Soliloquy: A commando in melancholy!

Who are you?
Is this the simplest of the simplest questions, or
The hardest of the hardest riddle?
I never knew, your name would someday drive me crazy!

Like this: What is your name, or even
Like this: How would you like me to call you:
By a name or by a title or by that signatory stamp of a dead man!
Asking and wanting to know who you are
It has indeed become a maligned thought and
I hardly able to conjure up any signs of living
Even if the blood that oozed past your nostrils
Smells the dreams of lives!
I think I have endured it for too long
And now, it looks like I have become a part of you, each one of you
With each unreadable names and every unrecognizable face
That's why I wanted to know who you are!

Is it a curse unto myself, or is it just another plain revelry
With few descriptive symbols like a tattoo in the name of your beloved, or
The name of your little daughter in your wrested wrist
Then I professed not to harm you again,
I thought, you are a shadow unto myself and
I ought not touch you again, for the love that beholds too many dreams!

*** 11/20/2009 ***

paper bullets

I couldn't afford to buy a gun,
Not even that toy gun of few rupees
For a bullet and few cartridges!
I couldn't dare a dream without dream
So living among the corpses of unknown affiliations;
I thought of using some paper bullets
To fend myself off the stray bullets!
Don't you know bullet respects bullet?

Sometimes, it’s better instead to die holding a gun
However it looks funny, even with cartridges of paper
Then to allow myself harness with nose-pipes through intestines;
For here, in my land
Everybody is dumbfounded with each gunshot
And we all know, we always eat and speak, not with the mouth.

Yes, I thought of using paper bullets
For I know, I can afford to make paper bullets
For I have grown up with aspirations drawn from the books
For I have seen the tears of burning libraries and
Its tarnished scripts taking flight with ashes.
I thought, bullets made from paper,
They will do some kind of justice to all of us.
And the best part, we don't have to be a lousy illiterate first.
For heaven's sake, we will be using books
Though in a different form, then
There will be no extortion, no matter how we fare each chak-kouba.
I mean, we can all afford to sacrifice few books from our blurbs
And even more, by doing thus
We can flaunt the bullets, these paper bullets
Like a pen, like a…a pen in the pocket of ministers that they seldom nibble
But I am pretty sure, with all our aspirations
We will be using these bullets more often than not.

For a long time, since the day I was born a Meitei
I always wished to have a gun in my hand.
How it would have looked?
A gun in the hand of toddler Jayanta's hand,
And sounds of gunshots from his little drooling mouth
Sometimes with a suckling of complaint for the weaning dream
Sometimes with a crying curse against the real gunshots!
Damn you God! It’s so surreal
And, this is how we grew up with different names
With bizarre accreditations
In different leikai's under the cloud of suspicion
Entrenched from the decades of struggle!

But we dreamed on dream and dream and dream.

In these decades, we have lost our sanity
Oh, I wish I have had a gun, in the name of the freedom
So that I can die in the womb itself.
At least, I will have a name attached with the gun
But unluckily, there ain't any gun I can be proud of holding
Nor for my parents while I was still a lump of blood.

And, everybody is happy devising new forms of protest!

Do I need to remind,
Bullet respects bullet!
So help me make bullets of paper
And the gun, oh my dear!
There is no dream without gun
There is no dream without gun
There is no school without gun
There is no body without gun
There is no grave without gun
And the paper bullets
Our best friend!

A Drunken Poem!

Who else need a song for the broken heart
Who else ever thought of a nice trickling

That damn lucky bullet
It hit hard in my conscience
It’s still wedged inside my abdomen
Where every morsel rots before digestion
Where every bowel of intestines panics
But I continue to survive
Sucking the bullet
Through mutilated veins
And we both survive
In mutual understanding that
Lives and let live.

A damn lucky life, for
A damn lucky bullet!

*** 11/18/2009 ***

a heartless soul

never have i known
me becoming a bastard of my own creation
then there were nights
through the haze called dream, and
you came calling every night, and
i continue to grow as just another shadow
happy waiting for the moments of ecstasy
in the filament of treason? or
trying to enliven another night
in the fields of pretention and ruse?

for you
i continue to slit each fang
waiting for few droplets of virgin blood
if your hearts were to be ever open,
for you
i fathom my purlicue
thinking, you once hold them ruffled
if you were ever to feel them alive

but each masquerade, i played
you were all there in joyous pretense
may be i was the wrong one
for myself, even to call a dream haze
may be i have created myself out of sheer fascination
though, i called myself a bastard
for myself in my own shadow
and you continue to chastize me:
how upsetting a soul can be
when there is no heart at all!

no, we have lived among the tricks
possibly asking for more pretension
where heartless souls play taunt
smiles, kisses, caresses
and i continue to remind her
they are all fake
like a heartless soul in the naked winter!

***11/18/2009***

Love Song!

For me
Love stories are menace of uncontrolled hearts
The effete truth that begets uncertainties
For you
You will say ‘You are colour-blind'
Like fireflies in the fields
For you
Fields grow wih wild flowers
And fireflies hum in wild songs.

Whatever, please look at this love story.

Who has rotten to the heart
Can never be redeemed with a mention of love
The boredom of highest order, if it could be written off, ever
For a mere trouble of certain generation
For the sole reason that it besets the reason
Then, my dear, what’s the ordeal
You say it?

Love wasn’t the only thing!
Dont say that I didnt paint your back
When you dry your hair in my eyes
I know this much though
Lovers draw images of loose cannons
Some smoked, some stuffed, some mellowed
Instead, look at these images
These few images, I wrought from the streets of Manipur
They penetrate deep inside my heart, and I cry
With every mention of love and reconciliation
Because, I know my heart has rotten
And your back, my dear
It's all red
Red with stamps of my name
Red with strokes of your swab.

