DARK SECRETS

Everybody has secrets because everybody believes they lead a normal life.

I drift through the pages of life,

I roam between the hands of time,

I wander in and out of consequences;

I ride high, I ride low,

I sail in clear waters with a free spirit,

And when the storm sets in,

I am lost rudderless,

Caught off-guard in deep oceans.

Sometimes on solitary nights,

When ominous signs hang in the sky

And murky moods hang in the mind,

My past crumbles at my trembling feet.

My conscience

Is victimized like a dragonfly tethered to the fancies of a juvenile mind.

The air turns suffocating,

It stinks like a bat-infested cave

And shrills like the musings of a million raucous insects.

The vision of what lies ahead is eclipsed by the burden of what I left behind.

Its the haunting of the dark secrets again.

(A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to each other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! - 'A Tale Of Two Cities' by Charles Dickens)

WHO IS THE BEST SALESMAN IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD?

The question, 'Who is the most influential person in the history of the world?' has been answered in the 1978 book which goes by a similar title written by Michael H Hart. The findings in the book are based on extensive research which simultaneously answered another closely related question, 'Who is the best salesman in the history of the world?'. The two questions vouch for each other because an influencer is a person who successfully sells his idea, theory, product or service to one, many or to a large percentage of the masses for profit or other intangible, and often, soul-searching reasons (an inspirer, on the other hand, is a 'positive influencer'). No brownies or free vacations for guessing the winner, but the frontrunner who influenced his way up to the summit rightly deserves the slot by all means for spreading (selling) the 'Word of God' across the two most populous continents in the world. The prize is, clearly, not a symbol of 'how many he influenced' but it's a reward to the aspect 'how deeply he influenced how many'. The winner is Prophet Mohammed.

- Sunil D'pudi

STRINGS OF ETERNITY

The night air is crisp and tender, 

and the vibrant life forms: 

blooming inside and out. 

The silence of the late hours

is broken

when the autumn breeze

gently blows a single leaf - away

on its mirthful journey.
The leaf
dances its way to the cobbled pathway.
The echo of the fall

reverberate through the distant light years

of star and sand.

As the seasons pass by,
the echo 

transforms into sweet music

and tunes in 

with the ballet

performed by a drunken bee

to an amused, wide-eyed violet.  

CALL CENTRE BLUES

Sinking sun, stirring souls, false identities, fake greetings, bee-hived cubicles, coffee-stained styrofoam cups, vigilant cameras, hidden angst, cursing cabbies, angry customers, abuses, apologies, plastic smiles, snakes and ladders, flashing deadlines, stress-busters, a few analgesics, easy going, hard coming, flying times, dragging minutes, rocking, frolicking, pushing, stretching, haggling, nagging, bragging, fretting … all in all, in a day’s (night’s) work.

THE PARASITE

I am a stranger in my own life,
I am an outsider in my own territory,
I am an unknown in my own world of reason.

I am lost;
I dig through layers of mud,
Through the decaying memories,
Through masks, pretenses, compromises, blind beliefs,
Through a past, strongly influenced by loud theories and pointed fingers.

The world’s adventure was my adventure,
Their game was my game,
Their life was my life,
Their passion was my passion,
Their defeat was my defeat.
After the soul-sapping battle,
I am ashamed of the journey. 

I crouch in the shadows,
Assaulted, beaten,
And mercilessly molested by temptations.
I am lost in the wilderness.

I envy
The great leaders
Who, like a lone oak tree
That clutches firmly to the barren harsh grounds through sun and storm,
Have the courage
To fiercely defend their individuality.

They are the motors of the world.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE

A smile can break the ice, and that humble initiative can be yours,
A glorious sunrise can start an era, and it’s up to you to paint the glory on the sky,
An idea out of the blue can reach the stars, and that spark can spring from your mind,
A single step can start a revolution, and that small effort can be yours to raise a foot,
A man with conviction can awaken a generation, and that giant can be you,
What becomes of your life is because of what you make of it,
What becomes of your life is because of what you choose.

It’s not all over until it’s really over

When it’s deadbeat in the heart,
When the body is completely drenched in sweat and blown by dust,
When pain browbeats willpower,
When the most comforting thought is about surrender,
When the sight turns hazy and the head turns dizzy,
When exhaustion has sucked the last trace of stamina from the limbs,
When the mind plays tricks, constantly throwing images of defeat,
Then do not give it up,
‘cos it is most crucial to hang in there, and give it all
To run that little extra.
Forget critics, forget failure,
But then, in the end, you will be happy you did it.

Remember, ‘If you are keen and willing, even the race you lost will teach you how not to run the race, and will prepare you to excel in the next one’.

