Let me sing you a song on freedom!

Let me sing you a song on freedom
It has been going on for ages, and
I couldn’t hold it anymore,
It has indeed started to harness its own will
Against my claim that I am still a free man!

This song on my freedom,
It cries in its morbid soliloquy
It plays my part, it plays your part
And you and I, somewhere under a gloomy sky
Recite many an untamed verses, and they thought
We are here for the waiting, for a brighter tomorrow!

This song on my freedom,
It summons many a trial on me
It seeks many unsound reasons!
Yet, I continue to sing
Listening alone, like a cry
For numerous gallows, in a single cry!

Let me sing you a song on freedom
Let me sing you a song on freedom
For your freedom
For our freedom
It has been going on for ages, and
I couldn’t hold it anymore!

Requim of a lost Dream!

My silence and the darkness ahead
I feared, what if I looked damn for a demon
In the dark, without a word for the soul
Standing in silent vicissitudes and
Ever approaching living dreams,
Like a staccato in a rhythm
In some wintry evenings
All bleak and hoarse, and
My being came to a halt
In audible screech…

And, My friends,
They proclaimed of a dream
And the dead song, unequivocal
Of the dream, dreaded feared, for
A requim in the dawn, of
Some late risers, like
You and I…

Then,
Every one of us
In my silence
Called me a dead poet;
But did we know
I was long dead
Even for a dead poem
That I recite in our numerous graves!

Forgive me my friends
I did tried to weave few dreams
But it seems
We are singing songs of dead
Evermore!

m still happy

i tried hard to weave a cocoon
but the seasonal weavers have already harvested them all,
i tried hard to fake a corpse
but the occasional nightmares drove the dreams away,
i tried not to die a deluge in the ocean of poems
but the anonymous fireflies bring me my private literature!

you may not have known,
i have tried to conquer my heart and body with listless steps
but the gait, it has taken my back a toll,
i have tried to save a morsel a day through the hopeless nights
but the earnings have lost the chequered in the midst of tears!

but i am still happy with these little pains here and there
but what i abhor is me wraping in half-eaten mulberry leaves
even the silkworms in *Ishok Ching*, they have their dues cleared
before the moths mate, with few coupling here and there

Cactus and Poems!

I buried my poems
With my body
In a barren dream
And plant a cactus
Above the insoluble grave
Of fear!

Next morning
I found myself with sprouts of thorns,
Thorns, everywhere
In my chest, everywhere
In the body, for every hair;
And the poems
They resurrect
As thorns!

Of each poem I betrayed
There is a thorn, and
They grew like quaint dreams
Of December, and
My poems with every concoction
In its easy demeanor and
Craven of weary words, hushed:
‘My body is still buried,
Dreaming and still worshiping visitors;
In dreams, in a vainly wrought coffin
Of hope, for a future yet to impregnate!’

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)****