The nowhereness, the nothingness, the absence of you
Is in those your words unspoken,
In what your eyes haven't broken
open,
In the straightest stream of sunlight upon a syllable askew.
The almostness of youness, this nearlessness thing
Upturns in garden rows, unpoetried,
Hangs by a nail in spaces, ungalleried
Incognied
Like notes that dangle from the lips of a man who yet intends to sing
This gap-ness, this would-have-been happiness, the nothereness you are
Lies, dies, in the dust of unreadness of my book,
Cries with the notness that knowing, with just one look,
took
Like stories still unborning, in realms still a-churning, in worlds still afar.
The unbeing and unseeing and undoing of wherever you are there,
Is the diziness,
the everydayness of business,
Isness
Of your constantly, so constantly, being elsewhere.
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Song of the Clay
Clay-keeper,
dust-eater,
shape-shifter,
seek
Simple lines
forbidden mines
untangled vines
speak
languages imaginary
constellations luminary
tongues of apothecaries
release
my craven omniscience
unfulfilled prescience
finger-tip efflorescence
tease
my many wandered souls
numerous misshapen wholes
unholy the fathoms of my holds
mould
me with your worthiness
knead this virginal earthiness
auscultate my genesis
fold
me to your neat design
exhilerate and redefine
identity that is all mine
free
cauterised impurity
flagellatory impunity
a fire-burnt jejeunity
be
fortune-teller
master, seller
jealous-owner-maker
mine.
dust-eater,
shape-shifter,
seek
Simple lines
forbidden mines
untangled vines
speak
languages imaginary
constellations luminary
tongues of apothecaries
release
my craven omniscience
unfulfilled prescience
finger-tip efflorescence
tease
my many wandered souls
numerous misshapen wholes
unholy the fathoms of my holds
mould
me with your worthiness
knead this virginal earthiness
auscultate my genesis
fold
me to your neat design
exhilerate and redefine
identity that is all mine
free
cauterised impurity
flagellatory impunity
a fire-burnt jejeunity
be
fortune-teller
master, seller
jealous-owner-maker
mine.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
A poem for women who organise rallies
Waters break, wombs awake, Wisdom gushes
To the feet of women sipping wine from glasses made of wind and more.
Agitate, regurgitate, ally, rally, presenilely profligate
Find common cause, complicate, gravitate, and in the hoopla, asphyxiate upon its hidden bones.
Shrill ideas, stinging tones, shrines and shrouds and shoot the moon,
Sybils shove, and show-and-tell, and sieve the sounds of sanity through sideshows filled with shells.
Who goes there, friend or foe, or feeble fence-sitting feminist folk?
Falter now and forsake the free, the freedom of infidelity, else stay and feed the frenzy with torn confetti from your mind.
Kapellmeister, orchestrate the kindnesses of king and state,
Kneeling to a kinder cause, a Keepership of karhais, knead knowledge to feed the masses with.
Harness your out-of-the-box hormones, you harlot to hysteria,
What hindrance to all harmony, what heaven-ordained ignominy, hold on to the history in your hands.
To the feet of women sipping wine from glasses made of wind and more.
Agitate, regurgitate, ally, rally, presenilely profligate
Find common cause, complicate, gravitate, and in the hoopla, asphyxiate upon its hidden bones.
Shrill ideas, stinging tones, shrines and shrouds and shoot the moon,
Sybils shove, and show-and-tell, and sieve the sounds of sanity through sideshows filled with shells.
Who goes there, friend or foe, or feeble fence-sitting feminist folk?
Falter now and forsake the free, the freedom of infidelity, else stay and feed the frenzy with torn confetti from your mind.
Kapellmeister, orchestrate the kindnesses of king and state,
Kneeling to a kinder cause, a Keepership of karhais, knead knowledge to feed the masses with.
Harness your out-of-the-box hormones, you harlot to hysteria,
What hindrance to all harmony, what heaven-ordained ignominy, hold on to the history in your hands.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Monday, February 09, 2009
Flicker
On your brow,
those lines, they are mine.
I’ve seen them before.
There by the mango tree in the garden,
down which the grey-blue caterpillars of summer inched and itched onto the ground, going crunch crunch under your big boots?
I winced as you walked, but you went anyway.
You had things to do, places to visit, people to see,
Important stuff that you couldn’t explain, I wouldn’t understand.
Don’t ask why you said, it just had to be done…
Ghosts laid to rest so they wouldn’t come haunting you again.
Lifetimes of debt counterbalanced, from your savings of many births.