The Dark Tide

His mind is hysterical, spinning at high speeds.
At the east end of the house
Is a study room packed with old furniture and numerous paintings.
The blinds are drawn
And they throw a view of the misty hilltops.

He sits near the rear window,
On a large wooden chair,
And his eyes stare intently
At an insect sitting on his right index finger.
 
His mind is like a cinema-house,
Constantly flickering images from the past.
First - a purple-painted tongue, sharp, slender and sudden,
Like the color of some forbidden wild berries;
Second - the bitterness of his father’s baritone voice
Shrilling through his ears;
Third - sticky, sweaty little palms
Clutching to a black gown at his mother’s funeral;
Fourth - the urge he felt in his calves,
When he crushed a flower
Under the weight of his heavy boots;
Fifth - a scrawny, slender figure in black metal
Hanging, or seems to be hanging, from a cross,
And the haunting chime of the church bells;
Sixth - the tingling in his forearms
When he smashed a kitten’s skull
With a single blow from a stolen baseball bat;
Seventh - the nauseating smell of rain-soaked grass,
Color – a violent green,
And the instant loathing for every object the world calls beautiful;
Eighth - a large, hairy man pinning a little girl against the bed,
Completely overpowering, physically devouring,
The memory chokes like a coin stuck midway down the throat.

The images
Never fail the sequence.
They howl ferociously,
Until the migraine sets in, spiraling his head
To grotesque proportions.
He escapes to the basement,
To the home of seven rotten corpses, 
And two rotting ones.
Thousands of termites
Eat into the damp, wooden cabinets that hold them.

The doorbell rings,
And he abruptly awakens

Into a subconscious mayhem.

The Mayhem:
The introvert closes his eyes,
The attention-seeker opens his.
The conformist ducks into his shell,
The narcissist emerges.
The facade peels off,
Something feral surfaces to the boiling core.
Conscience clings to the last straw of hope,
While an insatiable hunger throttles the soul.
The emotion is inexplicable, 

It runs deep,

It’s an inexplicable wrath
That compels the monster to murder.


The doorbell rings again.

BLUE BLOOD

When in deep thought,
He raises his left eyebrow
And his long, magician-like fingers
Drum restlessly on the velvet sheets.

The ever-rising storm
In his deep dark eyes
Deals with the clownery of the rich
And consoles the agony of the masses.

His black and white logic,
With no gray shades,
Render indisputable justice.
The red stone
Embedded in the cold metal
Wields the ultimate authority.
The sheen
Of the sharp sword
Reflects a merciless carnage of guillotined heads.
The determination
Clenched in his tight fist
Breaks the shackles of doubt.

A life
Tempered by the testing tides of friendship, treason and political intrigue;
A calm
Born out of the simmering chaos.
A life, a penance under the volcano.
A truth, which he refers to as ‘the absolute’.

Enchanting Whispers

A voice
just loud enough
to have him want to listen to it.

A voice
that runs like prose,

smooth, convincing and mesmerizing.

A voice so subtle,
and yet stirs the soul
In a sea of warmth.

A voice so subtle,
it teases

and tames his stubbornness.

A voice,
Just loud enough
To make him come back to her every night.

The Divide

The night is completely still.
Fear is rampant everywhere.
The countryside
Floods with running gutters of blood.
There are no street-lamps, no tramps, no drunkards, no story-tellers,
No beggars asking for alms, no dogs nor cattle,
No trace of even the occasional rodent
That scurries hurriedly through the muddy lanes.

The stench of brutality
Is what remains all over the place.
Stench
That belongs to gang rapes, mass murders, beatings, mutilations, and infanticides.
Then there are the twisted shutters, broken lanterns,
Burnt huts, charred frames - a body here, a body there,
Abandoned values, hardened emotions,
Zealously misused sickles and axes.

The violence overflows
And a part of it seeps into the moist mud.
Three or four hundred bodies
Lie buried since the Monday that passed by.
It was a full moon then.

More wheels
Screech into the silence of the night
- With the violence of the rattling engines,
With the violence of the ‘carriages of death’.

The dirty episode
Would go down the archives of time
Like a scar on the nations’ history,
Like a shame - discreetly hidden and nightmarish,
Like the shame of getting caught naked in public.

(This small poem, about the days of Indo-Pak partition, might not even come close to the actual pain and terror inflicted, or the agony suffered. It is just a minor attempt to remind that freedom comes at a cost, a great cost. It's sad that even to this day, no one refers to the early post-independence days as the ‘days of freedom’. They call them the ‘partition days’.)