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)

Snowflakes

Twenty odd years into the century

with strange happenings in all

Corners of the planet;

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 

But not one of those seven billion 

jailed by a tiny thread 

of nucleic acids found the will

to swim, to implode; Or to search

for another star, another flight

To visit families now aware 

Of the vastness of oceans 

But we sent a camera craft 

to Mars in that same year 

(As posted to Facebook poetry group)

Go

Be gone, you words, 

you easy sluts. 

You come and go

As you wish. 

I wish no no more 

for your charmed light 

You friendly butterflies,

Alphabet symphonies 

Be gone you pretenders,

Unloving mothers 

of my stillborn thoughts; 

Don’t buzz, don’t swirl, do not

Come one by one and silently 

Stand at the cobwebbed corners 

Of my still-less mind 

Your silence is a hoax

A web of quantum tangles

One syllable here and another 

Echo somewhere down 

Memory maps on the dark side

Of the moon. But there you go

Again, you words, you weird 

masters of my destiny 

I speak no more of you 

Pray, leave, be gone, 

You words

Go measure the ends of this

Universe in your lengthy,  

Pithy tales 

One hand, one pair of lips 

One wandering lock of hair

Every minute that I ever 

Lived, now locked in your 

Cruel jails, go, leave words and 

Let me be. 

Go, leave now and let there be me