From the mundane to the ordinary

From the mundane to the ordinary

Eiffel Tower is so common what’s the big deal, 
From my dining room I see it in every meal. 
  
I cannot see my mother, 
Can’t eat what she makes or smell her around. 
To my brother who’s with her, 
It’s as silly as it sounds. 


Objects, living or otherwise, lose their importance with availability. The poem takes two well-known archetypes so to speak and shows how even such coveted objects lose their importance and become ordinary. The poet understands this merely as a mental model (trained to neglect that which is in front of us) and wonders as to how to change this paradigm.

This poem does not talk about nostalgia alone. I have conditioned just one interpretation for which I apologise. However, there are other interpretations as well.

The narrator

The narrator

When the stage is done, 
Players will come and leave 
One by one. 
  
In a thick and turbulent weather, 
The move, not to be together; 
Voices coarse and terse 
As if to rehearse a hearse, 
Beings aligned like pillars, 
Rigid and firm; the strong weaklings 
An inch of space is more than a hole in the needle, 
Drowned in meek feelings 
Not to be placed, there are no fillers. 
  
The wicked stage is undressed. 
Has transformed the King once bathing 
In the stream of bloods. 
  
Years later. The hollow stage re-appears. 
Germs emerged. 
Thousands and millions of bodies burnt. 
Smell though wasn’t coming from hell 
Players unable to sit in the garden. 
Much later, the place broke the walls 
Memories of pain now washed. 
  
Coarse voices without remorse 
Their tongues re-appeared in some other place. 
Need lives. Some more. 
Suddenly, the narrator says, 
‘Let me be that life, that countless life 
To flow into death to loosen 
And relax the space.. as I did before’, and goes 
Backstage. The voice echoes… 
The stage didn’t show but 
Is now a dais of peace. 
  
The stage undone 
Players come and leave 
One by one. 

angst

angst

I don’t know 
If it was just a spark from the rainbow; 
I saw it upon closing my eyes, 
It disappeared before I could name it 
My eyes opened. 
  
The Sun at night and the Moon in the morning 
Look fatigued before me just as I am told. 
The grasses on my head and the hair on the meadow 
Detached and disconnected. 
I wonder if they were born for any function at all, 
Though their colors change when they’re tired, 
Between brown and white muddled in time… 
I see a seed in the womb a child in the bud 
Waiting to be named and dying to grow. 
  
I can see when I am blind can hear when I am deaf, 
In the painter’s symphony and in the musicians canvas. 
  
Confused in twilight numbed in the rainbow 
When meanings lose track; 
We look back and think, 
The spark where did it come from 
And where did it go. 

Scarcity in plenty in fiction and action

Scarcity in plenty in fiction and action

So many people so many stories, 
Yet content is amiss in proses and movies. 
  
Plenty of water land and air, 
Yet there’s no supply so fair. 
Plenty of food that daily go waste, 
In accounts written off that’s much out of taste. 
  
When beggars bang on glasses of our big and small cars, 
We choose to overlook those semi-visible scars. 
We ignore them with pain day in and day out 
We are planting in plenty our poverty to sprout. 
  
My leaders o dreamers when will you dream, 
For everyone who doesn’t so belong to the cream? 
There’s so much for all lying full and kind, 
Scarcity so tense we manage to find. 
Men and women so well born and bred, 
Show us the treasures that exist in the terrain. 
I am sure you’re as good as those who are led, 
Discuss with us to use our acumen. 
  
So many people so many stories, 
Yet content is amiss in proses and movies. 

Father-daughter at the moment

My child, my daughter, is ready to leave 
Her bag is packed. To study she has to go 
In some other town she’d be a sophomore. 

What is a baby pig called? Piglet 
A baby eagle? Eaglet 
And a baby swan? Cygnet 
She’d answer these questions on my lap 
Her soft puny self her butts firmly on my folded right arm 
Her water bottle and bag hanging from my left shoulder 
Her hands stretched she’d completely throw her without a care 
Her face and little hair hanging a tad above the ground 
In a second would come up and touch my cheek 
With her hand around my neck 
And shout Piglet, Eaglet, and Cygnet baba…ha ha ha! 

Just put your right foot forward 
When you are on the escalator, like this, 
Every day I had to show and tell her so… 

My child, my daughter, is ready to leave 
Her bag is packed. To study she has to go 
In some other town she’d be a sophomore.

ignorance

ignorance

sand is different from mud
east from west water from snow
tree is sleeping in the silly bud
clever we are, eager to know

When I know

When I know

When I know the cost of time,
Silent silly yet made to chime,
Nothing will find the price unheard,
The sound is still with the singing bird. 

operator (haiku)

life is like a horse
it is also like a snail
no yes time remains

ring-lost

ring-lost

I have lost the ring what’s the big deal, 
I lost my love so long ago, 
I fell in love to crack my heel, 
The scar I know will never go. 
  
I have lost the ring what’s the big deal, 
I am lost in my love so deep and down, 
Bring your pain and I will heal, 
With the spark of the ring I have in my crown. 

option

option

A look can kill as it can heal, 
a word can end or it can mend, 
An act can bless or be a mess... 
We choose from the two, 
What to take and what not to, 
Look word act have no tact, 
What we want becomes a fact.