Flesh on flesh
Bone on bone
Eyes go astray
He that spoke
Also unspoke.
The mornings
Presage gray
The evenings
Live up to them
Monochromatic
Experiences
Like always.

I have lost the tactile sense
The last time you met me
I could smell your hug
The fragrance has endured.
I keep raising my arms
Towards the rain-laden sky
But cannot feel the raindrops
On my outstretched tongue.
In the dewy winter mornings
My feet do not feel anything.
I try feeling the tenderness
Of the just opened lotus petals
With my senseless fingers.

I can sense the tingle of your fingers
On the shadowy curve of my back
Through their after-fragrance
You ran your fingers on my belly
I could almost hear their music.
I could hear your carbon smell
As the midday burnt your crackling back
When we lay, on the beach, oblivious
Of the crustaceans crawling around us.

Then was different
Of different hue
And music.
The eyes spoke
Of liquid love
The leathery skin
A graveyard of memories.
There are holes
Where were pools.
Eyelashes flutter
Like bat's wings
Embers of selfness
Still smoulder
Unreturned love
Yet another cover
For bruised ego.

The big sister made fine dishes;
Her husband was a proof-reader
Who had a way with  typefaces.
They made such a lovely  pair
Roly-poly Rajeswari loved him dearly.
Her dishes were so delectable
Albeit with a tinge of sadness.
Her necklace had a black thread
Which rose and fell as if it was gold
Her eyes were pools of sad knowledge
Which flowed in dark-lined contours.
Her tumescent tummy bulged with
Imagined babies one, two or three.
One would blame it on flatulence
Induced by late night indulgence.
Her man was no prince on a white horse
He was a fine printer nevertheless
Who had a way with typefaces.
The fragrant jasmines in her hair
Shone in the shadows of her back.
She smiled like a princess among
Worn-out print heads, squeezed out ink tubes
What if he is on forty-wrong side
He was a fine husband and a caring friend
At his age shyness didn't become him
He wanted to tell her what lay encrypted
On the flat-stones of their foreheads
(The lettering wore off due to time's ravages )
He shared a printers affinity with Brahma
One thing emerged very unmistakably
The patter of little feet was heard distinctly.

Her husband could never tell her this
His drooping eyes said it all, however.
How would she know that a few years later
The whites of his eyes would focus on her
And the horror of it all dawned on her
He, the expert proofreader that he was,
For once misread the encrypted writing
On the foreheads of  their joint destiny.

I must re-experience their freedom
It is as though I was there the other day
Only they have grown bigger and taller
And their inner spaces more cavernous.
Remember, I tried writing pretty pictures
On their scraggy walls in several stunning hues
To celebrate the leafy arrivals of the silver oak
And the jackfruits sitting heavily on the barks
Nothing much has changed since .
I drew such lovely pictures of charging bison
Our tribeswomen danced dimsa all night long
As we drank cup after cup of palm wine
And the dappu beat in a rising frenzy.
Millions of years ago I saw this very mountain
Gurgling to form a gigantic gas bubble
This very bubble has hidden all the parchments
Of my dearest ancestors' glorious history
They all went beyond the mountains
Never again to return to our land.
But I can still see their dark specters
In the cavernous womb of this mountain
Clinging to the moss-laden roof upside down
They shrieked out the secrets of the other-world
And of life beyond the mountain-peaks
That piled, one on the other, on a sunny day.

The poet is not the thinking man
Thinking up flashbulb ideas
He starts off with an idea, a thought,
A scrap of reflection, not pre-formed
But that which hits you like a tiny
Dust speck entering your eyes
Filling them with hot salty tears
Extremely annoying until ejected
Then one thing leads to another
Words take shape like cute icicles.
This fetish for semantic beauty
Leads him into unknown recesses
Of moist-green glades of gently
Gyrating shadows with soft sunlight
Filtered through leafy lattices
Imagery defines the moment
It re-creates the moment .
On a rain-soaked amavasya night
Full-throated frogs from muddy pools
Sing the ecstatic chorus of life
Words drop down from the heavens
Like a shower of translucent hailstones
The poet goes around blissfully with
A nebulous halo around his head
Of violet charged particles of voltage
Metallic words embrace this energy field
With so much sound and fury
But still suffused with meaning.

The body lay there in the room
With flies and people buzzing
The pale face looked indifferent
Tomorrow it will go down
Into the bowels of the earth .

Yesterday night he was busy
Searching for a quick-fix solution
To his life's problems in the
Froth of the golden yellow brew
The body had a fatal hunger
Just like the woman in his life .
Scoops of dust settled on his coffin
He had no more complaints about life.

The afternoons are unnecessarily breezy
Miserable scruffy stray dogs scrounge
Vigorously in the stinking garbage heaps
Wagging their fly-ridden tails meaninglessly
Stupid puppies suckling nonchalant bitches
At night these wretched creatures weep late
Into the chaotic darkness of the night
Striking sweaty terror into weak pulpy hearts
Dark ebony-bodied stone-cutters squat
By the tar-melting half-gravelled roads
Sweat drops on their dark torsos gleaming
Like stars on the inky amavasya night
Listless muddy buffalos stare vacantly in space
Their udders full and their hearts empty
The sunlight here is not even warmly suffusive
Tiny specks of clouds in the hot summer sky
Cast fleeting shadows on the brown parched earth
With not even a suggestion of imminent rain.

Eight o' clock is supper-time and family time
The old clock is ticking away like his heart
Blue-bodied, alcohol-full he sways violently
In spasms of male power, his passionate being
Overwhelmed by  malodorous masculinity,
Sweaty musclepower unabashedly displayed.
He looks vacantly through the  wooden beam
That supported the decaying faded thatch
His ebony body is full with fiery country liquor
Like a violet-black grape with a rotten core,
A home for a thousand crawling worms,
Where unbridled passions mix incestuously
With fierce familial attachments and filial love
Where carnality resides at the core of love.
Her  owl-like moans filled the nightly silence
Only to be muffled, two mournful hours later,
By the heavy crunch of her aching bones
Under his  weight on the sagging string cot.

On the hills everyone’s courage failed
That meant a clean break from the past
A clear-cut informed decision in the rain
A prophet sat right there, cross-legged,
Smiling in the polished marble vault
The decadent city dropped away gradually
In the semantic vagueness of the general rain
The lovers promptly lost their pristine bodies
In the fecund continuity of the falling rain
A little rain-girl smiled beatifically
In the blue and green of her eyes
There was no tentativeness in their slant.