My Tryst with the Beast

They say that because I didn't take the jab, the virus has chosen to take a jab at me...

Head exploding with blinding bits of jarring light, body pumping out heat, bones broken into a million pieces...young leaves on the cashew tree form hearts and blow kisses. Birds are vocal. They come visit, blabber a lot. There might come a point when I would be delusional enough to understand the language of the avian world, and all my knowledge of the human tongues might simply slip away from me...imagine all the great secrets i might be privy to! Who knows I might even be able to spread my wings and take off. The idea excites me and is saddening at the same time. Yet, would I be a lesser being if Rimbaud's audacious flights into visionary realms did not encompass my consciousness or Dostoevsky's nosedives into the subliminal eschewed my pinioned comprehension? Or...there are illimitable ors which could be illustrated here and honed to brilliancy but I think the point is made.

A few moments from my feverish reverie:

1.

The sun stretched
lazily on the balcony
beckons me;
i haul my feverish
body and lie atop;
together we pump
out heat merging
into one another.
the volcano
erupts and lava flows
out; a file of black
ants marching past
urges me back in

2.

the night a huge
organic beast
with uneven folds
where i lie tossing
and turning, craving to
fall through some deep
crack and disappear
into an infinitesimal
moment of not being...
a heart beating:
not mine.
a body breathing:
not mine.
dreams roll in like
a blanket of early
morning fog, smothering
the consciousness, yet 

here 'i' am, awake and
groaning with pain

3.

Beyond the mortal cells
dying and renewing
I resurrect myself:
an entity, an energy
a force of
a sprawled shadow
with an arrow of sunshine
darting through it

Spinning Webs, not Dreams...

The sky split open and a voice boomed from above: 'Thou shalt contest the elections from Mathura'...And there He stood, the cerulean blue vision of beauty and delight, holding the unmistakable golden flute, smiling mischievously. It was Lord Krishna himself urging Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath Nath to go forth and conquer his beloved city Mathura. How could the CM refuse Him?  Humbly he accepted.

The dream made headlines in the media across the country. People offered their oblations to the CM, the Chosen One. Who would have thought that such an epiphanous directive from the Lord himself could be overruled by the party high command? Yet, it was. And being an obedient cog of the party, he did not dispute the decision.  And disregarding the divine implications of his dream, he resigned himself to his assigned constituency. 

The Chief Minister's sputtering fire in the belly to reclaim Mathura from the Musulman would have to find its deliverance somewhere else. And his insatiable craving to pitch seething speeches to raze the Shahi Idgah Mosque adjacent to the historical Sri Krishna Temple, to a hungry and frenzied mob would have to wait for another time. For now, he will have to let his dream sleep. 

Interestingly enough, America's dear old ex-president (now an avid painter) George W Bush, in his waking dream, claimed that he was on a mission from God when he sanctioned the invasion on Afghanistan and Iraq: "I am driven with a mission from God'. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did." He did indeed... It would seem that directives from On High are infallible.

Almost six decades ago Rev. Martin Luther King, in one of his concluding paras of 'I have a dream' speech, said: "I have a dream...With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood."

One wishes that today's world leaders would change their sleeping positions; turn to living dreams like the one Rev. King so eloquently expressed, and help transform old hatreds into new empathies. All emancipated nations take their first step by learning to  create an organic  internal harmony within the existing demographics of the land, instead of divisions the way our colonizers did.

A Funeral by the Sea

 It's wonderful to see the world lopsided. There's a certain weightlessness to it...a momentary defiance of gravity. How liberating it is to think that not everything follows the same trajectory, not everything that goes up must necessarily come down! Things can remain midway undefined in their coordinates. 

He was glad he was a bit tipsy. They were still collecting firewood for the pyre. The old woman who had lived on the footpath for as long as he could remember was found dead in the morning. A cluster of bones, lying open-mouthed, an early morning blue trapped in her cold steadfast eyes. No one knew her name. No one came to claim her body. The dog sat whimpering, unwilling to leave her side. So, they decided to bring it along to the funeral. It sat there, hungry, yet undefeated in its sorrow. Two orphaned puppies encircled it with their furry warmth. A nice family, somebody said. The wind was getting stronger, and so was the sound of the ocean. The pyre needed to be lit lest they called it quits. The monsoon clouds lurked threateningly in the west. 

A child ran laughing towards the rushing waves...a man quickly caught him by the arm and picked him up.

It was getting cold, and he hadn't brought a jacket along. Patiently, he waited for them to set the corpse on fire, so he could huddle by the leaping flames and steal some warmth.

the stillness and the word...

 As yet another year wound its way in and out of the shadows of the pandemic as an inevitable continuum to 2020, one hoped and prayed that it would spell the end of global consternation and economic anxiety. But, Ananke and Providence had other plans for humanity, and a lot of us tumbled into new year with weekend curfews beginning to ebb our social life.

We would remember 2021 as the year when humanity seamlessly divided itself between the vaxxed and non-vaxxed, the 'responsible' and the 'rebellious'. And between those who distrusted the governments and took to streets to protest and those who mistrusted each other and shut themselves in their homes and took to the trenches of social media.  It was also a year when many of us unquestioningly resigned ourselves to a masked version of reality. We moved within the confines of our designated area, trying to reinvent ourselves vis-a-vis the limitations imposed upon us.

Personally, I saw reality  as I once knew it, slipping from my grasp, its regimented predictability becoming amorphous and elusive. I lived from moment to moment, from day to day, in an infinite stretch, looking for myself. As an immense amalgam of time, I could very well sum up  the year 2021 as a huge wasteful expanse, but no. It turned out to be a voyage of self-discovery, giving me courage to face myself in my raw solitude, and find myself in random moments of sudden revelation. I struck a natural companionship with the wilderness surrounding me as it spontaneously embraced the wilderness within me. The two became one...

1.

a gutted evening 

spilled across the

sky: ribbed clouds

in gray and pink

being dragged 

like dead weight

of a rotting day;

the poet could 

seize the peace 

even in this decay,

a pale moon's

crescent smile compelling

the eyes to reciprocate

darkness turning to light

with  sightings of 

the first stars

2.

The ocean and sky were one

the thunder and the sound

of crashing waves edged 

into each other; the far away 

cry of the peacock slipping into 

the neem grove rose in delight 

above the slashing rains,

the stinging of the fast drops 

and the memory of our hesitant 

first kisses fused seamlessly. your

touch on my dress was washed 

away by this sudden downpour, and i 

smelled of wet earth

3.

a moon quiet

and fragile like 

the sky timid behind

the golden evening

veil; a fiery drongo 

perches on the clothesline 

whistling flirtatiously

4.

short filaments

of gold looping

across the purple

night, weaving magic

and love: peacocks

waking up to the

stirrings of 

spring desires

5.

the brahminy kite cruising into

my view from across the

window slits the afternoon

with its silent flight,

the kingfisher swings on

a low branch, whistling, the frail

moth i saw last night

lies lifeless on the porch;

my heart cries and sings,

flies and sinks, sways and 

slips, like dappled pearls of

light through quicksand