after a very very very long time with meaningless commas and few thoughts

such a long sabbatical. it's been a year and a few more months since i have posted some-anything here. i have had a deluge of thoughts; most of them have vaporised, but luckily, some thoughts are still within my grasp. whatever these thoughts of mine may sound, and in all probability, i wish to say a thing or something -- i know, they all bear my being

it has been such a long time thinking about the being that i am is; and some 'it' inside me continues to favour them, harnessing every loose end it associates with. those very thoughts -- cultivating every seed into my belief, thus harvesting a person in me. with every thought i become something else. this happens continuously until i am bored with all these thoughts. that's when i thought, again, to write again and start posting here.

let me think with my thoughts intact, and then i will write.

forget it. i have already forgotten

Poetic Dreams (for Poems)!

Unable to meet their demands during the daytime
Poems, they come haunting in my dreams
Disguising sometimes as my beloved
Sometimes as sworn enemies
And sometimes, bringing caskets full of flowers
Found only in Manipur, like girls going to the temple

I know my beloved; she doesn’t languish in the night
Yes, except when my bouts demand her comfort.
Neither has she got any liking for flowers and temples;
Only perfect and in her brutal best, lassoing
My unstable heart; she knows the innocent flowers
And blind Gods in the temple, they can’t see a fiend in me

I also know my enemies, numerous though they are;
They have their own businesses -- devising and
Lying traps for me to fall in, but
They never dare trespass on my dreams;
Maybe they are afraid of my pillow knife
An Indian aunt got it for me from Japan.

And the flowers, those lovely flowers
I only pretend I forgot the bloom
That brings me a wet fragrance after each rainfall
And the droplets of water falling unwillingly
From the leaves, in the whips of winds
Like inconsolable tears of parting lovers
After each meeting.

But the poems, I find them rather amusing
Staying awake, up late at night
When the whole world is asleep,
Seeking an easy prey in me, while during daylight
They play hide-and-seek with their furry words
And in the night, they seek their poetic dreams
Wearing masks borrowed from everywhere

To the Serpent!

Living by the daylight of lecherous dreams
The serpent tried not to hiss. Yet its fang, all pronged
And dripped in convenient sarcasms on the epiphany
Of being raised a fortunate parasite, with unsound claims,
That serpent hissed again, in its favourite tune
Finding an easy target for its fangs in my walking feet!
But I wouldn’t die in haste, for dying,
It’s all in my blood; ever since I was born, an eclipsed soul
With a body wrought from promiscuous coffins.
I wouldn’t die, no matter how ruthless the jeers are
For I have lived weaning this body
With venoms milked from the agony of living!

Kids in Graves!

It is unusual for this to happen to me. I thought thus.
After all, I was born there, in the wilderness, in my paradise
In distinct symphony with nature; in my profitable ways,
The morning dew on the feet, the sound of streams
In the classroom, winds still stalking sugar-cane leaves
And then vanishing with a promise to come back
And of course, chirpy girls, like sparrows, chirping about me.
How do I see red in their cheeks and pink in their smiles!

Then, how is this vacuum in my heart? No, this isn’t a paradise.
This is a mound, with a vacuum inside and my body in it. No,
This isn’t the paradise that I saw. Or, am I having another incarnation
Or, in another paradise? I doubt that too! There ain’t no bird.
The paradise, in my wilderness, they have birds and trees. Yeah, maybe
The kids, they might have taken all the joy out of here.

No title

Unable to sleep, with my unwritten poems swimming in my head
And waiting for my body to succumb, I waited for someone.
To give me company, Thangjam Ibopishak came.
With one of his innocuous poems, about a lucky blouse
And his poems, all proud and ready to confess...
Why did he choose his wife’s chest to write in poems
And why can’t he buy decent clothes!

He said, ‘Very soon, his poems will be in market.’ And
He left in a hurry, leaving me with some advice: ‘Don’t write poems. Instead,
Carve statues of women. They sell at a good price.’
With my marriage looming, I am thinking of my nights
And my would-be wife, with her chest all smeared with ink!

No, I don’t know how she will like it. But for Ibopishak,
And his advice, I think, was right, at least to me.
And I know nothing, except writing poetry.
Pity her!

The Truth!

They said: ‘It’s the blaring truth,
Of the time.’ I said: ‘No, it’s the mute truth, of our time.’
Then he said: ‘You both are wrong. There is no truth, at all!’

