Is that a rose?

Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen
and waste its sweetness on the desert air. 

                        ~  Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Thomas Gray.

In the front yard, a plain hibiscus blooms;

the rose’s glamour is on show at the back.

The gardener does not enter my rooms

he knocks, and I open the door a crack.

The guests wipe their feet on the front door mat

but the hibiscus twists shut by then;

it’s a simple short-lived, no-perfume format

rather like a pebble in the garden;

a pebble splashes only when it drops

a few ripples and the surface is blanked;

the rose meanwhile preens its bushy red mop

the closed hibiscus lies wholly outranked.

But just the gardener and I see the shows

if no-one sees it bloom, is it still a rose?

The Teacher's Fee : Excerpt

Eklavya’s not quite a hero, a bit player

many like him in that ancient epic

a one-off conflict, a scene here or there

and promptly dismissed in a casual flick.

How does that justify writing long odes

the complex crafted lyrics, line by line

moving glass beads of sounds on an abacus?

all praise’s for demigods

why should anyone carefully realign

the praise towards a mere man with so much fuss?

The quality of steadfastness is rare

rare indeed the mind which has the intrinsic

strings in place to wing it on a prayer

with a statue overseeing his technique

his aim and skills, all arrows straight, all lines toed

and stand fast at payback time and not decline

the cruel fee: his weapon arm made useless.

Admit it. It was odd -

that a Master should spot the statue at the shrine

and gauge the pupil with an eye this ruthless.

Ghazal 25

Pour a glass with those hands of yours, my love

Pour it and let things take their course, my love

The muezzin has just given the midnight call

But few men prostrate on the floors, my love

Some turn east, some west, some look to the stars

but my compass is at your doors, my love

Whatever’s poured gets a rim of froth and foams

even when the best of them pours my love

So you too will fill the glass with emptiness

half headiness and half remorse, my love

The night’s a barbed flash of long blue lightning

and the earth burns its bridges and mores, my love

Not one properly teardrop-shaped

Perhaps the matches were damp, steadfast flames

didn’t burn in teardrop shapes, the ones I lit

sputtered, went out, and I never could claim

perfect mastery over fire, or matchsticks.

There was no moving warmth, except the burn –

fierce in my pot,  but that was more like acid,

salt sharp, shrivelling – it took years to learn

that only certain fires warm relationships.

The ones I struck fluttered the wrong colour

saffron and not crimson, blue and not brick

if they caught at all, burnt lower and duller

the spectrum just not mainstream attractive.

But they’re also fine. This salt being a misfit.

Flames that burn short. Alone. And damp matchsticks.

Recipe

Do this now, with a great amount of care,

split the pod of this body and expose

the nuclei that have passed for my mind -

(I’m not so sure of the immortal soul)

flick a nail down the line of join and tear

the kernels like plump peas into a bowl

prop the shell against a surface, because

all said and done, no pea is quite designed

to be without its shell, dangling from - what?

so keep the cover handy, though aside;

press the plumpness between index and thumb

or spin it in a tunnel in deep earth

centrifuge it, then see what you can spot.

I’ll bet the shell, for whatever little it’s worth

that nothing poetry can be teased and spied

no fancy love slime dredged up from the crumbs.

Amazement does not leave a single trace

and blasé curdles nothing in the blood

it throbs or plummets once, and it is done;

split the shell and spin the nuclei

search fibres in the guts and in the face

crack straight backbones and slipped discs of the eye

and still there will be nothing, not a shred

however fast the particles are spun.

The leaves that I have turned, the paper thin

beams that vaulted over cobbles of dawns

the jewelled dew scattered on dead grasses

monsoon rain-misted roofs and mountaintops -

nothing remains under or on the skin;

a purple pulse might quicken, but then stops,

resumes its sedate beat, wonder passes,

so does boredom, both froth of pheromones.

Take the pods, unravel every helix;

and split the hair as fine as it can stand;

gaze into the bamboo hollow navel;

dissect each limb till you are satisfied;

and still you will find nothing in the mix -

how smiles and tears were made to coincide.

Deep into the subatomic level

rung by rung, climb down into the grand

atrium of the heart and the great dome

where bare-arsed, bare-fanged, famished nightmares pace

along the walls, chafe in their prison cells

and fringed dreams swish like stiff, curled mongrel tales.

Go over it all with a hound’s tooth comb

the froth and spit and fluids, each detail

and then put back the halves, close the pod, and tell

me what kind of love rhyme is in my face?

