WHY THE TORTOISE GOT ITS SHELL

Since the time a mountain 

was eased on to

my philanthropic back,

I turned a nomad

home is where I am alive,

and so I carry my heart, my beak, 

eyes, innards, skin and soul,

so no hope, nor fears are left behind 

Home is somewhere to hide 

my bruised fingers 

from when I touched the fire 

of your cardinal desire 

A legacy that will live on in

brooches and necklaces, 

combs, hairpins, frames for eyeglasses

delicate works of bekko art;

A sour old man’s curse, this home, mine 

to wear as a wedding present that never arrived, 

weighing down on my need to roam, 

to not run in the race, oh to be a nomad!

Mount Fuji

Do you know of gods churning an ancient white ocean,

burying couldrons of grief-tinged devotion

beneath this giant of a peakless mountain

Do you know of days burning with reason nor rhyme

or of those that truly know the poetry of time

Did you you hear those lies that mothers sing of folklores, sweet loves and springtime 

One such tale they wove of him, the god who was born  

when that unlikely couple met at a promiscuous dawn

Tender earth made love to the mystical sky

And they said he was born tiny, a tad too shy

Along came grief, vanity or jealous might

he grew by the day and through the night 

His heart opened a longing hole heavenwards

And his arms spilled over the earth downwards 

Perhaps he yearned to make a home for three, 

In misty cloud-cysts, but them two, never free

His unborn brothers lie buried round his girth 

Who saw his birth, who knew this worth

He Fujisan, sings their songs from autumn's lengthy tomes

He Fujisan weaves clouds on his untracked mighty stones 

And down below we weave our punctured lives 

into blurred portraits, into false tales of truthful strifes

Fujisan, do you live in those stories of daily deaths

Of your mother's infinite thirst, her never ending quest?

p.s:Another piece of unused writing recycled. Was trying to merge the Indian myth of churning of the ocean by gods using the mount meru with myths I heard of Mount Fuji. Forgive me please for inaccuracies

(As posted to a Facebook poetry group Singpowrimo)

Again

Another truth, an alternate view 

An epiphany to save your life

A new abacus to count blessings

This ancient way to hold your breath

That drive to practise, to compete, to win 

Again this world will sell us 

Magic, hope and dissent to dissipate 

the nature, nay, the very soul of fear  

How many tedtalks does it take 

to know, what’s known is known too late

(As posted to a Facebook poetry group Singpowrimo)

Indira you’re going to be here tomorrow

Wondering if it was still worth,

those coffees and bridges over rain 

Breathless moons, silly limericks 

Sudden urge to hold on and not

to ever let go of he, who 

melted all too soon into the crowd 

But what of those afternoons

that linger as fragrant dried roses

somewhere in his everyday words

You will still be tomorrow, Indira 

here to count moles on his beloved

half-forgotten face

(As posted to a Facebook poetry group Singpowrimo)

Staying Sane

Twenty one reasons to remain 

attractive at forty two, two 

Children, a home in all shades of blue

Cars, cards, cuddles and the sweet pain 

of knowing that each night at nine, we kiss

& tiny, timid polka dots light up the sky

Perfect porcelain angels look on, do not fly

handing out stabbing aches called bliss  

I wonder if you know that I am sane now

Attractive at forty two, two lifetimes 

into these Marie-kondo shelves, glorious primes 

Rid of your insane breath, sober and how

(As posted to a Facebook poetry group Singpowrimo)

Chinnu, before you taught me to love

I was to teach you the ways of this world 

How does one conjure jungles and jinns,  

When to let rainbows pour onto lilac walls

Where can you skip, hop and land in moody monsoon’s muddy puddles 

Who to cling on to when bubbles, balloons, all the bells and all the balls are gone 

Why do stars twinkle and not ceiling lights, 

Which sand knob on the beach turns the snow-white sliver moon on

I look up all night for the best ways to 

teach, Google, YouTube, Gurus, Gods,

But no books

No books taught me how to braid 

peacock feathers, yards of jasmines, into tender coconut fronds, 

And Siri paints a myriad pandemics 

on a mute pink rash on your freckled arm

Strangers, and their dangerous gaits, Mothers say, I should 

teach you of the world at large;

But for one more day, another hour, dear daughter, 

Here, learn to hold my hand and reach for the ocean waves in those monsoon puddles 

Learn, if you must that before thunder, there is light

And that after darkness, there is always light 

Before you leave me empty hearted

Drained and spent, here 

and now there is so much 

to learn, so much to teach, so many

earthen lamps to light 

(As posted to a Facebook poetry group Singpowrimo)

Waiting for water

You queue up for water at ungodly 

hours in a city of imagined ladders

Plastic tumblers of every hue, your passports to  technicolor dreams

Around the corner, they sew sinews 

and nerves to cinema screens, 

Winged unicorns devour grown-ups

But you wait your turn to be carried by chance 

You, you are just one among a billion 

taught in telugu to long, to not wait to belong in and around 

Temporary queues for temporary wants

Airports feature in your dreams too

Oh yes, as bright as a hundred drums of 

drinking water, freedom, being adult,

One hundred drums, twenty trumpets and  fifty tall elephants in a temple fair, a queue to enter

