The vapours of your words rise up

The vapours of your words rise up, steam in what I read,

In every lively music, every crumbling manuscript of loss
In every hand raised in protest, every newsfeed.
Wherever I turn a page, however far I travel across.
All convoluted streets wherever they may lead
Smiling in malicious glee as their numbers close
About me in tightening circles, unwilling to concede
A single needle-point of space for anything I compose,
They bring me back again and again to that same old place
Where the puddles shimmered with the faint reflections of your face.

There are no codes that anyone can make or call their own.

Even the ones that came before and wrote what they did
The point to all their myriad points seems only to be drawn
When you finally speared your pieces, their bodies slim, heads lucid.
All the tyre-treads etched in asphalt, every cobblestone
That thuds down the steep tumbles of alleys, every ruined pyramid
Leads me back to the labyrinth of hilltops in the dawn
Back into the chequerboard fields, the fizzy paddy green grid,
Laid out like torn pages of the poems I once saw you write
The letters a bit blotched by the rain, the meanings heaving upright.

Lovers' Cove May Link Up

Andy David initiated a brilliant poetry link up session called Lovers' Cove. He gave us his first line which can be read at http://apd-loverscove.blogspot.com/2012/05/lovers-cove-challenge-1-05262012.html.

I continue from the last entry which is Diwakar’s and my line after his is...

But later, a velvety-sudden blue love-lotus rises again on the ebb of wrath

http://apd-loverscove.blogspot.com

Seeing red

I read the news, see gulmohurs cascade
their blossoms in a glorious spring red
I brew the coffee, I remake the bed
in the same half-hearted half-latte shade.

Spring repeats, the sheets of petals fall

again and again but the colours remain true
and here inside there is also nothing new
the usual violence, and the winner takes all.

I watch the news, see untold lives cascade

away in inflorescences of shocking red
I brew the coffee, and they count their dead
and that’s how nations, and my news, is made.

Let’s not talk about rights and righteousness.

Do you want your coffee with more sugar or less?

Rubaiyat: respectfully yours

I have learnt yours off by heart and recited

each one of them outside and inside my head
till the domes of skulls were shaped with their echoes
and spines curved to hold the words they said

Your moving finger has crept down centuries

touched pawns and queens, and great pens and keys
and touched me too sitting in the darkness
with my hair lifting slightly in the breeze

Then there are those, whose delicate rubaiyat

I forget, at least, can’t recall the details of their art
but they get mixed in with the mortar of life
and they are in the paving of the path.

And sometimes I’m caught quite unawares

as to what I read, whether it’s yours or theirs
all words seem to blend in at the source
into one great poem, echoing everywhere.

It rained in Giza! and on the prints

I.

It’s already midday where they are, and my dawn

here is speckled with rain, drunken birdsong
and children’s laughter.  Moisture’s suddenly on
my hair, and beaded in places it doesn’t belong.

And the lotusprints I’d talked about the other day?

already made something less, I can hardly see
where the men had stopped, and then moved away
from my door, away from all that’s mine and me.

Their soles left marks because most of the yard

was unkempt, silksoft earth’s my garden.
Men leave no footprints where the soil is hard
or lush flowers bend under their own burden.

Oddly holy-looking lotusmarks by my door

Wiped out by a holier rain. Not there anymore.

II.

You too must have heard the stories just like me

faintly sacred, without pinning their exact source -
some tramp comes to the door, then turns to be
an evil tempered brahmin without any remorse;

the old, stooped man who came to the saint’s lone cell

and he washed the gnarled feet, and to his awe
under the dirt were twin wounds he knew too well
to admit any doubt about what he saw.

You know the stories, the almost-myths and tales of old

the holyfolk who came in their humble guise
and touched a life and so changed it manifold
and you bear in mind what a knock at the gate implies.

Of course there are myths too hard to believe.

But you check their feet when they come. And when they leave.

III.

