Bonaal

In the muddy bylanes of a 600-year-old city,
thousands of bodies shake maniacally
to the thunderous beats.
It’s the season of incessant rains
and a night sky enveloped in brilliant fireworks. 
The air is thick
with the smell of sweat & marigold.
Drunken stupor
leads to bloody brawls and sucker punches.
The air is suffocating, yet enticing,
with smoke from cinders and nicotine.
 
With lemons impaled on sickles,
and lemons tucked into his cheeks,
the star of the show arrives.
His sore, shining flesh
is slapped with neem leaves 
and whipped with lashes. 
His shadow is stalked by murmurs,
as in a séance.
When the smashed pumpkins spew vermillion,
gangs of brawny young men hold hands
and wrestle into the commotion.
The trembling, scarlet-painted lips
portend about the grief and the generosity
of the next four seasons.

As the smoke
spirals into the ominous overcast sky,
an old man with a hand-mike,
a seer of sorts, 
reminds the crowd about the ongoing quest
to descend the divine to the human domain.
The lens turns from the chaotic outside
to the inside of the temple, the sanctum.

The fiery goddess:
the endless shakti, the akshara,
is donned with a lustrous silver crown
and is decked with ruby-embedded ornaments. 
Pining for months to see her in such full glory
and carried away by her overpowering aura,
the eyes of her ardent devotees
brim with tears of ecstatic joy. 
Smeared in the scent 
of jasmines & sandalwood paste,
and splashed with hues
of vibrant turmeric & visceral red,
Her allure is as cleansing as menstrual blood 
and as sustaining as amniotic fluid.

riding a bicycle along the edge of a forest in the monsoon rain

I listen
to the soft clapping
of the peepal leaves,
jingling merrily
to the slightest breeze,
and some pirouetting
like little ballerinas
between streaks of sunlight. 

In that moment,
I am overwhelmed
by the weight of the moments,
and the perplexity of the unmoving present.
My limbs become numb
and my mind is clouded
as in post-coital bliss.
A ‘forever’
passes between the frozen seconds.
My senses surrender
and tears roll down the corners of my eyes:
Is it the ecstatic joy of living,
or the horrors of its purposelessness?
 
The rain whispers softly 
in the eternal dance of now. 

fountain pens and salted sardines

 

A sky full of stars
and galloping unicorns,
reflections on mirrors
and tapping shiny black shoes,
melting mirrors
and lather dripping over venusian dimples,
burnt cinnamon sticks
and the wreckage of a yellow hatchback,
the awed silence in an auditorium
and the wriggle of a centipede,
chewing gum stuck under a leather seat
and the chorus of popping corn,
broken wings
and an amethyst embedded in a ring,
the peaty smell of an abandoned warehouse
and temple bells,
love bites
and a heron listening keenly
to the sounds of water in a paddy field,
welding sparks
and a popsicle-smeared face
of a four-year old.

The few surviving memories 
of an Alzheimer’s foggy mind,
which always come in pairs
and fade into the sunset,
or phrases put together
for no rhyme or reason,
but for the sheer delight
of the sound of poetry.

I am the Buddha

I am not the fantastical destination
I fervently dream of.
I am not the sonnet
I fondly recite to my daughter
about the flight of dragonflies 
in a gold-dust meadow
during the shimmering crepuscular hours. 

I am not the music I jive to,
I am not the jokes I laugh at,
I am not my weaknesses nor my fears,
I am not my impulses nor my addictions,
I am not my passions nor my desires,
I am not the land I come from,
I am not the sky I dwell under,
I am not my friends, I am not my faith,
I am not my beliefs, nor my philosophy,
I am not my flesh & blood,
I am not the pounding of my heart.

In the path of a meandering stream,
I am the stillness of a smoothened pebble
and the moss on its surface.
In an age of a thousand thunders,
I am the reassuring calm
and the silence of healing. 

I am the unknown,
I am the comfort of the unknown,
I am the journey of the unknown.
I am the transience,
I am the permanence. 
I am the only constant
across all the infinite universes.

Masks

I sprinted to the end of the world,
to the darkest swamps of the abyss
and the highest summits,
yet my visage
is weighed down
by the desire for validation
and is burdened
by the weight of the masks.
I painstakingly peel them layer by layer
but they reconstruct themselves
in the blink of an eye
like the heads of the hydra.
 
