We have decided to move on
And we would move on now,
Shuffling our feet ,in rhythm.
Sea would move on in nights,
With a soft hum against rock
After the turtles turned turtle.
As the crows would move on
They stopped on their deaths,
Till bellies stopped rumbling,
And fear turned in at throat.
Bellies would move on under.
After each grief we move on.
Healer would pick lady in crowd
She would fall like tree in storm.
We witnessed a miracle on body.
The tree falls but does not get up.
Tree is timber for home furniture .
Wood hardly knows it was a tree.
The girls walked past us with lemons
In their spoons embedded in mouths
With their eyeballs screwed on them
Below noses with shining gold rings.
As the skirts undulate over the knees
The Lolitas with the lemons to prove
Infallible, in the little bowls of spoons
Would march ahead ,defeat a despair
By lemons smelling good , tasted sour
But one could always make lemonade.
The moon is a big lemon for the poets
Above the firs in the snow mountains.
Moon has his own lemonade to make
In the smaller hours of a wakefulness
When they are no firs to host a moon.
The lemons of girls are good enough
For the poet’s lemonade, so infallible
From bowl of spoons as they walked.
At times, moon lemon would slip off
Behind wavering firs in the snow hill.
This here thing restricts choice by keeping
Myself committed to filling of a white face
In a space frame , as spring pad for action
All through the windy chime of dark night.
I have no choice to come out of the frame.
Much like dog’s solo performance outside
Amidst Beethoven performed in the room
A poet has no choice but take bark as oboe.
I am committed to choice of a white space
For morning’s filling , in sounds of chimes.
Lucky, freedom is curtailed and I can hear
Sirens singing without running into rocks.
(Odysseus ties himself to the ship’s mast in order to hear the sirens’ song without the temptation to steer the ship to the rocks. Beethoven’s music is in reference to Billy Collins’ poem Another Reason Why I Do Not Keep A Gun)
Moth pulses with its brevity,
Embracing its rain and light,
Like lightning upon the sea
That appears behind a wish.
Fish eats wonder struck rod
Going its way down to earth.
Earth goes briefly out of sea
A lack of sodium discovered
Or less iron in blood flowing,
Brine flowing in ideal brevity.
Sea is brief skin of the earth
That hides people and bone.
My brevity is longer than fish
But shorter than mountain’s.
All -things’ brevity measures
Bone and long ,against a sky.
When I close a book I open life…”
Pablo Neruda
Keep the magic open, in pages
In the smell of paper and print
And dark smell of the ancients.
Just touch a book, not to shout.
Surprise worms at their game,
Adding dusty page of your life.
Close a book to keep life open.
You close to be stuck with life
Through the despair of magic
That vanishes on each closing.
Some bodies thought they were sky
Till they noticed they were walking.
They were no bodies but were words
Taking turn there or at the butcher’s
Where a goat was hanging tail down
And chickens would think and think
Till they are free to wake sun asleep
But no mind to know they are lunch.
Bodies had words that mourned loss.
As bodies vanished , bodies grieved
Bodies are words that are just vapor.
There are other bodies, other words.
Books are like old Dostoevsky
In my book case, coming alive
Long on Karamzhov passions
The exquisite insanity of man.
Its horse carriage is like boat
That takes us through stories
Death awaits end of journeys
All through a hobbled street
On nights of intense passion.
Books are just some journey.
If your shibboleth is swollen
The sound of our word lives.
She is survivor she says it all
With such an onomatopoeia,
We are now meaning a river
And mountains are our pass
She already is mountain top.
No one asks, to say the word
She who is beyond all words
Reads meaning beyond lips.
She is already the Shibboleth
She pronounces so correctly.
Here ,this man makes little houses
In plastic miniatures, in his garage.
We wonder if he can make plastic
Model of boy’s fear in mud house
Of phantoms from the dark jungles
Who burn bright in their shadows,
To such confusion you never know
When beauty ends and fear begins.