So you burn the lamps and keep any wicks trimmed

low and straight, so that your flame is a shapely blue
at its lowest point when the light is finally dimmed;
and you pare the breeze for its secret haiku.

You give a guarded welcome to the destitute,

the tramps and holy men, wonder who they are -
prophets or kings in disguise over some dispute
and you watch their feet for any unusual scar;

and yet they come and leave, and only when they’re gone

you notice their footprints - a sacred lotus mark
and then it rains a little in the desert, just at dawn
on the two-faced join of the light and dark.

It's a gift, this sudden relief of unexpected rain

but it means that the lotusprints can’t remain.

IV.

And so the vague sacredness that comes your way

leaves you too, unbeknownst, and a precious rain
washes it off, its faintest trace, spatters it away
in a brief dance of sand and liquid, a different stain

marks the garden now, a shallow wetness of the earth

not enough to even pucker the air with its smell
but there’s a sense of loss, though the exact worth
of lotusprints against desert rain is hard to tell.

Much of the morning is spent in futile rehash

should you have looked more carefully at the sleeping sole?
A little more mindful and this sudden splash
of rain would fall but still leave the footprints whole.

The rain’s dry now, the morning chores are almost done

as you think - will there be another lotus one?

V.

I do know exactly where you are coming from

we of the complex-simple life, a little out of touch
with soles and tales, who guardedly welcome
tramps without reflecting too long or too much.

We of the easily forgiven mistakes, the casual slips -

looking at the wrong side of feet of an unknown guest
just a resting point for holy men on their trips
touched once, and then brushed aside at the best.

And even the marks that we would hold as souvenirs

washed off by a shower where there’s never a drop of rain,
every cosmic sign and slight made amply clear
each snub a blessing so that we can never complain.

We know this too, if there’s a second chance, a repeat -

it won’t be a lotus, or it won’t be on the feet.

VI.

It’s past dusk where I am, and the brief dawn rain

has left not a single sign for its twilit twin
a dry sky, an empty garden, another mundane
day draws to its dry close, and a night begins

I remember to turn on the lights by the gate

in case a mystic man should decide to stop
but just like you, I know that it’s a futile wait
brushed twice by holiness is too much to hope.

As I turn back I notice the desert has bloomed -

a small blade of green, probably a weed
not a lotus, or a rose, nothing perfumed
just the first shoot of a long forgotten, hidden seed.

And I can’t be troubled to find out if this blade has grown

As a gift or snub, enough that it’s here when the prints are gone.

Did you hear the haiku when they knocked?




Dreams.  Wistful marigold petals

strewn on the holy waters
of sleep.

Men at my door, their heels

are cracked with long journeys
over dusty days;

they wash at the tap outside,

as they clean up their feet emerge,
unscarred;

turn out just ordinary men

glad of a meal, and a place
to sleep.

Think nothing of it, I’m not

searching prophets
to solve all my puzzles;

they leave, rested; and later, there are

lotus marks leading
from my door.

When you wake in the morning

you can’t know what poems
the day shrugs off;

what marigold petal, which jasmine

or lotus shred falls
by your gate.

I looked for nailscars but got

lotusprints facing away
from my door.

They knew me for what I am.

Or maybe they’re men
with oddly scarred soles.

Facts can’t be changed by poems and

no rhymes intervene in their
cadence.

I heard no haikus on the breeze

when they knocked, I hear none still,
nothing

except blankness made into

the lilt of the still lake where
no-one walks

but I now have doorsills, mud

in lotus patterns till
the next rains come

as though I too am a pilgrim,

a torn petal on holy
waters.

Along the hard crusts of love

The fragile white perfumed blossoms
collapse into the winds with a sigh
along the hard crusts of love, the crumbs
of life thrown out into the sun to dry

And shall I pick them up one by one?

- the leavings of tiny scented flowers
dried up seconds left out in the sun
and heap and pat them into hours.

I’ve breathed enough, deeply inhaled

the wind, the heat of midday light,
faint scents of dusts as they sailed
slowly into my line of sight.