Whatever! This is what you said.

Damn you, my beloved
That touch you often complaint about
I have lost long time back
When we were young and tender
And now, you feel it for the men,
The touch of gloat;
Damn you, my beloved
You are such a misery to me
You made me hump my own back
And my love lost its way.

So where is the love that you blamed me for?
I haven't got any heart to love you.

Yes yes
I am a colour-blind.
What I knew was the colour of red
Drawn from certain spectrum of my existence
A moist colour
A lukewarm colour
The colour that stick
And you thought
I stalk you when I touched you
You might not have known
I have tears for eyes
My lung lugged your heartbeat
Feared was me
For your name
hat you have sold to his surname.

And you called me "My Name Is Red"
I should have asked:
"ঐবু ঈরো"

Then my dear
My streets are painted afresh
And your back
It reverberates what we have lost in the ordeal
Of love and hate
You being the one, and
I being another.
So sad!

*** (November 20, 2009) ***

I Want To Wear My Freedom!

I want to wear my freedom
And conquer the world in love
I want to wear my freedom
And live a life in harmony
I want to wear my freedom
And die a peaceful death in her arms.

Look,
This is my freedom
That he is wearing a camouflage
In the fields, in the forests, in the villages
Afraid of farmers
Afraid of Christmas carols
Afraid of kids going to school
And my freedom
It looks torn and tortured
So how do I stitch its being;
For they say
‘A stitch in time saves nine’
But for my freedom
A needle big enough to prick the earth
I guess, can only stitch it,
And a spat of sewing
Like machine guns firing at will
I guess, thus can only sew it.

I want to wear my freedom, at any cost!

***(11/27/2009)****

My Psychedelic Poem!

If you ever see your favourite rack
You will know, it has got smuts left by my invasion;
There, in its every shelf
I have hidden my prominence like titles of expansive books
Some gifts and some bought, but
All hollow except the rim of covers, and
Those bookmarks of yours through every page
Of words and numerous blots
They are like my lies for a lifetime of moonlit dreams
I couldn’t hold onto myself
So I tried interpreting myself
For better or worse, that I don’t know
But, I was sure with one common alibi
I wasn’t me and I can get hurt in lot many other ways;
In fact, life itself wasn’t that beautiful
For me to hold on and expanding like a swelling balloon for a bang.
That wasn’t the truth, to say the least
But the common denomination for a living
It has to be the bliss and hope and forgetfulness.

After a brief living
I accept life receptively
Like an ever expanding mind dotted with coalescing new collages
Of dreams and few conversations on death and its afterlife!
invitation!

***(11/27/2009)****

a hEAvY bOOkSHelF

If you ever see your favourite rack
You will know, it has got smuts left by my invasion;
There, in its every shelf
I have hidden my prominence like titles of expansive books
Some gifts and some bought, but
All hollow except the rim of covers, and
Those bookmarks of yours through every page
Of words and numerous blots
They are like my lies for a lifetime of moonlit dreams
They are like my pretense that the day was actually an invitation!

***(11/27/2009)****

A Gray Poem!

My body, it reminds me of my lies
Within muffled voices in some raunchy streets
For every grotesque face in its crooked by lanes
I save my body like a heap of fool’s gold
Within aggrieving charms of glitters
Yet the voices within, though muffled
Yell at my steps, for every single step
They have million reasons to chastise me.

Then, my dear friend
How do I live thinking it’s all fair
For a body, a soul and person
Having to survive a torrent of abuses
Like love, kindness and help
Within the realm of unknown walls.

My dear friend,
My body, if you look closely
It wears a pie of colours, streaked with
Random strokes of nature
In jealousy, hunger and lies
And it looks a portrait of self effacing wave
In tatters, spread across the face of existence
Splattered with ignorance and disbelief
And this was when, I touched you.

Then, there lies ahead
The street I couldn’t fathom,
In your image, like a creek with few trickling of hope
In some dim lit alleys down your way
And my lies consummate in final ecstasy
For every hope that I professed humble, and
For every step that carries me through your street
Yet, my body wasn’t there
And I worried:
Was it a lie, for the body to survive all these while
In your shadow, following that ugly shadow of yours
And how I dare myself
Reminding, I am myself a lie!

So my dear friend
I don’t have a body, nor a soul
In fact, I am a no person
So, no pain in my existence
No repentance, and
No identity to haunt you!

***(November 21, 2009)***

Landscape!

For an old miser like me,
Who frets over the qualms of life,
Dying silently in the obscurity, and
Waiting for one last journey, is
Like a futile adventure against the destiny.

Talking about Destiny
It reminds me of certain trail, of a
Poet, a barking poet
Who barks at everything
For the black holes of undying chasm
For the graves that embrace unknown souls;
And with every pause, he says:
‘Graves and black holes
They are the landscapes with new meaning
No pretention, no fluttery, but
The landscape of a new civilization’.

Then, I kneeled
And watched the space between my legs
Upside down, it looked a morbid architecture
Left unwanted for the future
With few urinated walls of ruins
And there, I saw my body
In resurrection, like a landscape drawn poorly
For a makeshift barrage
From the lame shin who can’t follow a girl
To the mouth of sinking lips, cursed with kisses;
Little far away
Through the space between my legs
The black holes, they swerved through the nadir
And raised as graves, there
Souls hovered wearing familiar masks
And again
I am frightened for the life.

My legs,
They dropped with an awful thumped
There the poet stood tall
With his half grinned humanity
And I was left for the body.

For him
My body was one of those black holes, and
For me
My body was the grave!

*** (November 18, 2009) ***