Themed in the next one

You know I tried many times to write to themes

parenting, jobs, sex, cities and such, but words

won’t be segregated – love and sorrow, dreams

defy limits, don’t agree to be bordered,

resist the lures of heavy grammage and gild,

spill across in slurps of untidy noise

billowing emotions, but still iron-willed;  

so I gave up, mustered whatever poise

I could in that messed-up meaningful wild

and wrote and left, tail between my pens, or keys

more often than not nowadays, my brain child

turned out to be less mine, scrolled memories

of verses, blown out feelings like popped balloons,

radio voices babbled over party spoons.

Loveweak III

love me as though you’ve loved and lost before -

unzip me along my backbone, undo

and smooth down the silk of flesh and sinew

love me as though you could not love me more

love me like it is your very first time

as though you’ve never loved, nor suffered loss

as if love does not fade, it only grows

untainted by grief, supreme and sublime

love me as if we’ve neither been heartsore

disrobe me of these outer skin membranes

splay me open and kiss the pulsing veins

school yourself for the scars you will ignore

or love me as if the wounds that were once mine

were meant as gifts for you, my valentine

Write...Edit...Publish : February 2014. What's in a face?

This month the prompt at Write...Edit...Publish is “What’s in a Face?” and it has been buzzing around in my head the whole fortnight, like one of those songs you can’t stop humming no matter how hard you try.  Thanks, Denise for an amazing prompt.  I ended up writing reams - flashes and a short story, a spoof, poems; but fear not, I shall not force all of them on you :)
I am posting the flash that fits the word limit best, though there is nothing very Valentineish about it.  Not much of a VDay fan, me.  Sorry.





Sleepless

The bell has just chimed the hour, and I can almost see that dusty clock face down the corridor if I close my eyes.  Just a few hours to go till sunrise.  The dawn breaks every day and a circle of light hits the blank wall opposite me.  I have watched that for the last month.  Not tomorrow though.  Tomorrow I will be out of here, and there will be no-one to notice how a fuzzy moonlike patch coalesces into a hard, crisp disk.  A round hard face of light.

Loveweak II

the most loving don’t breathe a word of love

in odd lateral threads that dumbly snake

out of nostrils and back, somewhere above

the sore pinhead of years of stuck mistakes

know them by the coolness of their shadow,

by their gentle hands, and palms of leaf shapes

cupped into a mudmoon, incandescent glow

of a million lampborn miniature landscapes

the seahorse ribbons in the oceans of time

the razor coral thorns, barbed as dreamnails

tear the blooddark spaces of valentines

tear up frozen endbuds of limplove tales

the most loving don’t breathe and speak lovebuds

just smooth the disturbed nap of velvet blood

Loveweak I

did my love merit marks - commas, full stops
did it fuel business, make rhymes flow quicker
magic freedom into crystallised hope,
weekend loveshot irises, did it flicker

once in your blingflamed veins and quietly die?

or was it a recurring decimal
sung offkey though holy, strung through your “I”
candied on your tongue like a capital

pulped in your bone in the sponge of marrows?

it asked no marks from me, I can tell you
safely, nothing punctuation, no close
and no throat grabbing start, I never knew

what begun and if it’s finished with me yet

it gave no period at this close of sonnet

Blood urge

I wonder if you know that blood urge

to knead the unformed morning into words

to indent it with three thumbprints of rhyme

and leave it alone in the bowl some time

and check its rise and fall and surge

stretch it thin and throw it into verse,

so what if it feeds into nothing?

It’s what the blood approves and craves in spring.

It’s what it wanted all through the winter

the same three marks made with cold fingers.

The yinyang summers pass, the rivers swing

the monsoons bone dry in the autumn winds

a pancake sun’s caught inside the arch

of veins and madness tucked into the heart.

Foggy lakes

Silence among the ruins, the crows -

staunch friends - sit solemn on a lintel
in ceremonial blacks and indigos
against the stone-chapped lips of winter.
Ruby dreams once sewn in tailors shops
laidback needles in the spider webbing
of satellite cables digitised dull props
delicate necks of cranes, high-stepping
giraffes and slow moving meddlemen.
narratives won’t be forced into neat queues,  
garlanded with marigolds, chillis and lemons
on chilly mornings of foggy lakeviews,
dipping and bowing to crows and humans.
There isn’t any order to a timeless world.