I’m glad they came, but the flowers are shed;

the sun and wind have dried up things
and all that remains is half chewed bread
and petals fallen into the evenings.

I’m glad you came, but I won’t wait

somewhere on the outer fringe
of seasons, eaves-dropping on a raging debate
on the irreversibility of change.

Who moved my quays?

I.

I forget.  I forget where I started out, who was with me.

Were you there? And you? It’s only now I have noticed
That I am walking alone.  Cobbled pathways in a different city.
Sea waves out in force on rocky shores shattering the dawn mist.

There is so much comfort and warmth in a group

Friends, unfriends, the neat categories of acquaintance,
Stifling heat of laughter.  Never the chill of holding aloof,
Never walking alone with the dawn spray even once.

Every seashore, every path is precious, tender, dawn fresh

When I am alone. Hard footsteps ring on stone
Clear and solitary amidst the muted, relentless rush
Of wind or water. Undisturbed. Elements on their own.

I forget where I started out, but when I loop back again

I stand at that same spot with you, where the journey began.

II.

I’m not sure if I peeled off, or you dropped one by one

Like leaves do by the wayside and then are dribbled away
By careless feet, by the sweeping reckless walk of women -
The brush of hems and borders. Things that heave and sway.

I only noticed when the wind blew harder into my hair

When I was thrown to the silences, when the spray struck at my cheek.
As the cold crept up my exposed skin without this barrier -
The crush of bodies absorbed into the chatter of group-speak.

Every spray that stings my face, every wind that billows

Into my hair and my clothes in needle sharp profusion
Every press of step on stone, every road that goes
Winding alone into blinded corners - none of them feels foreign.

I’m not sure who left whom, who wanted to stay or quit

But wherever I stop, I find your face at every point of transit.

III.

There is cargo loaded and unloaded, points where I disembark

The chants of workday dockers like a flag waving in the breeze
Evenings of inverted daisy-fields over my head in the dark
And the beasts of boats tied up at rest alongside the quays.

I forget what colour the darkness was, the colours of sunrise

The day’s sails and engines put to work, silently unfurled
I must have seen their reflections in glistening pairs of eyes
As each of us struggled to find our places in the world.

Every vessel that parts the seas, each flight that cuts the air

Starting here over the horizons and beyond the skyline
I watch them from this quayside now but it’s like I am there
And every journey that’s been made ends up feeling mine.

I don’t know if you held my hands, whether I was held at all

Just that I am touched by you at every port of call.

IV.

There were no goodbyes said, nothing to acknowledge

That partings were partings, just a thinning of the crush
An ease in the fizz of personal space, in the swing of baggage
An absence of human noises in the wind and water’s rush.

The taxi ranks trapped some at the kerb.  Black and yellow

Stripes on broad roads echoed eerily on the metal of the cars.
The peak hour traffic drenched in profuse sodium vapour glow
Squashed flat on the roadside under a canopy of stars.

Startled to a abrupt standstill, because the vague arc

My bag cuts in the air suddenly swings open a bit.
Every angle that it makes, dumbfounded in the dark
Feels wider, deeper, though I can’t quite understand it.

I’m not sure who carried whose bags, who swung wide or tight

But each time I lift them after you, they feel a little light.

V.

The sudden stutter of engines, the slow yawn of a horn

Mixes in with the evening traffic and the thread of the mood
Is it time already to go back where I started out at dawn
Counting out the complaints of days spent in solitude.

Did we forget the complaints themselves in the headlong rush?

Fading sirens. And then silence.  No reminders there.
The pier falls quiet, the corniche empties of the returning crush
As the people hurry on home.  Or to the sunset prayer.

Every sound that pierces me, every viscous silence

That patiently stands by and quivers as I rummage
Stacks of the present and the past, every presence or absence
Crowds into this minute now at the darkening water’s edge.

