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!’

Amnesia!

The sound reverberates
And the ambivalent response echoed
Through the myriad limbs,,,, of the body
Heart, spine, ears and many strains of hair;
The influence of existence
It embraces the qualms
To a mere provocation of desires
Like a dream beyond the shore
Compromising the wavy presumptions
Of this soulful heart;
And it dies quietly, dies
An amnesia, in the sound
Of fictitious lines!

Questions on Life!

This morning, I woke up with a purpose
A purpose to live another day
To settle a few scores with certain questions
With choicest answers
Learnt from last night’s nightmares!

Some questions,
They have become parts of me, to the self,
Like my own skin and other assortment of limbs
Carrying wherever I dare go, and
Leaving the odour of its eminence,
Off the shelf
Every time I move, carrying
These questions and the body
For answers
Even before I could ask myself
Even before I could identify myself!

Sometimes,
I think I am groping for answers
To the questions that I have never asked
Sometimes,
It looks like I am painting my dreams
Even before I could fall asleep
And at times,
I feel disgusted with myself
Even to think about my existence, and
The eminence it portrays
In shadows and its many glorified shades!

But the morning
In its many glories
Brought me strength
For a day to challenge myself
Asking questions about my being
And many forsaken truths
Like double-headed riddles
Those, for so long
I thought of excuses
In the grasp of life
With its many demands
Comfort, cosy dreams, and
Cherries and blue nights!

These questions, those questions
Now they let me live
And I better not ask
Until I have lived my life
For all the truths that I sought
In questions for answers!

The Plight!

Initially, I thought
I was borne for the occasion
In celebration of life
No matter how I do look like
A clown, a tramp or anything
But,
Looking at the plight of these poems
I think
I am lucky
Even to fancy this look
Of varied misdemeanours within our struggle
Of a chorus
Though in tatters!

Unluckily for my poems
Their plight, I can’t grasp:
No one reads!

Are they that bad? Or
A lousy scream of a few scattered words
In its many faces, some volte and some lewd;
Are they the worst form of reprisal
Like a verbal tirade of soured dreams
Or like words conjoined like Siamese twins
For people to despise in heart
Yet pretending a heap of cheap similes?


Oh no!
You all seem to know me and my poems
Within its many dead incarnations,
The flirt of the dreamy town
With the corrugated shilling of a beggar
And my poems, as they be read as my soul
I can only breathe them
Though the haze of lies and pretensions
Like such a poem and its easy price
In praises and contemplation!

But my poems,
I swear, they bleed in your adorable flaks.

redemption: a poem!

so many of them declared me dead
seeing the muse succumbed in gloat
for poems were growl growled
but for me, who has stood
the hearing of deaf
i have chosen to walk away
"from their torments and wretched petticoats";
walking and dragging myself
"for the begging and their mercy laden taunts"
over the belief that, there
not so far away from my view,
lies my beloved, sleeping,
hiding inside a mound of requiem;
and i thrust myself
thinking of each morning i have waited
dreaming of each night i have wandered
in her tender dreams;
for her,
my poems were the corsets
she died into every night,
my poems were the birds
that took wing for her soul.

of late
the muse
she dressed rather unceremoniously
and in her invites
pleasures flew in remorse
so,
i wrote few poems
like dead birds flying and falling
and hiding feathers inside the pages,
like wedged memoirs of cursed duets
sung rather coarsely during mating
of intellects and socialites.

i have chosen to walk away
defeated and terrified
from such rituals of poetic extravagance;
those poems, i am afraid
shouldn't be buried with my dead body
for i will lie next to her
with her favourite poems

*** 01/26/2010 ***

lucky dogs!

if you ever looked through that window
through that window that rest
on the far right-hand corner of your painted room
you would have seen many a street dogs
prying on the foetuses,
foetuses of all sizes and audacity,
big, small, resonant, breeded, waxed
just shed form the womb
and thrown on the pavements
in the drain by the pavement
in the dustbins
in the schoolbags for books
they were all borne in the shackles
but walking as if they all borne
with the knowledge of the paths
and wriggling in the bin,
as if each one of them already knew the filth
and the lucky dogs, for them
kids, are the best of feasts
soft bone, silky smooth yet munchy flesh
and yet not a spray of dust
lucky dogs having a taste of human, their masters!

***01/26/2010***

why is that i couldn't cry

why is that i couldn’t cry, aloud
for us, brought up in hidden ridges
with scary nights of gunshots

tears have run dry
and we paint the pain like a dichotomy
on numerous patriots
dying hungry and in desolate cravings

why is that i couldn't cry, aloud

am i waiting for the coffins to fill with tears
am i waiting for the deaths to walk again
am i waiting for children to swear dead wombs

waiting for me to cry again
i have wrought dreams through umpteen promises
teasing martyrs in their graves
for every single drop of tears
may be they will chastise me
seeing me pretending a poet

waiting for me to cry again
i have harvested my soul with fickle desires
writing eulogies for each one them
and sometimes praying them to live my life
and to burry me there, in their graves
for i have done nothing of sort
other than waiting for tears

yet, i am still waiting for tears

a testimony, a poem

of many sleepless nights
there lives the odour
in its many layer of sits;
i seek virtue
for who i was
though, its beknown to all
no vistue for tramps
and the odour of tramps
who walks random streets
picking rags of torn relationships
wrtitng testimonies with words borrowed
and there, someday will be a full-circle
for i pity on those sleepless nights

silence breeds poetry

your poems hurt as much as my silence
they speak the untruth of my un-being
and i seek a canvas to paint my guilt
like meaningless noises perforated
through dilemmas of words
but how often did i play with the secrets
thinking them to be sources of my indignation
or maybe all that i was fed to believe
then, your poems…
one after another
even after i have buried my sonorous claims
your poems...
one after another
continue to exonerate the untruth that
has lived with me like my own affirmation
on your so-called truths

poetry nausea!

"what do you do with your poems"
a slut asked me!

i said:
"i sleep with them,
they are my mates and
i am a polygamous poet, and
each poem,
they inhibit my fertile appellations
within each strand of belief, and
in the subsequent morning..."

she undid my eloquence and little subjectively
continued:
"do they beget children?"

i have a quaint look at her
then explained:
"my textuality,
at times figuratively overwhelm the congenial serviles
like wombs ready for cross fertilisation
and, we beget epigrams
in the subsequent mornings"

after a brief gasp
she said:
"is this your slutty poem
that i have been waiting for my response"

i said:
"no my dear!
i can, no longer, read hymns for you"

little later
i died in her lap!