The elephant ride

At such height ,you can see the mountains.
The secret is to hold on and not to let drift

To mountains on thorny low-slung bushes
With blue clouds on top presaging storms.

Without ankush it takes us to inner animal
Trees uprooted, mountains pulled up near

With the dusk shining from the rear flanks.
Muthu teaches to wield ankush to let it go

Where we want to go, the blue mountains,
Not where pleasure or lust or desire led us.

(The mind is a rider on an elephant. ‘My own mind used to wander
wherever pleasure or desire or lust led it, but now I have it tamed, I
guide it, as the keeper guides the wild elephant-Buddha)

Shiva in the hills

All the machinery is there ,in siren’s blow
A blade, a voice to the right, some words.

The blade cuts through ice, mud and lies
Saying it is words from the night, a sleep.

It is bodies in their own words in a space
A chopper on way down , men stopping

Short, other people alive and some dead
For a hill visibility that is missing from life.

Silence is all ,the stone phallus in the hills
Snug in the cave ,a light from earth lamp

A blue and dusted god with a river in hair
And moon no longer super, high from us.

Words are his dreams, a god in snow hills,
A god submerged by the river of his wife.

Imagery

At once visual and tactile, the imagery sprouts
Abrupt dunes on plain-speak, bush and sand.

It would not matter the girl was what and how
Her space notwithstanding, time in her pocket.

That is where it is ticking away, at blind curve
Like a river in eternal bind near the mountains

Curving away in bend, near the sleeping trees.
Images are real, belonging to our very spaces.

Yellow sheet

Let me write into a yellow colored paper
The mass of yellow of the eclectic sheet

For many crawling letters,coming to life
While another night moves on to decay

Spurred on by the fading cricket’s noise.
Blind poet wrote yellow before his dark

Who wants to remember the last world
As yellow world that stood out in a fog.

A fog can only be grey like a frog visible
Only by its leaps across the rain puddle.

A yellow sun that stands out in the dark
Stays in eyes like before they are closed.

Words are little frogs in this yellow sheet
Visible only by sudden jerky movements

Across long stretches accruing meaning.
A yellow sheet is temporary note taking.

Poor copy

We are one with many, in many places
In many climes, the every man’s island
Who dances barefoot to robotic music.

We are spectacle we make of ourselves.
We think we are someone else in body.
Our body is the child’s mind story teller.

We are such poor copy soon we forget
Who we are, as our plot gets mixed up.
We make spectacle of our loose selves.

Negation

Who are they who had said we would do
And disappeared with no to their resolve

Ghosts that they are, not even whodunit.
The train comes in ,reiterating existence

Mine and the red railway bridge that sat
Under train ,under the weight of history.

Down below there is coal under very feet
A black coal of negation, a fear in a belly

Of our existence, gathered in hollow pits
That river fails to fulfill with its lazy sand.

Fans and buckets

Stories are from  inside as we confer value
On vacant things and the holes in  memory.

Like the woman who had kicked a table fan
In  diffused russet hues of a tiny beauty-dot

As if it is  a bucket women routinely kicked,
In stories of kickety table fans and  women.

We do not blame the table fan for officiating
The role of a bucket the old woman  kicked.

The table fan has views on sundry subjects.
It cannot surely be blamed for higher views.

Our own table fan ticks off all our men, as if
It alone makes wind trees are shivering with.

Comedy on the deck

It is  albatross not around a poet’s neck
But in it , in total lack of walking grace

Like a squawking woman ,obstreperous
And spacious, with  a tinge of the tragic

In a ship’s comedy of  wingless walking.
The poet has his comedies in a boudoir.

Here he walks privately his restless arm
Flung in the air, beating the air comically

As if swatting many mosquitoes  words.
He better stay there ,not come to the aft

When the sailors are waiting to prod him.
Laughter explodes after him on the deck.

(Reference is to the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Albatross”)

No spring can tempt our winters

Priest poet goes back to sin garden,
Spring with snakes and temptresses,
To save our lambs from fruits of sin.

Spring starts in nipple-size mangoes.
The neem flowers drop like snowfall.
But no spring can tempt our winters.

(referring to the “spring” poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Water poetics

Where you begin with the water tanker
A keyboard presses in repeated poetics

But the sound of tanker soon falls away.
Only neighbor’s hole is filled to its brim.

His water speaks softly to his wet dark.
Our hole is still empty, holding its night.

Morning fears a dark silence in cisterns
And much more, the vacuous air sounds.

Only the water from a distant hole can
Transform their vacuum states to fluids .

Meanwhile open a morning’s skull-pate
And pour poetry words into its dark hole

Waiting for a sputter of the next tanker
Before a tepid conclusion of last stanza.