Stranger
Why do you keep clicking?
On this ad,
For lonely hearts,
Can’t you read?
They are already sold
The person who bought them,
Might be thinking of,
Putting them in an oven
Sprinkled with pepper and salt
Just to get the kick
Of their rawness.
Or in his room,
Smelling of formaldehyde
He will keep them for his visitors
Or you tell me stranger
I want to have sex with you
Behind your camouflage
For the night
I don’t care whether you are
Man or woman
I just want to feel some skin
To my skin
Tell me stranger
How do you like the idea,
of living someone else’s idea
of you
Those better, stronger people
With their pens,
Weighing more than their hearts
With their knack for short hands
They tag you
You are an existentialist
When at the most you are
Just a lost kite
How do you like it?
When they scratch their beards
On uttering those fateful words
Let’s start a game?
Who will die first?
We will punch our chests
Till we choke
Or are you on a different channel?
Signal lost
You fade
You have skidded off
This information highway
Stranger, you are already dead
Try again
Living a pale green dream
on the edge of sanity
of insanity too
between forgetfulness
and remembrance
Collected cotton swabs
red
from the wounds
of your story
he will cry for you
America
When you become a land
of body bags
and collapsed highs
his kora will dance
one more flamenco
of your death
A curse of the black sweat
olive colored middlemen
that you are hunting
like rodents
down your own sewers
slitting their own throats
with dull blackened knives
They are crying round
the graves of their
violent cocks
big and brown
in the jeweled cases
of their precious history
so forgotten
Collecting thick oil
in the sieves of the
funnel shaped baby mouths dead
smirking at your own meek
judgment
Famished, recessed
they won't still be withdrawn
yet you wish
they make their spines -
a bit pliant
for you to devour.
I can see the big clock turning, churning my insides.
I puke a crucifix from my second grade.
a nun always proselytized, loved the habit she wore
which she hardly changed.
And the man on the crucifix, years after I saw him.
In some movie, leading a mob after a man who looked like -
our school patron.
The movie was rich in color, had intense, mesmerizing music,
mad mad men, women and children with fearful eyes.
My uncle has a tiny wooden clock,
a possession from his dead father and he got it from his father
so it goes.
my mother, and her little nephew run around the flowerbed.
A freeze frame clicking and licking -
some happy 60's moment,
I stop and ask people " excuse me, what time is it ?"
They laugh and point at the setting sun
I see our neighbors three year old daughter watching whirling Sufis -
from our sprinklers.
They have never heard of Scot McKenzie or San Francisco,
never in their life they wore a flower in their hair,
or picked up any habits of love or loving
.
I stop and wonder,
why there is always the right songs for wrong seasons,
right reasons for wrong actions.
That it wouldn’t have made much difference,
even if it was one of the soldiers from those tanks for -
Husak sang these lines.
and all the madmen with their prophetic visions
inventing God and killing him.
And why ants only crawl into a child’s clothes
In the ads, cute dogs always chase little girls-
with curly brown hair, bouncing. she cries.
our neighbors’ little girl "damn those grass blades"
They cut down a few more trees.
Its all just the clocks. It doesn’t matter one lives or not,
they know- time by their pulse,
that life is a faded torn yellow cloth with flowers.
And the words you couldn’t speak gobble you up,
like the monsters of big time machines - running wrong missions.
You shout the inanimate objects into motion.
Then, the words become wailing violins,of your head.
They remember fruits by the their taste, I remember the colors.
Allah created everything for man. Fruits to savor, women to fuck
she, our neighbors little girl picks an ant out from her chuddy
Through her tears I can see dancing bees, coming out like crushed fingers
from the rusty hinges.
I want to tell them the time,
but all I could manage - was some bad case of heaves and a crucifix.
Turning off the ocean in ones head is a hard job, especially
when the feet haven’t experienced the tickling licks of
warm salty waves of the cool evening. Grand father
was always lost in the racks of his childhood belongings,
like an old metal rod of nothing and news paper clippings
of his grand father jailed by the king - was a poet. He always
had the cold stare of a mighty dog of street for my uncle
and his sad fearful eyes, which he gave to his son.
Madness and flies know their homes . Keep away from Places
with rusty iron grills and old chairs made of majestic wood.
They are all contaminated with vanity and grandiosity.
Those days were a moody rain throttled by the audacious
clouds growing downwards. Failing to break free, a soon to be
rainbow. The fresh water canals were yet to marry the sewers of
our ever-expanding towns. Grand mother took cussing
of grand father with a cool head,told stories of easily-
provoked pariah men. Evenings, a light bulb always flickered,
showed water level of dams. Mother still carries -
an incandescent bulb in her heart and the reflections of its
sad orange light on the majestic woods, like madness. And it runs.
Run faster boy ,before it gets you. It strikes you down
with a vengeance like the ocean of the night. Its roaring shuts
the sun in your heart and the breeze lulls you to sleep.
