Ratnarao’s short verse

The afternoons were  glycerine
Add angst of the worst type
Evenings were musical and mushy
Twilights accumulated unaware
She shimmered in white wine
A black night danced in my veins
It was a charade , this love thing.
I woke up on the next day
With colored marbles of careful words
That clattered against each other
In the vacuum of my heavy head

In Bishnupur our horses no longer fly
Their long decorated necks look pretty
But break soon and dissolve into the earth
We now have potato cold storages,here,
Our youth are playing cards under the banyan
Our horses do not fly these days.

Her eye-lashes flutter like a bat’s wings
Embers of selfness still smoulder
Unreturned love a cover for bruised ego.

He stays on the other shore
Rolling beauty waves, softly,
With hypnotizing hand-motions
There are now gentle ripples
I sit alone, in the hotel room,
My limbs stiff ,my mind still
After several acts of tokenism
I have failed to synchronize
With the music of his waves.

The night is dark ,liquid and saturated
With the impossibility of our situation
As the night deepens, clusters of fireflies
Rise from the depths of the earth
Sowing seeds of sweetness and light
In the vast wild wastes of the firmament.

 
 
Words are sea-shells
You so tirelessly collect
On the Vizag beach
Only to empty your pockets
And throw them away
When you reach home.

 
 
You  lie spread-eagled,
In the Volvo night bus
Re-living in celluloid
Suburban train horrors
Of three living-dead humans
Watching a twelve-year-old ,
Spread-eagled ,dying of love.
 
 

Fleeting images strike the mind
Like moths in the first rain
The window-sill is carpeted with wings
And the garden walk strewn
With carcasses of one-day glory
These are long wet nights
Of  rich rakings of gossamer wings.
 
 

There is a gentle rustle
In the coconut frond;
Our hand-fans fail to
Agitate the wind around.
The squirrel runs up the tree
A half-eaten guava
Falls to the ground.
This moment, now,
We don’t understand.
The night will be on us
As if nothing has happened
The crows will retire
As if a gun-shot is heard.
We have seen it all
We have heard it from others.
This is [...]

Then the world moved away under our feet;
A barebacked child mopped the floor under us
A fifty -paise coin glistened in his hungry eyes,
Like the broken sun found in the muddy puddle
That had formed in yesterday’s wind and rain.