The Chomilla palace in Hyderabad

The palace was luminously wet and reached out to sky
In its shadow lay the kings and their faceless women
Whose fine drapery interrupted their noses and seeing eyes
Under big-vaulting domes and resounding halls.
Their noises went up to the ceiling and returned empty
Like their noses and eyes lost from their faces.
They were not lost actually but had never been there.
When the silks arrived they forgot the women’s faces.
The women sat there gossiping about other women,
Other women in the harem and their fine draperies.
Their men’s bloated egos did not show on men’s faces;
Their men’s egos showed on the women’s stomachs,,
On the little heirs to the throne who came from there.
A fine bangle,a glittering necklace and some pearls
Hush talk about the latest addition to the harem
And other scraps of conversation went on as it rained.
They had no faces for the evening conversation,
Only bodies fully draped in the finest gilded silks.
In the beginning they sat on the ground huddled.
Later the West grew on them in the white man’s land
And they sat on sofas and high backed chairs presiding
Tea ceremonies just like the sophisticated women.
They still did not have their noses on their faces .

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The cherub in inverted spectacles

The portly gentleman looked at himself
In the bathroom mirror and smirked.
In the shrill voice of his childhood
He made some really funny noises
Which yuckily merged in cistern sounds.
He tried to think simple like child
He will go out and pick some berries-
Bleeding berries from the red mountain
But mother says Banti it is sleep-time
Will you now lie on your back and sleep
How can one lie on one’s back and sleep ?
It is fun to wear spectacles upside down
The world looks so much different.
Not for me the complicated transactions
These grown-ups are terrible bores.
I will now dig deep in uncle’s backyard
I will find several nuggets of gold there;
These teachers are sometimes stupid
They ask funny questions in their class.
The big gentleman looked at his paunch
This time the child is not coming back
Everything is once again complicated
The cherub in spectacles vanished
In the mists of time , not to come back.

The cherub in inverted spectacles

The portly gentleman looked at himself
In the bathroom mirror and smirked.
In the shrill voice of his childhood
He made some really funny noises
Which yuckily merged in cistern sounds.
He tried to think simple like child
He will go out and pick some berries-
Bleeding berries from the red mountain
But mother says Banti it is sleep-time
Will you now lie on your back and sleep
How can one lie on one’s back and sleep ?
It is fun to wear spectacles upside down
The world looks so much different.
Not for me the complicated transactions
These grown-ups are terrible bores.
I will now dig deep in uncle’s backyard
I will find several nuggets of gold there;
These teachers are sometimes stupid
They ask funny questions in their class.
The big gentleman looked at his paunch
This time the child is not coming back
Everything is once again complicated
The cherub in spectacles vanished
In the mists of time , not to come back.

The world of the Alzhymer’s

We find bottomless holes
In our mentalised theories
Local logical postulations
Cause-and-effect sequences
Perceived chain reactions
And medical research findings.
All those are quintessentially
Protein specs floating freely
Our words float like protein
Fondly called lewy bodies
Colorless and unsubstantial
Dreams in shreds floating
As in amniotic fluid like then.

A certain woman of less virtue
Was not fit for our society
She embraced men in dark
In dreams and art and thought.
Fuzzy scenes of yesteryears
Telescoped into the present
Including ego and power games.

Let me know who is this professor
The man who brought it all up.
Our language loses meaning.
We do not agree you are you.
Actually you cease to be a son
A brother ,a person ,a human
You are a hand or a stone
Just a broken splinter for a whole .
My part becomes a whole
A thing is a word, an idea,an event
A daughter-in-law is a hand
A son a stone in the wilderness.

There is sorrow swirling in the belly
The anguish of a human existence
The pain in the bloated stomach
These forced feet take you nowhere
Men came with tails in their necks
Forcing down tiny white universes
When they go into the nether world
There is only a swirl in the belly
But no meaning accrues to words.

A soul change

In the river there was utter confusion
The boulders were not all that sure
And the hot brown sand felt disoriented.
They saw the Sunday bazaar on the banks
The images were there, those shadows
That played in the walls of the holes
Filled with darkness where was sand
That now removes fear of darkness elsewhere.
The shallow waters dealt with the bridge
On which people went up and down.
The grass swayed gently on the bed
When the wind called in the noon.
Everything was the same, even the buffaloes
And their eyes were vacant as always.
The water was green and cool
Only the machines no longer whirred
And their men no more shouted in the wind.
The boulders wondered, everything the same,
Why only the water felt different this time.

Refusal

I know you have said that enough
In the day’s heat and moon’s eclipse
In the horizon I looked far enough
And deep in the tree’s silences
The leaves rustled in the night.
What can you do again and now
Unless art has not left here as yet
And senses still matter to the mind.
In the hollow of my downy back
Your after-being remains as refusal
Senselessness hurts in my fingers
As though my senses are conscious
And are offended deeply by refusal.

Faith

These flowers would not talk to us
About their previous night’s growth pain
The pain of their petals unfolding
When the stars sprinkled dust on our roof
And the night’s queen whitely bloomed.
All the while our pleasures stuck to us
There was déjà vu in the night’s smell
The left over one of the previous day
That had mixed with tar and hot sun
Which had in turn mixed with bodies.
That night was hope and some angst
While nothing ever happened , it would.

Poetry is late

Poetry is now the breeze rustling in the tree
After the temple tank’s mossy stillness.
On consciousness had luminously arrived
The phallus god, in brown beauty- hues
And cyclical eight faced phallus ,in turns,
Tranquil-white and angry-red in stone eyes.
Polished now as God ,a washer man had used it
In rhythmic beats, all for beating laundry.
We have our myths, carefully polished
Over Time’s washed stones of the riverbed
Our accumulated minds enormously meshed
As a haystack of shared consciousness.
Our gods have uneasily existed all these days
With spirits who have to be driven out
From darkly lonely houses and fearful men.
On the hillock pallid ghosts come haunting
In moonlit houses amid systolic blood-chants
You know our god is fear ,not rain’s beauty
Or lonely jungles with the fall of cascades
I keep thinking, while my glass eye twitches
For brown beauty and pixelated praise.

Existence

Here a talking man is sleeping,
His arms akimbo, feet in the air.
Then were wild gesticulations,
Sweat on brow, fire in the eyes
Now vacant and unconnected.
He no longer exists in space
But he had happened in time
Whatever begins shall remain.

Revenge

revenge bleeds purple
for deaths in the train
and wounds to religious pride.
images of terrified nobodys
refuse to believe
neighbourly dastardliness
in crackling hell-fires-
revenge feels good.
in their orange fires
lies our salvation
revenge is warm blood
burning flesh, broken bones
in all,a delicious feling.