monkeys
Remember the fruits
When they are hungry
As the crows remember their mates
In summer. Remember me
As the leafless baobab
Flourishing on the tombs
Of the inhumed moon
Remember the rich green felicity of their leaves.
Wait for me where no one waits for anyone any longer.


VI) A Line of a Poem

Is hardly ever the shortest distance
Between two spaced points.
It is actually a misfortune of a sentence
To become a line of a poem.

Usually, it is doomed to incompletion
Disintegrate into fragments
That make no picture if put together again.

As your name means a line of a poem
I gather the fragments
Of the meanings of your name
In my faceless palms
To see how my line of Fate
Merges into your line of Destiny.

The small white butterflies
Of your scintillating laughter
Punctuate
The lines on the palms of my poems
Perching
on my unwritten commas
And full stops
Which are usually
Commencements of a new sentence.

I can only respire
My line of a poem
In my effort to escape
The rocky prison house of prose.
In front of my eyes
I see the sentences crumble
Into the fragments
Of irredeemable distances
The stoic sparrows
Peck at the common crumbs
Altercating over the words
In their insatiate beaks.


Thursday, July 22, 2004


VII) One Half of Jarasandha’s Unfinished Soliloquy



He sliced me neatly
Into two unclean halves
From the scrotum
To the skull
I am bifurcated
Like bacterium
In the biology text book
Each part alive
Each leg kicking
Each testicle alive
With bisected sperms
Each part dead
Half of my earthworm soul dead
My left-brain
Separated
From my right
My Hindu body
Cleaved
From my Muslim remains
My capitalist flesh
Amputated
From my proletariat bulk
I am half hearted now
My scream
Forks
Into two bleeding parts
My antipodal ears
Will never see each other
With their accompanying respective
Eyes

When Bhima seized my legs
In his steel grip
I thought he was going to f*** me
Instead, he ripped me into two
Like what Dante did to the Prophet
In Inferno
Tossed my halves in opposite directions
So that they won’t come together again
On the instructions
Of that Sky Blue Devil of a cowherd
Actually, he is the one
Responsible for my demerger
Arrest him for partition of India
Arrest him for the cold war
Arrest him for dividing Germany
Arrest him for every division in the world

My each part will thrash about
In agony forever
My each part will die every moment
My each part will pulsate with unspeakable pain

Only you can bestow
The conclusive death upon my writhing halves
Only then will I turn whole
Only then, will this torture of living
In two detached halves halt.

Take my undone breaths
In the cup of your palms
Take deep breath

See how my partitioned bleeding soul flows into you
Invisibly
And becomes you
Undivided and whole


Wednesday 29 March 2006
11:47 PM


VIII) Words are the Threads

Words are the threads I use to weave this jute cloth.
I intend to cover my naked self with it.
I will walk on these meaningless streets teeming with utterly boring crowd, lonely shops and soulless traffic.
I will walk and no one will call me names.

Words are the threads I want to use to weave my flimsy skin.
I intend to cover my mortal bones and flesh with it.
I will walk on these meaningless streets teeming with bodies and dust, the toxic smoke from auto rickshaws, trucks and luxury buses running on petrol corrupted with kerosene. I will walk alone and no one will notice me.

I want to wear my memories like clothes and walk these inhuman streets.
Words are threads with which I intend to weave this tenuous cover.
I will sing the song with no words in it.