I told u stories
Of glowing worms, orange snails
White cats, and black rats
The lonely fighter fish
Of my aquarium
You might have been
Reading my messages
Or might have been drinking
Water , lemon juice
Or iced tea
U texted
How much you hate yourself
Your Papa, your Mama
And their silly fights
All this time I imagined
Your face
Yellow , brown, red
Pale or silly
Of anger, hatred
Trust or silly playfulness
I cried
Thought you cried
And I turned my monitor off
Thinking
You might have done the same
puzzles consume the last drops of venerated greens-
of caffeine, of corrugated hemp, of Sanity
and its corroded edges. DJ traps the betrayed-
restlessness of wet feet Into the mocking tap tap
of rhythmlorn toes poking the soft underbelly
of distorted tapes. Aimless branches of mighty teaks
put yet another rabbit into the hole in the clouds.
use that thick lifestyle magazine here and there
strike down all those greedy termites of wings-
wrong time to have a sunbath under the white light
of CFL. Its almosting- July June and the many
insects haven’t known calendars of Sun the father
and Moon the mother. Boredom counts the legs
of beetles trapped in windowpanes.
Wish for a pet anteater. so curved and perfected
like cuddling girls of monsoon, curling up like millipedes
Water penetrates the many beehive hymens
Of the stubborn breadfruit tree.
Exasperated hare-eyes of grass. The greens of it,
look away from the monsoon overdosed yellow -
From the roots beg, another summer.
I have to get out of this madhouse.
The screeching guitar betrayal,
of this no-jazz music they stole.
The fair skinned, sharp nosed
officer in blue.
Tells me,
they are all vegetables
and no one eats the cow.
Among the swaying grass blades,
hundreds of glass graves
And I have ...
I have to teach this baby
Of anatomy of seasons
About the faceless Decembers
between February and May.
The officer tells me
not to walk around with
the nauseous smell of that athar.
My heart jumped
"oh he’s got a nose"
My guitar just dropped off my shoulders.
Like balls.
Playing cricket
in the sun,
the dark skinned security.
With his stained teeth and alcohol breath,
tells me,
"they stole our buffaloes,"
the officer in blue says,
they are all vegetables,
but you cant eat cows
Walking with muted steps,
the baby asleep at my feet.
Her father was circumcised
and her mother was a black veil,
till they tore it.
The officer in blue,
for his museum of experiments.
The dark skinned security
to feed his buffalo children.
With white lily lies and a
saffron tomorrow.
that the fair skinned officer in blue,
tells the dark skinned security,
that they are not vegetables,
and no one eats the cow,
or steals his buffalo,
She is asleep at my feet,
the baby with her Turkic eyes.
Her Arab hair
and the wilted, withered Persian flower
her mother wore,
………..the blue flame,
the dark raping tridents,
and my muted song...
The beats in the birds make them flap their wings
Perhaps we can dance to it again,
like the children we were.
In that old fields of Intertwining yellow, brown, and green.
Yes, that will be nice.
In the ponds and in the dark rooms, we searched fear.
The cries of the barn owls,
the wings of the bats visiting our patios.
You were at your grilled house
I stood behind that guava tree
The Russian folks.
A trapeze girl called Katrucia, Chuck and Geck.
The reasons for hating America do not lie in the arid plains -
Of Afghan or in the deserts of Iraq.
A yellow dream of a river bank at twilight,
you ran after Nyura, I stood imagining Kostya.
Yesterday they cut a huge mango tree
the plot is expensive, close to the temple.
But the spacious rooms on their portfolio
do not match the discoveries we made
In the apartments flashing their shadows on the Muscovy.
A town somewhere down Misha, we made rockets.
White children with blond hair. They laughed with us,
told us how much they envy the brown skin.
Now they have all shaved their heads
and we march behind Swastikas of different colors
And the milk-white milkteeth you lost in that ridge,
of one broken tile on your slanting roof,
turned brown are growing wings,
with the skeletons of two mango leaves and
one black moth brought down by lightning,
writing stories.
what would you make of me
when sadness is just a word
at the colossal abyss
of your winning diamonds and Mercedes'
a prophet, motormouth
like the downpour of
an insensitive summer rain
lamenting the death of his thought
in a godless corner
and hey woman
about all the knights of yours
holding their
purple, brown, red, black
lances
before the white storms
are not men
but poisoned darts
from your dreams
that we all live in an age of
e-mailed miracles
and we all will be risen
a thousand years later
all wise and pure in old wrinkled skin
and feminists will talk
about the aerodynamics
of cock
how it's easier to be blasphemous
in a godless world
that anal penetration won't be a sin anymore
and the comets hanging still
are the years you lost
trying to describe the asexual affections
of your sex
and you stand motionless
the worst hit of your life
everyday
you ask him
bastard where did you lose the roomkey
the smoke from your cigarette
covering everything you borrowed
you fail to laugh
and your intellect is just the rings
you make
in the still air
that ass is a heretic lamb
going against the will
of gluttony
we constipate
''oh god it's too much to take ''
a laxative
and, "bitch i shouldn't have let that
last splash of numbness to spread through
my veins"
and when an orange light's
scattered glow defy the etching
of our window pane
"God, cops"
we all reach out for the unknown sender
of that old spam
about the death of freewill
and the new store
to score some prescription pills
cheap !