I’m not sure if this step is final, if these are the last lands, last seas

From where I turn back alone.  The final movement of the quays.

Journey’s end

My journey doesn’t complete itself

because I loop around and loop
around, it needs you to fall into step
beside me.  Only that, and the rest of the group
could be forgotten, nothing missed, nothing misplaced.
There are milestones still, and pebbles, and the sudden scoop
of dug up earth - the road still sets
its own pitfalls - the soar and swoop
of hope-despair, the thin-joint two-faced
fallen coins, lying in wait for me to stop and stoop.

I am perhaps not the same as I was

many years ago – perfunctory, risk-averse;
but still as easily enraptured by the wash
of rain on leaf, by the rinse of words
on a page, by the sluice of a pause
at its turn, by the dabs and swabs of a well-turned verse;
less swift to write off as a loss
everything that’s not a gain, the way it blurs
its own edge to disguise its flaws;
I accept that much of it could’ve been worse.

You too are here somewhere in

the crowd, perhaps a little less or more
impatient, the changes somewhat hard to pin
though I know nothing can quite change that core
unshakeable and constant.  Many things remain
just the same, just as lucid as before -
the twists of roads and turns of page still beckon.
Just that our twinned prints, the sounds of your
footsteps are no longer aligned with mine, they are fallen
somewhere else, not by my side, steady and sure.

No journey is an end in itself, it’s the means

to an end, and my end is just you -
this thin wedge of a crowd in between,
the tiny gaps, the bliss and press of a few
frantic minds don’t matter, nor the sheen
of fallen coins in the mud. The arch of blue
overhead, the tumbling stones, the lick of green
the silence of condensing dew -
that’s what counts, and then within
them all, your footfall, oh close enough, and mine too.

No capitals - cairo : delhi ; you : me

Everything need not begin with a capital, there
are many small beginnings, without a flourish,
without any punctuations or a clear closure
preceding them. No evident rhythms of anguish
nor the pulsing catchy beats of pleasure
nothing at all to mark the start, or indeed the finish.

Here there are roads that ring the cities, concentric walls

pierced by ruined arches of gates now and then,
once they may have been guarded and shut, but overall
they’re useless now, too much trouble, and left open.
There is no entry point, the fringe of suburbia and industrial
estates engulf and blur the limits at which cities begin.

And I too don’t know where it starts or ends and which mindzone

is exclusively you and stops being me, though there are gates and exits
and all the walls, each one in place and shut fast, the metal and stone
of existence marked clear and etched so that no-one forgets
and here I am far away yet next to you and distinct, alone,
and I respect but cannot recall any of those limits.

At which exact point do I stop being me and blur into you?

when each of us is a different thumb-print, unique chemicals
held together behind strict walls and windows,  a strong taboo
on blur and spill of minds and matter that are individuals,
no borders between ourselves, whether it’s cities or just us two
no start or finish, no punctuations or capitals.

Biodegradable and eco-friendly

Am I being organic enough

Biodegradable enough? soothing green
In all my relationships of love -
Can they decay quick and clean
Without any sediments in the routine?

Are things kept pollution free

Have effluents met all standards?
The spectrums of love the required purity
The brightness of my words
Quicksilver sharp but filtered.

Then why is there a landfill out

In gaudy colours, plastic hues?
Stick figure rag-pickers moving about
Stabbing at the ache of residues,
If I’ve done the work and checked the flues?

The strangest thing

I love the flowers that carpet the spring  
But here's the nub, and it's the strangest thing
That when the winter strips it ruthlessly bare
It can't strip the love, that still remains there.

Season's change, the colours flush and fade
The green and copper by orderly turn cascade
But here's the nub, and it's weird and strange
The colour of love quite refuses to change.

And here's another oddest thought to think
The fullness of harvests into harsh winters sink
Hollow and bitter and cold, but here's the nub
Strangely, no bitterness touches the love.

The planet, whatever colour it chooses to wear
Branches might dance in lace or choose to go bare
But here's the nub, and this might be the strangest
Whatever the routine, it just seems the best.