Pockets of your soul were they now full enough,
Now deep enough, now generous enough,
As you walked, the loose change, it jangled.
“What will I do till then?” I asked.
You shrugged. “Find something”.
But, you half-turned, and frowned. Don’t lie. I saw it.
The white madras cotton fluttering against your steely shoulders…
The line and the cut and the curve of it all
Is mapped into fingers that have been searching across lifetimes
So unlike you,
that flicker of doubt.
The memory of it unclouding you from the rest for eternity.
That was a few lifetimes ago.
The tree’s been felled,
The caterpillars still appear from time-to-time.
And lest you think my feet have turned into the roots you planted them by,
What I’ve been doing with myself since then
doesn’t concern you anymore, so don’t ask.
Are you done? Let’s go inside
Coffee is freshly brewing
I have no more patience for long absences and karma.
those lines, they are mine.
I’ve seen them before.
There by the mango tree in the garden,
down which the grey-blue caterpillars of summer inched and itched onto the ground, going crunch crunch under your big boots?
I winced as you walked, but you went anyway.
You had things to do, places to visit, people to see,
Important stuff that you couldn’t explain, I wouldn’t understand.
Don’t ask why you said, it just had to be done…
Ghosts laid to rest so they wouldn’t come haunting you again.
Lifetimes of debt counterbalanced, from your savings of many births.
Pockets of your soul were they now full enough,
Now deep enough, now generous enough,
As you walked, the loose change, it jangled.
“What will I do till then?” I asked.
You shrugged. “Find something”.
But, you half-turned, and frowned. Don’t lie. I saw it.
The white madras cotton fluttering against your steely shoulders…
The line and the cut and the curve of it all
Is mapped into fingers that have been searching across lifetimes
So unlike you,
that flicker of doubt.
The memory of it unclouding you from the rest for eternity.
That was a few lifetimes ago.
The tree’s been felled,
The caterpillars still appear from time-to-time.
And lest you think my feet have turned into the roots you planted them by,
What I’ve been doing with myself since then
doesn’t concern you anymore, so don’t ask.
Are you done? Let’s go inside
Coffee is freshly brewing
I have no more patience for long absences and karma.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
The Others
Sometimes, I wonder if
(between you and me)
There’s a third, we do not see.
That person, whom you think you know,
Or whom perhaps I imagine you to be
Hidden in an imperceptible gap of reality.
For when I clink my glass to yours
(I could swear) there’s a moment’s pause,
In which the one you think you are, slips right through those unseen doors.
For when you tell a joke of which
I don’t approve, but laugh anyway,
(I do believe) someone leaves, even as the rest of me stays.
And when you greet me do you find
Just that part of me you don’t really mind,
The same you say you love, but don’t, well, not nearly all the time?
Is that why when kids break glass
They say instantly ‘it wasn’t me’?
As though there could be someone else, someone there, implicitly?
When a badly dressed woman in clothes far too gay
Hits the road in the middle of the day
I want to ask, was there someone else in the mirror this morning, what did she say?
And when a couple unkisses and unbends,
Winding up on the counsellors' couch,
"I never knew him" she whispers bitterly, and aches over every sigh, kiss and touch.
"Was none of it for real?" she asks him,
and he has nothing to say.
For he wasn't there, it wasn't him, but then again it wasn't her, it wasn't they.
Who are these Others,
Who slip between, into the crevices of you and me?
Who haunts the incompleteness of being?
Look at yourself hard, if you succeed,
There's two of you,
Being seen and seeing.
(between you and me)
There’s a third, we do not see.
That person, whom you think you know,
Or whom perhaps I imagine you to be
Hidden in an imperceptible gap of reality.
For when I clink my glass to yours
(I could swear) there’s a moment’s pause,
In which the one you think you are, slips right through those unseen doors.
For when you tell a joke of which
I don’t approve, but laugh anyway,
(I do believe) someone leaves, even as the rest of me stays.
And when you greet me do you find
Just that part of me you don’t really mind,
The same you say you love, but don’t, well, not nearly all the time?
Is that why when kids break glass
They say instantly ‘it wasn’t me’?
As though there could be someone else, someone there, implicitly?
When a badly dressed woman in clothes far too gay
Hits the road in the middle of the day
I want to ask, was there someone else in the mirror this morning, what did she say?
And when a couple unkisses and unbends,
Winding up on the counsellors' couch,
"I never knew him" she whispers bitterly, and aches over every sigh, kiss and touch.
"Was none of it for real?" she asks him,
and he has nothing to say.
For he wasn't there, it wasn't him, but then again it wasn't her, it wasn't they.