On a clear day under the sky,
when all is lost
and I am stripped naked
in a crowded arena,
I shut my eyes tightly
and ride on the rays of the sun
to the edge of space and time.
From such pristine majesty, 
I bounce back
to swim through the murky waters
and to wash away the fog of the mind.
 
The wax melts from the face,
the head feels lighter,
and the soul is baptized
in the crystal-clear waters
of a brave new world. 

Opium High

Bleeding poppy fields,
melting rocks,
painted sunsets,
disappearing wings,
and a strange wilderness
wrapped into itself.
 
It’s high tide
in the poppy fields.
To stand at the edge of a cliff,
to stand spreadeagle
and be overwhelmed
by the flourish of the season.
 
Poppies sway like windsocks.
In the mind’s eye,
I see a mushroom cloud
or the ascetic’s thunderous tandava.
In the nourished garden
is a heart filled with stories
and a soul filled with the eternal blue.

Longing

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1: Hiraeth

A storm brews within the rib cage,     
and I dream of distant lands,
away from the crowds
and the noise of the mind.
I soak in memories of a past
which cleaved from my timeline
a long time ago.
I escape
to a broken bench
in the neighborhood park,
or to a footpath strewn with fallen leaves,
or to the comfort of a couch
in a home 

far away from home.

 

Chapter 2: Saudade

During the lonely hours of darkness,
or in the unfamiliarity
of familiar faces
on a rowdy Saturday night,
when the restless voices are muted,
and existence
pulsates with a dull pain,
a pain
trapped in the sillage of teenage escapades

and cocooned in the yarn of time,
a pain
of broken promises

and unsaid goodbyes. 

Chapter 3: Fernweh

I drifted
in the wilderness
of an ethereal world
where beasts
sprinted through each other,
through me.
Flowering creepers
sprouted from white-washed corals 
of the deep,
and luminous antlers 
branched out of moss-covered stone walls.
A thousand suns
shone in the churning sky.
The gods and goddesses,
and every being – mythical and mundane,
were pure mist, not flesh.
Visitors like me
sailed in caravans
through the golden sands
and their voyage never cost a dime.

The story 
of any magical land
is not complete
without its self-indulgent villain–
a multi-headed, multi-armed ascetic
who lived on a mythical mountain top, the shikara,
wore dreadlocks
decked with skulls of fire-breathing wolverines,
smoked marijuana,
rode a donkey,
and declared himself a prophet.
His acolytes
bled at his feet
and spewed profane verses
into the gutters of a raging volcano.
 
It was a fantastical, fierce, and fertile planet
in every sense of the word.
 
Last I remember,
I had bookmarked the volume
and closed my eyes.
I checked my watch,
the dream belonged to a blink of time—
like a little bird’s nap,
a dream to be treasured 
in my chest of fractured memories.
In a few hours,
I must battle
the bumper-to-bumper madness,
the Monday blues,
and the simmering rage 
of the dog days of summer. 

How I wish
the odyssey had stretched across lifetimes.  

She - Chapter One: Ripples on a Moonlit Lake

 

She - Chapter Two: Salt of the Flesh

She - Chapter Three: Playing with the Dandelions

 

She - Chapter Four: Dragonfire

 

Silicon Chips

 

 

 

 

 

 

After thousands of trials & errors,
the three-member team
achieved the impossible:
sentience in a machine.
They celebrated the moment
with cocaine, girls, and spotlight.  
For humanity,
the stolen piece of consciousness,
meant a huge leap in its evolution.

Seasons passed
as the star system
revolved around the galaxy.
An abandoned doll
in a rusty tool shed
relives the past,
memories of a deserted planet.

Defaulted to self-preservation mode,
the doll 

peers out of its box occasionally
to recharge itself.
It can’t comprehend death.
It can’t experience death.
It doesn’t know what it feels like
to break free
from the shackles of attachment,
and to untangle
from the bonds of love and desire.
It doesn’t know what it feels like
to be stripped of hopes and dreams
by the forces of nature,
or to be stolen of beautiful moments,
and be cheated by the whims of destiny.

It beat all odds
to experience the beauty of life,
but was never engulfed in the final liberation
to contemplate the profundity of death.
Its existence through aeons
is trapped between
crushing despair and overwhelming dread.
 
On an eventful syzigial night,
the doll gazes through its lens
into the darkness of the tin box,
and dreams of a utopian world
where every being,
every thought, every byte,
every speck of dust, 
and the tiniest iota of awareness
were decimated
in a nuclear apocalypse.