Witness

Late fruit of tired loins born in a good year

And thenceforth anointed with high hopes

An optimism not shared by fate perhaps

And later, nor by the fore-mentioned ‘fruit’.

Buoyed by the ease of easy achievement

A second place seemed too cruel

Unexpected of one held with ‘expectation’

Mediocrity became the burden he bore

Sometimes resisted. Dissipation offered

Dubious delight, cynicism comfort

And reflection yielded

That life had been a deck of dominoes

Mistakes lined up against the next

Crashing to every harsh touch;

In the trial box, he pleaded guilty

Witness to his own conviction.

Scarecrow Self

Trapped in a pool of its melancholy

nostalgia its sole reflection

time is the only wind that

ripples the surface and

spawns self-same currents,

—as if this were

a heady matrix of absence and desire

when its but a fool’s plaything

to chime away shallow suffering—

of a Scarecrow Self

who battles the days and night

lone sentinel of windswept barrens

learning endurance

and its place in the world.

Some Sudden Lines

If only my days

Would lead to your nights,

Speak in common tongues.

Seeking intimacy,

Beyond love, each other,

We draw into this square

A tide of the world.

You turn it around--

Wanting it topsy-turvied,

I, only to set it right.

And so we continue

Our quest

For a perfect understanding.

Questions that ‘Love’ Throws Up (in the air, regurgitates, tosses around, et al)

Love seems queer

Autoerotic

Reveling in the sameness

Of the other,

Is difference a point of departure?

Janus-headed

A turnaway and look elsewhere,

Or a g-spot of arousal

Powering the eternal

Sado-masochistic self?

What is love?

One moon sighted by two pairs of eyes;

A night framed by a window;

Playful abuses bandied around;

A high on hormones;

A new wound to cover

Pus of the oozing old one;

Union of the solution of

Attention deficit disorder

And the stalking syndrome;

Plato’s search for two halves

Of the one whole?

Is it a hallowed name, or

All the revered words

(Trust and laugh, feel and touch)

Put in the simmering cauldron

Producing wafts of heady nausea,

A pendulum like chime

Between two extremes

Leading to a puking fit,

Carving out a dent

Like words etched on a tree

Eroding the heart

Than a healing seal?

Love is a much-fucked slut

Raped by many pens,

Burdened with bastards

Claiming her legacy.

So I added yet another paean

To the litany,

A friendly detoxifying

Homily.

Nothing

Nothing is a full-bodied word, like zero, which holds within its 0-shaped belly the sense of everything and nothing. Sifr, like the world itself, is an orange-shaped anamoly and is also that much-touted word, a paradox. And all these deliciously curling words that twist the tongue and make the mouth pucker up in a round pout, ‘nothing’is wonderfully full.

So to a casual, ‘How are you?’, the desultory reply ‘Nothing’, might mean just that or imply the hint of some life-altering existential angst. Compulsive literariness compels me to remember Beckett, the guru of ‘nothing’, exploring the very absurdity of this nothingness which pervades modern human existence.

Interestingly, a status message on Facebook stating ‘I am doing nothing, and loving it’, gets more thumbs up and comments than something urgent and macabre like, say, ‘My life is ending’! Evidence of the enduring appeal of nothing!

I am fascinated by the endless potential the literary device of litote throws up, and thus ‘nothing’ fetches in its toe, the desire and yearning for its other half, everything and the intermediate, something. Sketching a lazy trajectory of a person’s ‘life’ from birth to death, it is interesting to wonder if it is a move from nothing through something to everything?

Well, then why the nothingness associated with death, and if the zero be recalled, what of the promise of a circle come to its completion when the curved line joins itself while running always at an exact distance from the centre. The perfection of the circle remains the unattainable zephyr that all vie for and never achieve, yet death is understood commonsensically as an end, not a much-desired, much-awaited closing of a circle to encompass the everything and nothing life has been. Lest I be mistaken as championing the cause of morbid quietus over free-breathing life, a clarification -- it is the fullness of life that death celebrates, an ever-interesting, ever-perplexing Rubik’s cube; much like ‘thingness’ arises out of the heady mix of the one and the other,of nothing and everything, or as in literature, the concept of one can be explained by the opposite of its negative.

wanderer: Silence

wanderer: Silence

Silence

If a word were to be described by stating the negative of its opposite, then silence would be known as absence of speech.

All those blessed with this virtue, know that the absence of speech is often more expressive than words could be. They are moreover, content, not handicapped by the compulsive desire to speak requiring the crutch of ever-available speech. They are the calmest people I have ever known.

Perhaps, like some ancient form learnt only through a long arduous discipline, speech and silence maybe practiced too. But paradoxically, words are required to tell of silence.

An Ode to Silence

Bereft of calm

On torrid eves

We seek solace in words,

Writing a mask

For a silence

Which tells of our hollow faces.

But true silence,

Is a word

Which speaks itself

By saying

Nothing at all.

Not a riddle to

Puzzle the hours away,

But a teller of a calm ecstasy,

Not in need

Of an orgasm of words.

Sometimes

She talks

To hide,

To shatter

The silence

Too cold

Too cutting.

Words are the masks

She writes.

But a wise one counsels,

Silence is a call

To speak

Without words

Overheard by no

‘Eves’-dropping

Snake in Eden.

A beauty

Grown

In cloister.