Who are these Others,
Who slip between, into the crevices of you and me?
Who haunts the incompleteness of being?
Look at yourself hard, if you succeed,
There's two of you,
Being seen and seeing.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Beautification
a park bench
sits
in the widest stretch of green, skirting concrete freshly paved,
with the grain of old wood showing through at its feet, peels of paint down its slivered cheeks, hanging in unsightly wrinkles by its eyes,
where the cooky blind cat in Number 3 scratched it,
Shankar's puppy Khudrat cut his milk teeth,
Jenny the-first-time-jogger right-angled her undusty shoes and tied her shoelace self-consciously,
around the notch where the old man Salunkhe leaned his stick,
and the slight depression of old wood into which hawker Hakim offloaded his cane basket of fruit,
and the invisible oblong where Jehangir put his book down when playing hooky from the tutor's place - where his mother whacked him when she found out-
where the cuckold Shankar the plumber lunged out at his wife and missed,
and the homeless drunk guy put down his bottle on it just there - where did it go…
where Sachin the defeated champion of the under-14 league lashed out with his bat never to pick it up again - sore loser he always was,
and two-timer Amit scuffed it once in the morning, and once in the evening,
where sometimes in the afternoons when no people came by, a few birds would sit and peck for crumbs or termites, pretty as a picture postcard...
where grandmother Misquitta and her neighbour Joanna sat to talk of how their children had changed…
and that secretary nobody-thought-to-ask-her-name sat primly in the evenings reading her book,
and Stella sat thinking of killing herself, really...
where Mr Pinto dug nails in when his business partner had skipped town,
where old man Joe still sits to place his chess pieces with knobbly fingers the kids make fun of, on his roll-up board no matter how many times they roll off the sloping bit and will never learn,
where little Dona and little Saurabh first kissed and first necked and tell the stories still of how they met over dinner in their falling-to-ruins tenement across town, from which they still come to sit upon it and just remember when things get tough…
and where Shanti met Veer for the last time when she wanted him to carve their names in the wood but he went off to marry Preety instead,
where Chottu was brought for his first ever walk and saw his first pigeon on the backrest of a faded bench and his mother to this day swears he gurgled at as though he understood what she was saying….
But it’s just a bench, and it’s been here too long and the town around it's changed and deserves better.
Besides, it’s ugly now.
It will be varnished and polished and made over in the morning, the corporator promised, thanks to funding from the Shankarsethji, whose mother - God bless her soul - loved the park.
A shiny little plaque in her name will be placed there where it is most inconvenient for Miss Patty to rest her back.
But it will be, he vows, as good as new.
Beautiful.
sits
in the widest stretch of green, skirting concrete freshly paved,
with the grain of old wood showing through at its feet, peels of paint down its slivered cheeks, hanging in unsightly wrinkles by its eyes,
where the cooky blind cat in Number 3 scratched it,
Shankar's puppy Khudrat cut his milk teeth,
Jenny the-first-time-jogger right-angled her undusty shoes and tied her shoelace self-consciously,
around the notch where the old man Salunkhe leaned his stick,
and the slight depression of old wood into which hawker Hakim offloaded his cane basket of fruit,
and the invisible oblong where Jehangir put his book down when playing hooky from the tutor's place - where his mother whacked him when she found out-
where the cuckold Shankar the plumber lunged out at his wife and missed,
and the homeless drunk guy put down his bottle on it just there - where did it go…
where Sachin the defeated champion of the under-14 league lashed out with his bat never to pick it up again - sore loser he always was,
and two-timer Amit scuffed it once in the morning, and once in the evening,
where sometimes in the afternoons when no people came by, a few birds would sit and peck for crumbs or termites, pretty as a picture postcard...
where grandmother Misquitta and her neighbour Joanna sat to talk of how their children had changed…
and that secretary nobody-thought-to-ask-her-name sat primly in the evenings reading her book,
and Stella sat thinking of killing herself, really...
where Mr Pinto dug nails in when his business partner had skipped town,
where old man Joe still sits to place his chess pieces with knobbly fingers the kids make fun of, on his roll-up board no matter how many times they roll off the sloping bit and will never learn,
where little Dona and little Saurabh first kissed and first necked and tell the stories still of how they met over dinner in their falling-to-ruins tenement across town, from which they still come to sit upon it and just remember when things get tough…
and where Shanti met Veer for the last time when she wanted him to carve their names in the wood but he went off to marry Preety instead,
where Chottu was brought for his first ever walk and saw his first pigeon on the backrest of a faded bench and his mother to this day swears he gurgled at as though he understood what she was saying….
