A common man

Kitchen is burning

The man has eloped from the man

Inmates numbed

Sympathetic wind brings food-smells

Oozing from the neighbor's walls.

Blankness has severed engagement

Yet the onlooker life, waves cadence

Words of the past do not feed the present

Deeds of the yore cement the compulsive lent

Memories counting moments.

Love hasn’t left,

Lines do not speak of mediocrity

And hormones secrete affection.

Useless utensils lying on the table

Like archaic words

Stagnation is the only mobility

Static rail lines moving the train

From day to night and day again

A predictable stability.

All of this has made the man

A faltered equestrian
His inability to smile and talk
Overshadowed his work

An odd man out

Lying flat on the ground

A jelly fish

Without fulcrum

Gets no leverage from the field

Has no knees

No elbows

His shameless eyes track the rainbows

Calls the perpetually engaged, social horizon

To fetch his pot of gold

Lines lie, don’t connect

Sees faceless teeth everywhere

More of teeth

Clapping the performance

Of the eloped man, leaving the man.

Life, in rhythm gallops

She has to go to work

In the end, she’d die

like every other lady.

But today, while making her Sunday lunch

with her comfortable, lazy hands

an indolent course that takes time,

she told she’d like to live in my lines.

Taking a picture is easier, I thought

a part of the shot.

But she! To be covered in lines,

How’d I write about the pounding of the heart

that lied on the ground on that first slow evening

drizzling on us facing the sky,

or about the sweaty hand that willed to write the story

of a prince and a princess,

or about the smiles that moved the brooks

but in time fell

as brown leaves in the history of pages.

Or

She wants me to write about the present moment?

She wants to die oh I see why.

Please remember I’d never want to go to work.

Women’s liberation, economic independence

Yes they’re important,

not for me.

For good or bad, I’d like to lean

withdraw money from the hidden wallet.

Then the evening gently drizzled I recall

as pleasant as a snowfall

but forever to freeze as a broken promise.

I see clouds stealing space in the sky,

it will soon rain.

Tomorrow, she has to go to work.

She never reads my lines

But she’d like to live in them, she said.

Listen

Yearning

Yearning

I am only a yearning

Unable to take shape.

There is this Vishvriksha*

Growing with seasoned years

Waiting to be uprooted

Innocent defenders

Onlookers

Wonderers

Ignorant, attracted, inert

I am only a yearning

Yearning

To break open.

*Poison tree

Threads of thoughts

15^th August

Independence day

Smiling urchins flock at the signal

to sell flags to car drivers

A writer writes of rose

smelling as sweet

Unforgiving history

Commemorates torture

Celebrates freedom

Labour

Old wrinkled man

pulling the thhela*

carrying the burden

*Wheelbarrow - a small cart with four wheels, two at the front and two supporting at the rear, used typically for carrying loads in building work or gardening.

Poverty

Poverty exists

To feed the rich

By design, for years

Despite words and tears

Urchins

Children starve

In unicef zones

Mystery

Ignorance is a safe zone

So peace is a mystery

Unnatural

Computer virus, weapons

Invented, marketed

In the honeyed world.

On the other hand

Anti-virus industry, firewalls

Talks on disarmament

Beehive.

Counter-productive relationships

between countries safeguarded,

Well-meaning persons intoxicated

like the occupied bees.

No stepping out

from safe zones

of expected behaviours.

Colourful friends

I have a friend.

He is black.

I call him Blacky.

Black is not bad

I don’t change him

His colour, with euphemism

For his kin, he’s not sad.

I am Browny; with colours, we don’t fuss

We also have a Whitey with us.

One is fat, one is tall

And one is short

Us, we sometimes call

Tally, Shorty, Fatty

We don’t feel proud, ashamed or dotty.

We don’t make amends

Our looks is given for free

Not how we look, but how we see

Makes us outstanding friends.

One goes to a church

One to a mosque

One to a temple

But we know whom we pray

Lives inside our hearts

Is beyond the fence

And if they ever met

They wouldn’t fight

Like us, they’d simply be friends.

A small poem

Rains...

An urchin draws smileys

On the draining field

The untouchable

The wind has sinned.

It took ink from the sun

Wrote stories on the sky

What appeared as clouds

Became visible with the moon

Daylight is such a lie

Thousand stories

But whose stories are these

Smiling, crying witness.

And where are they placed

Right in front of nowhere.

And how old are they

Light-years, or a day.

In the middle of all these fictions,

The wind, the only indispensable voleur

The uncatchable offender

Perpetually in medias res, yet out of sight

The invincible, pure benefactor

No matter what, unwinds.

Grow up

Wars, a delinquent game, it’s nothing new

With foolish weapons, far from witty

Funny you know that pretty well too

What a joke! You name a cannon Humpty Dumpty*!

Get rid of wars, unleash peace

Before you pull the girl

From her wonderland and call

A weapon as Alice!

Get rid of weapons, unveil prosperity

O adults! Please outgrow Tom and Jerry.

Jokes aside,

In killings there’s no pride.

When you create a weapon

In your mind, a war is born.

When you market a weapon

Death warms up its horns.

We’re ordinary peoples of the world here,

Our troubles don’t seem to end,

We die as martyrs most everywhere,

Wonder when enemies, like adults, could befriend.

Note:

*From 1996 the website of the Colchester tourist board attributed the origin of the rhyme to a cannon recorded as used from the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall by the Royalist defenders in the siege of 1648. In 1648 Colchester was a walled town with a castle and several churches were protected by the city wall. A large cannon, colloquially called Humpty Dumpty, was strategically placed on the wall. A shot from Parliamentary cannon succeeded in damaging the wall beneath Humpty Dumpty which caused the cannon to tumble to the ground.

Source: Wikipedia

Gift

Civilisation’s real change

Is to be free from wars, weapons

Arms and guns,

When intelligence with skill

undoes the need to kill,

when armies shift their focus

enemies for good leave from our hearts,

when insecurities perish

when poverty and hunger vanish.

Rest,

including reaching out to other planets

is gifting a comb

to the tonsured world.