It seems there is no single integral way
Of grappling with the world , in its nights
Of darkness hiding trees after their silent
Manouevres in a day of their making stuff
Plain green stuff in leaves of yellow light.

Another leaf is my own fragmentariness.
I am a leaf to be removed from its winter.
Like this man severed from his leafy past
Now earth and water in the sea of a sky
Fragment of event that is not whole of life
A broken life, from a winter of the past.


My reading is fragmentary , wholly digital.
My grasp of the wholeness of a wired life
Is leaves from someone else's digital diary.
My verse is leaves fallen of a winter of age.
This life is fragmentary, a heap of images
Like many-hued splinters in a kaleidoscope.

We talked of Kolkata's garbage boys
Scavenging on India's poverty in glory
Their cheeks gone pale with knowledge
Amid Nobel prizes lost and not found,
Their brown sugar level intact in blood
From cigarettes puffed in silver rings.

This morning we find some Boston boys
From yellow blogs scavenging in forties
On mountains of putrid Western glory.
Thank God we are level with those guys.
Now we do not carry giant size hurt egos
Any longer, on our drooping shoulders.


http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/lewis-w-hine-child-scavengers.html

In checking up, a room of night grew on me
On phone from hot windy plains, her dream
As a woman of daughters beyond the ocean
Talked of holidaying in emerald island together
By a mother-daughter, a son in childish glee
Tipping over a balcony, in a mind's slowness
Hunger of mother, a dark anguish of mother
A heart attacking the dark night of lone tree
In a mix-up of time and space, night of day.

A checking up is poetry of pursuit, a last training
A sunshine at the hem of a garment in retirement
As the sun diagonally pursues a woman's walk.
Checking up on a room of night grew on my sleep
Seeking a confirmation of continued existence,
Of each other's continued existence, my own life,
In its poetry of night and a box of light in the day.

On a morning of bedewed grass
A bare walk hardly leaves notes
Only bird notes from park trees.
The grass cowers in wet silence,
But raises its heads once a while
Its wetness tingling the underfoot
A painful thorn peeps sometimes
From shadows hid in its self-respect.

A noisy nose on the green bench
Dumps a breath of fresh dirty air
But takes much more of green air.
A broken lawn-mower lies listless
Throwing up its hands in despair
Powerless to cut its pride to size.


Winter-cold feet barely manage to squish
In its bleary-eyed upper submissiveness
Flying away before the sprinkler gets them.

Between us and our philosophy there is a stream
Of people, slow-moving towards the blue horizon
With their hands hurled into empty space in rhythm
Their brass cuff-links glistening in the morning sun.


There are overwhelming huge crowds milling about
In railway trains , with water pots under their seats.
They are the shadows of so many people in frenzy
Of hearts suffering blockage, of minds gone crazy
Bodies lying intestate, with flies buzzing about eyes.


I have to first understand where they are all going,
Crossing the fords and rivers, dunes and beaches,
Clutching fears in bellies, gods crying floral attention
And water on their phallic stones, camphor flames
Lighting ancient darkness, bats fluttering in caves
Old men and women blinking eyes to blinding light.


I should understand their stones and nubile maidens
Dancing in ancient moonlight, their flutes softly singing
From tree branches on the river banks, after stealing
Butter from pots hung in kitchen's darkness of mother.

Ten people in a picnic do not a man make
Only a pagoda rising from the wet grass
On a summer evening, a fresh wet spring
The beginning of summer, a winter's end,
As a hose on the side gurgles grass water
On soft summer shadows, wet shadows.


A tiger burns bright on a green grass mound
At a flash of photo-bewilderment in far eyes
Looking over the shoulder, from a round head.
The tiger burns whitely against a stone's pink.

Shadows walk past in black, rising against men.
They eat ice-creams, pop-corns in large trees.
Obstreperous kids shout at a Sunday's silence.
Some old men look over monkey gods in red.

The tiger refuses to gawk at men that do not make
A pagoda on a wet evening, eating their popcorn,
All the strange creatures walking in their shadows.
It has to burn bright for poets wet behind the ears.

Between us three there is this he, a flat piece of jelly
That defeats us daily by the night, occupying our body,
As fears spread in the belly like a jelly, these silly fears.


He that wore a body till recently is now an idea mainly
That spread from our sleeping body, between our sheets,
In dreams, mainly, to a sky that arched over our body.
Our light shadows coalesce with his absence of body
Entering our common dreams in our separate sleeps.


( Three women are mother, wife and daughter of a dead man)

I have sealed this here fate as spurious
A name given to a poetry of non-feeling.
Its words come from the depths of marrow.
They are semantics, sounds semantically
Linked, in an under-sea of bones and meat.


Nakedness shall be in dreams, of a red meat
White bones, holes to the sky, wind and rain
Hissing through sooty eye-holes, a free jaw.
Poems come from a missing lower mandible.

I take an armful of words to the lake, in my breath
As the sky seems still and is ranged over the trees
Sonically in whispers ,with a breeze ever so gentle
To the lake, smiling from enormous blue distances.
Time to catch the world by its words, in the softness
Of a silky evening, a passing thing of this very time
Before it vanishes in a spoof of words, in a breeze.


I return to spit fresh wet words into the wash-basin
And look up thimble ,quotidian,high sounding words
To catch the world in acoustic grasp, its emptiness
Collected in porous canvas bags as a few sonic words
This way I try to catch the world by its own words
By the very sonic words that have made the world.

The only way is to look at oneself in the mirror
When nobody is looking, as the fan is whirring
And a fly or two buzz about in the morning sun
When window glass burns with it in gold and silk
And tall shadows sprawl on yellow-flowered beds
As though they were men of your former selves.


Then there are silhouettes of cooks in the kitchen
And green cut vegetables getting ready to be fried
Office children pulling up socks ,bent and frayed
House maids deliciously applying golden brooms
On night's weary marble floors to gently flick dust
Off to golden pathways from kitchen's windows.


The way is not look into the eyes of needless men.
Nor into future shapes of inert bodies under sleep
Waiting for a larger sleep to devour smaller ones .
A golden window , a yellow bed , dust in the sun
Do cover bottoms better than those gloomy figures.