But it’s just a bench, and it’s been here too long and the town around it's changed and deserves better.
Besides, it’s ugly now.
It will be varnished and polished and made over in the morning, the corporator promised, thanks to funding from the Shankarsethji, whose mother - God bless her soul - loved the park.
A shiny little plaque in her name will be placed there where it is most inconvenient for Miss Patty to rest her back.
But it will be, he vows, as good as new.
Beautiful.
Friday, January 23, 2009
A first kiss
Somewhere in Africa, there's a long green asbestos fence
With a hole in the webbed wiring right at the very end,
There where it bent upwards, leaving just enough space to crawl through
On our bellies.
Where across intertwined fingers,
and at rope ladder meetings upon the nearby tree,
you above and me never ever more than three rungs below
we'd whisper secrets our parents would never know.
Sieved worlds of white and brown flowed in-between.
I think the dog it was who captured us,
Your lips puckered up, but still an inch away from mine,
Your eyes closed, like in the movies and like you said your dad did it,
Mine wide open and frozen in the fear that I would scream.
We ran into the bathroom of your house that twinned mine,
So we exactly knew where everything was, should be, but wasn't,
Hence we kept stumbling into things that were where we thought they wouldn't be.
In the bathroom on the first floor,
Amidst dirty laundry in a wicker basket, yesterday's newspapers and the smell of shampoo from London,
Mother at the supermarket, dads at work,
Nosy kid brother hovering outside the latched door
And mine calling for me, I could hear, in the garden, across the fence
No time for niceties, just a pounding fear
of doing it, or not, and succeeding, or not, and liking it, or not.
There, in two pairs of socks, with an elastic snapped, that had been face to face before,
And the taste of bubble gum lingering,
There, brown and white, went wholly pink.
With a hole in the webbed wiring right at the very end,
There where it bent upwards, leaving just enough space to crawl through
On our bellies.
Where across intertwined fingers,
and at rope ladder meetings upon the nearby tree,
you above and me never ever more than three rungs below
we'd whisper secrets our parents would never know.
Sieved worlds of white and brown flowed in-between.
I think the dog it was who captured us,
Your lips puckered up, but still an inch away from mine,
Your eyes closed, like in the movies and like you said your dad did it,
Mine wide open and frozen in the fear that I would scream.
We ran into the bathroom of your house that twinned mine,
So we exactly knew where everything was, should be, but wasn't,
Hence we kept stumbling into things that were where we thought they wouldn't be.
In the bathroom on the first floor,
Amidst dirty laundry in a wicker basket, yesterday's newspapers and the smell of shampoo from London,
Mother at the supermarket, dads at work,
Nosy kid brother hovering outside the latched door
And mine calling for me, I could hear, in the garden, across the fence
No time for niceties, just a pounding fear
of doing it, or not, and succeeding, or not, and liking it, or not.
There, in two pairs of socks, with an elastic snapped, that had been face to face before,
And the taste of bubble gum lingering,
There, brown and white, went wholly pink.
Thirst
Hide where you will
In states of being, asleep, awake, alert, or something akin
To dead; behind deadbolts of mettle and grit
Employed, enjoyed, enduring moments,
Engaged and sunk in work that grabs
You by the neck and dares you speak,
joust, joke, jibe, jeer if you will
Upon yourself call the curse of a packed
Day; Whether locked in love, in lust, in
Lazy spread of a kitten upon upon a tattered scratcing mat, outside a bathroom door; in sunlight, by stealth of night,
Surreptitiously, slicking, slinking, sliding
By upward thrust and unstoppable
Quest; unquenchable burst, it arrives.
ignore it and it underlies your every move
Lick your lips, or mine, what lingers, salty, is its be ing.
(c) Gayatri Jayaraman, 2009
In states of being, asleep, awake, alert, or something akin
To dead; behind deadbolts of mettle and grit
Employed, enjoyed, enduring moments,
Engaged and sunk in work that grabs
You by the neck and dares you speak,
joust, joke, jibe, jeer if you will
Upon yourself call the curse of a packed
Day; Whether locked in love, in lust, in
Lazy spread of a kitten upon upon a tattered scratcing mat, outside a bathroom door; in sunlight, by stealth of night,
Surreptitiously, slicking, slinking, sliding
By upward thrust and unstoppable
Quest; unquenchable burst, it arrives.
ignore it and it underlies your every move
Lick your lips, or mine, what lingers, salty, is its be ing.
(c) Gayatri Jayaraman, 2009
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