Nohkalikai, Again*

The first in the series of three travel-poems

Goosebumps, turning skin into prickly mounds

And the mist, like white smoke

Settled on us, chilling the clouded noon.

Shaking ourselves, we laughed nervously

At our adult fear of ‘spooky’ tales

But the glass was a thin fence

Hardly holding off the wails of Ka Likai

That followed our slow tread.

Mist and shadows and clouds curled past

A lone woman walked by,

Her flailing arms, her trailing clothes

Her snaky sinuous hair

Her slow measured walk to the precipice.

Clutching the ends of red-blue fingers

And green betel-nut leaves.

No tears, no voice, we heard nothing,

Only a frenzied flicker of the tongue

Erasing the taste of incestuous flesh

Settled like rancid fat on the roof of her mouth,

And a gut that refused to spurn

What the soul could not digest.

She is the powerful fall

Of mighty waters

Crashing off edges

Forever leaping off into

The void below

Crossing in leaps and bounds

All the borders that flesh of her flesh

And a hungry stomach had blurred.

*Nohkalikai translates as the Fall of Ka Likai, also the name of a waterfall near Cherapunji in Meghalaya. The chilling tale that gives this fall its name was narrated one June afternoon by my excellent storyteller friend Isa while we drove to visit the place. Ka Likai loved her daughter a lot and this made her husband very jealous. One day, when Ka Likai is out, he kills the daughter and cooks her flesh. When Ka Likai comes home, she eats the tasty meal made by her husband, only to discover her daughter’s fingers in the betel nut basket. Mad with loss and disgust at what she had done, the tale ends like a Greek tragedy, with Ka Likai’s jump off the cliff.

Neologisms, like ‘Love’

It started out, a four-letter-thing

Just another profanity, a pubescent fling.

A ‘crazy’ cultivated irreverence called ‘love’

Among others like ‘cool’ and ‘fuck’ and ‘faff’!

In the beginning, was a hollow gut pain

A quickening and then a long-drawn drain.

Dreary afternoons, and much of the moon

Of nights framed by windows, passing too soon.

A burst of pure feeling, states we didn’t know

Hidden nights, dreamy days, secrets like the big-O.

Now, I am glad we bartered youth and that year

To earn this bare-boned beauty, bought dear.

This thing, we leave nameless, utterly ‘virgin’,

Elusive, we frame it in tangential neologisms.

Announcement!

Some exciting new publications coming up in October and November with the UK-based web journal www.atavicpoetry.com who recently approached me. Meanwhile, check out what they did with my poem 'Poetry' for National Poetry Day celebrations!

A step out

Some of my poems published by Writer's Asylum! Here are the links

http://www.writersasylum.in/2013/08/poetry/near-thirty/

http://www.writersasylum.in/2013/08/poetry/threads/

http://www.writersasylum.in/2013/08/poetry/curse/

Home Alone

I

Lizards throw scurrying

Shadows, the walls stretch endless

They have far to go.

II

We seek redemption

Or something close to it, at

Street corners, all alone.

III

The slow crawl of hours

The creeping minutes of night

The long wait to dawn.

Monsoons Arrive

Musty smell

Of mossy sheen, like

Another skin

Growing, over

Nights and days, monsoons

Arrive, late.

The Memory Book

This landscape of memory,

And the portrait of one

Posing forever, frozen

In some sepia world;

The margins cleared

Of remembered words,

A text of desire paginated

Into an easy understanding

Of the wise ways of the world,

Hard-bound now against

The despoiling of time;

Crisp pages, each

Chaptering new moments

Whirled in continuum

Of infinite whiteness

And traces of ink

Scribbling away

New lines about

Old die-hard tales.