Oh, I love the flowers that dress up the earth
When they are no more, I love the undressed dirt
And I love the dirt churned into mud by rains
But here's the nub, mud dries, love remains.

I have loved each flower as well as its thorn
And those that have never a flower borne
And I found it strange, but this here's the nub
The bearing of either did not impact on love.

Why poetry makes a great subject to blog about

Compass, champagne corks, and straws

Everyone has their own choice of weapons with which they face the world and cut it into manageable portion sizes.  Mine happens to be poetry, what’s yours?  I grew up thinking of reading as an arsenal against the world as well as a champagne cork to pop at every celebration.  And poetry is the straw and also the compass I clutch at as I drift through life’s vast oceans.

So, does poetry make a good subject for a blog?  Yes, it does and here are my 5 top reasons:

 Brief and punchy

The first tip that an expert gives a newbie is to keep it brief, between 300-1000 word count for each blog post. Well, what else can make a point as pithily as a well turned quatrain? One of Shakespeare’s famous sonnets totes up less than 120 words, and you could probably edge in a poem of epic proportions at a word count of 1000. Like this one for instance.  Poetry fits into the pared down précis world of 420 word counts and 140 characters like nothing else can. Here's another example.

Trendy

Poetry deals with themes that are always in demand – love, sex, hormones, happiness, loss, grief, mindfulness, spirituality, beauty, humour, work and play, you name it, there’s a poem about it.  And you could always add your own take on each of them, they’re not likely to go out of fashion anytime soon.  Poems and rhymes encapsulate the collective wisdom and “how to .... in 3 steps” for a vast range of subjects.  In short and sweet verses, just the right byte size to nibble at during a coffee break.  Intense but short attention-span reading.  Nothing quite like it.

Convulse the SE’s now, go on

Strangely enough, traffic and search terms need not have anything remotely to do with the actual content that’s written, only the labels and headers that the SE’s can pick up on their radars. For instance, someone may have written a perfectly innocuous and deeply profound poem about a war-ravaged topsy-turvy world and then called it “The Second Coming”; and no guesses on how the SE’s gleefully O that for the kind of search terms that make toes curl.  Or your blood curdle, alternatively.  But hey, that gets the traffic moving, right?  Poetry has a lot of potential that way.

Bring them on!

How many people do you know that are voracious readers? Oh, loads of course.  Okay great, now how many of these people bought a book of poems in the last year?  None, or maybe a couple, right? Poetry is simply not a wildly popular genre as compared to the rest.  It’s a small niche, and as more and more poets find recognition and publishers, there are ever more books competing for the attention of the same readership.  The Internet on the other hand is a cost effective and far-reaching medium.   There is no reason for readers to avoid creative writing on the net, if good content is available online.  In fact, it can be used to broaden and create new readers as well.  So yes to blogging the poetry, no to rigidly sticking to just one method. 

Lo salt alternative

One thing I keep hearing is that how I shouldn’t take everything I read on the net as gospel truth. 

“Don’t take it seriously, a large pinch of salt is a mandatory addition,“ my more net savvy friends tell me with raised and wagging fingers, ”Just because a page has a half a million views a month doesn’t make the information accurate.” 

“Lies, damn lies and statistics, most of ‘em,” another one tells me, “Check the sources.” 

Really? I always thought people went to the net for information, Google being the modern day Jeeves, no? 

“What are you, insane? Only .gov and .this, .that and .other are reliable, the rest is bs.” 

Well, a poem does not convey facts and since it's imaginary there need not be any disclaimers about accuracy or the lack thereof.  Writing a poem doesn’t require reams of research, and reading it doesn’t require you to be on some information red-alert either.  It only needs for one side to feel it and be able to communicate, and the other side to read it and enjoy it.  Easy write, easy read.  No salt or seasoning mandatory.  Read it, shut it, forget it.  Or not, as you like.