Thus, the eternal argument continues. Me taking
Many an avatar, like incarnations with my own truth;
They waiting for me to arrive, every time the flood recedes
And He, ever present like the truth itself, but doing nothing.

Then, we erect a pole of truth, and a flag atop
With questions scribbled on truth, about
His non-existent truth, my mute truth, and
Their blaring truth! We all wait for the flag
To talk, in the wind against the wind, and to spread our message
Of truth and gather a majority. But it never fluttered.
It never fluttered for the truth.

The Misreading (of Time)!

As a result of continuous living,
I have learnt the misreading of time
It has indeed helped me understand
The vulgar it carries with the living,
And the breezy lies of time
And the moments that carry the tinged hope
Of bequeathed lives!

But as the misreading goes
Without any comma or semi-colon,
This living becomes a thick morass
Of seconds and minutes;
Chiming against the rim of faith,
Just like the time ticking and ticking
Inside the wretched watch of memory
And sometimes swirling inside my body,
The clock that doesn’t tick!

This misreading, with time
Reminds me of my brutal romance
With her words
With her ludic expressions;
The nun that she was
Knew how to caress a reflection
Like my own writings
In my heart’s parchment
In colours, garnished like never before
And the texture of her skin
In intimate consummation.
It seethed in imperial lust
Seeing my narcissism!

Yes, with time
I have misread her lines
Unable to satisfy the appetites
Whetted by time.

But at times
This misreading
It’s like an idyllic dream:
My poems falling
On the tin top, clattering
Dripping with words
In some loud monsoon night that I borrowed
And me
Holding back on myself
Watching her play with raindrops—a thought I lent from her surname

No,
It’s only a living.
But it seems
I have gone too far with the time
Waiting for that patrician whore
Who once brought me life
Every morning!

To the Shirt!

Oh! My shirt,
Lovely you! Posing as me
In this season of fake,
Giving me an identity
And representing me wherever I go, about
And humming in their tunes!

Oh! My shirt,
You allow me to live this life
Like never before
In this season of tardiness
Playing my unwashed body
Like a poor man’s cruse
Empty though, yet filled with pride.

Oh! My shirt,
I have no qualms living like this
Carrying you, instead of my body;
In fact, my body
It befits a decor for borrowed coffins.
From some crafty carpenter
Ready to be buried without a penny
Without the parting ceremony!

Yet my dear shirt,
Bring me the finest of robes
I want to walk these fine roads
For one last time, in your garb
In the finest grandeur,
So bring me the best of your robes.
Don’t you know:
They all come in their finest attire
Silky smooth shiny clothes,
So that they call me their friend;
And I am tired of this isolation -- 
Hiding, wearing only you
Like my own skin.

They even said, I stink
But you don’t know, that’s not on me;
They were talking about...
It’s you, in your fetish for this body
Tell me what’s in this body
That you can’t let go,
No, don’t say you can’t shed me off my skin!

Still Dead!

I was miserable
That’s how I saw myself
Walking through these graves

I carry with myself burdens of deprivation
Seeking poems of happier times
In recollection, in remembrance
Of happier times, when
The streets echoed with poems of abundance
But this deprivation that
I harvested for myself
It carried me afar, far from my home
In the unknown streets
Leading to the graves

I looked miserable
Walking naked in those graves
With flakes of poems
But the questions that I asked
‘On my anguish,’
The streets and graves
They responded rather clumsy.
They said: ‘I am still dead!'

Poem for a Missing Person!

My mother—she is a matric fail.
But she reads newspapers well, every morning
Before we could wake up and disturb her
With our petty demands for a day to start!

She reads it for us, picking up news of the killings
Helping us digest the scores of missing
Sentence to sentence, word by word
For names and organisations
Like her favourite weaving threads
With twisted threads ready to warp and weft,
Entwined between her seasoned fingers
For her favourite fanek
And mapping it like a plain we could live in.

Shredded and torn—that's how we find the newspapers
Each morning; and she would still read aloud
Audible enough to the entire locality,
The moment we scratched through the remains.
Bemused, we brothers and my little sister
Would search for our inventory of peoples killed
Or either missing, for yet another morning
Of listing, for the record!

This morning, I got a call from my father
Saying, my mother went into hiding the last night
After serving him the best of ngafak kangsoi,
With our inventory! My father’s worried.

He said, ‘My name is in the newspaper!’