Every unopened door, jostling through

Multitudes, senses, smells, desires

All merged into a jealous, nervous wait for your turn 

Not too long after the gods carry you on a crystal craft, to a mirror-wedged city

of perfectly-aligned rubbish bins, 

polite traffic lines; neat lunch queues

You see small gaping holes in the sky

You count them all, oozing technicolored 

Airplane fuel, oil slicks from up the heavens,  

Stardust of memories, water gushing 

off unlimited taps, those holes in the sky 

Fill every cell of your mirror-wedged city 

And you learn to queue again, 

for toilet rolls, oil and rice, to seal

Some of those holes, but without 

water, this time around

(As posted to a Facebook poetry group Singpowrimo)

Yes, Ships do dance!

Then this myth of an ancient ship 

hauled alone by a prescient fish

sprawled on waves of a drowned wish

They say, I’d made an ordained trip 

I took seeds from Darwin’s stingy grip,

Sealed words from tomes of his niche 

Packed wee wounds on my soul amiss 

They say, I sang of a future in worship  

But what is tomorrow if not an infant of the now 

Cradled, cajoled, in rivers of collective  past

Into delicious torrents of expectant trance 

They say today has been in a quantum vow 

entangled in every ship’s mission to last 

Until the fish learn to fly or maybe to dance  

(Note: Many ancient cultures believed in cycles of time and regeneration, not a start from the scratch. This is a feeble tribute to that idea based on the imagery of a Hindu Purana which talks of Vishnu in the form of a fish who took a boat with representatives of all living creatures and all living knowledge ashore during the “great flood”. As posted to a Facebook poetry group Singpowrimo)

Prefect’s Towel

Grab these cheat-sheets to 42 with or without a loved one, 

Smear on galaxial highways, a dense yellow sheen Of spinning yarns, of ripening, of having been, of not being done

Towels! Yes, towels! Beach-towels,

Bath-towels, hand-towels 

Kitchen-towels, face-towels

Sweet-scented paper towels, 

Lush collective pinnacles of human effects 

In faded ice-cream pastels, royal ivory or intrepid Madras checks, 

Raw bruised cottons, soft PVA viscose or Turkish luxury pecks, 

Towels to dry the boobs, towels to hide the tears

Towels to furl the sails, towels to fold the fears

Towels and more towels to wipe away bottomless years

Take twenty towels in white and two in pink

Count infinite galaxies as one in a soul-sink, 

Repeat, rinse, repeat and do not panic

(As posted to a Facebook poetry group Singpowrimo)

Poetry

Wordy kaleidoscopes 

Into that otherworldly 

dusk-light, tributes to 

a Jasmine-haunted 

lucent late evening 

Our now-cimmerian

story just being poured 

out letter by letter as though 

by a poet from the clouds

Poetry is that purple saree 

hanging from our ceiling

fan; yes that same one sold 

faulty by a thrice-greedy 

salesman in the shop, whose

name sometimes flashes 

into my mind at random 

prompts by jasmine

notes in brightly lit malls;

Dimly lit temples, terrible

Purple hues of party

Balloons; poetry is those

Sadly tangled syllables,

anklets round your feet

I held on to while a

purple knot on your neck

remained lodged in my words; 

These needless pages;

and all the holes that I ever

dug to bury all the whys 

Poetry is questions from my 

lost childhood, silent alliterations

to silence wordless whispers 

in the wind

If I were good enough: for you, 

for us and for all the poets

known and unknown, would 

kaleidoscopes still be a deep-purple

(As posted to a Facebook poetry group Singpowrimo under the title: what is love if not a lance to drain sweet scabs of purple pain)

Snowflake - edited

Twenty odd years into the century

with strange happenings in all

corners of a pale blue dot;

It was said that hearts frozen 

in loneliness blow up dead stars

As well as they could men, 

women and children 

All it took was a cocktail of 

snowflakes & ancient uranium 

Or maybe it was a myth, 

from many years before 

When watchmakers were yet 

To melt needles into back-lit digits 

When all of those spaces 

between words, could be painted

into pages of a stranger’s thoughts 

A nuance, a comma, the way one 

Goes about collecting snowflakes 

Sitting on the equator peering into 

instant-faces, hash-tags, story-lines

Distant galaxies of other-peoples- worlds

Twenty odd years into the century

with strange happenings in all

corners of a pale blue dot;

There is no room 

to remember differently from you, 

those shades of an afternoon spent 

In the rain; frozen forever 

into filtered pictures of fun,

So no, not not even one of these

seven billion jailed by a tiny thread 

of nucleic acids will find the will

to swim, to implode or to search 

for another star, another flight, another 

way to hug families now fully aware 

that the famed vastness of oceans, 

Is no longer a myth

Bit by bit, before the snowflakes 

settle, we dig the earth for another 

hour, another way to spend the year

And sent a camera-craft to Mars for uranium 

 

(As posted to Facebook poetry group)