On his way back home he picks up some stones
Some useless like memories, some useful
Like memories
He walks through grasslands
Sometimes resentful, sometimes joyful
Or he walks in rain, through a forest
Summer in a yellow veil, winter he dances with
A girl in thick woolen cloth
We never retreat, instead we follow footsteps
But,
When he starts throwing them
Into a pond nearby
(Like the estranged kid you saw in that B movie)
Words by words, images by images
They form the old prayer,
Where he used to hide with fear
To escape the ghost that never really appeared
On the nights he slept on an empty stomach
After a fight with his mother
Or after being picked on by his brothers
A weak legacy
Pollens from the past billow the curtains
Impregnating the curious night
With soothing voices and angelic fears
The dull hue of the yellow wallflowers
frame a vintage dream,
And in the darkness the waves unreel
A toy train, a toy car with wheels bearing the marks
Of a three year olds teeth
The stench of summer nights
And an unexpected rain, bringing birds
To nestle in small, cross-shaped openings
And their chirping, in rhythmic contrast with the thunder
And how he hid in a meaningless prayer
Till a lightning that tore the sky in two, silenced them
Sometimes an old, torn cloth, soaked with tears
Or an empty, rusting geometry box
Trying to hold the untold pain of the silence filling its void
A headless Barbie doll, curved like lust in a little girl's eyes
Sometimes shocking, provoking
Mostly alluring
And we hide our eyes in a mocking grief
A toddler learning to walk, talk
They form,
Paintings, poems and the beads of a rosary
And the last pebble he throws
Floats on the water in a silent prayer
Failing to provoke the water, starts to sing
Requiems for unseen landscapes
1
The poet was dying
The ghosts of his words
Crowded the streets
And his bed side
Full of lies
He clasped; huffed puffed
And people thronged his bed
The trees rose
In an August start
A tired dream
And it's bad marketer
The poet was dying
With his fingers burned
And his clock ticking
In his last incantation,
The soldiers were still marching,
He said:
"41 years since He* said we march!"
With scorched minds
Farmers burned their fields
Darkness creeped back
To the vacant houses
With violet gladiolis
Barely enough to bring
The scent of the villages
The poet was dying
His white cat
After a random black rat
His spindly fingers
Burned, all pointing and poking
His belly
Scraps of paper
And questions wasted
He tried to speak
The sentence incomplete
Escaped his mouth
Hatched a silent betrayal
Houses unfolded everyone
To an unfinished poem
Of a burning, red violin .
2
When the poet was dying they marched the streets to arrest the ghosts of his half-dead sentences, his last spell. The last conquest, on dreams outlived .
*Mao was a cat who would often appear in my dreams to tell me about kinds of rats only a red cat could catch. Mao was pale and white; he never admitted that though. Anyways, he never bothered to show up after I burned the "Bible of Red cats" and ever since, I have three white rats, my pets...Mua...Mua...Mua…
Mother,
I remember you in the words
Of that gay stranger,
said I am an angel.
And distances uncrossable
Always misunderstood
I print my sorrows on to,
Black and White photographs.
But all speckled, filled my notebook.
Criss crossed lovers, black cats,
crowded beaches, everything reminds me
so much of what I lack.
A quarter of a room
And my portable pc,
with door to my world feels lonely
The huge rose apple tree and its shadow
reluctant, to go beyond
the window sill.
Father,
I see you in the words
Of my brothers
A hole in my door,
doorknob always twiddled,
in wrong direction.
You never taught us love
The teddy bear you never gave me
And the bean bag that
I never sat on, they live after us
With whirling voices from our guts
We chew our souls and burst,
in silence
Trapped in a mirror
This reflects a shadow, a mere shadow!
Stippled, a lack of aluminum
A mayfly in the mouth of
a dried bass, already too late,
and useless…..
Telephone is sad and is feeling cold
On my table,
some old pictures with no footnotes
Papers with straight lines drawn on them
Just straight lines that intercept,
at absurd angles
Silver vine in water turning,
weird blue at roots.
The paper towels
I sent them back to you in last July,
said its raining and I don't cry that much
Last November, we walked
barefoot on the turf, talked
about Orion and Crux
You said we hunt, or we carry
the cross, and life
is like catching a large avenue,
with the tiny lens of a camera
It stays there, may be for a moment
At least for a moment, then you walked
Away.
Telephone is off the hook;
I am not expecting your call,
May be some paper towels
