Bricks came first and then the lime.
We like their color and the round pan
That they sit in on woman's head
As a warm sky stretches infinitely
From the sun-kissed hem of her cloth.

Old bricks make way for new ones
That contrast so well with old cloth.
The bricks have burnt to perfection
Outside city where they spew fumes
As earth burns slowly towards the sky.

Woman and boy cut smooth cakes
And burn them to perfection like hell.
Their hell burns fiercely in its red face.
Once they are out from the inferno
They sit in pans on woman's heads
For a joy ride to the house skeletons
Here they are laid, end to end, to hide
People from the sky and its fierce sun.

Just now I am reminded of a top
First spinning on the child's palm
And flung down to spin on ground
Till it stops tired and falls to a side .


Reminding is a top act of spinning
A brief spinning on the palm tickling
Like the red velvety creature crawling
On your palm reminding rain season
And flung to the ground it reminds its
Vanishing in grass hairs of the earth,
The earth that is spinning after flung
From a big child's palm slowing to stop.

Kafka's top spins on my palm briefly
Only to stop a little later ,when flung
To the ground after reminding is over.

We are waiting for our soul's salvation
Especially at night , as sleep vanishes
From the corners of pillows, their soft
Textures turn hard in silk and cotton,
And resident dreams turn stale and old.

Then there are moths come to eat sleep
From a powdered body under our skin.
They seem to appear by window's frost
In search of their light fighting windows
Staging phantom dances of men in bed.

We are the people who cannot sleep
Only dance with our vigorous limbs
Touching backs, clothes peeled off
So we present really pretty shadows .

We grow our heads right into clouds
Not knowing the lizard and the rat
That scurry past our tiny feet below
Lost in rustling dry leaves and scrub
But a mild tickling sensation to feet
Is felt in heads even at such heights.

Whenever our cups, we mean, runneth over,
Full or half full at times, then his eyes turn red
Bloodshot and much water oozes from kindness,
Stone clothes in pleats, a sloping torso in waters
As the morning sun light marks their lines from
Side to side, their stone ersatz for ancient body
Standing in eternal presence with its fixed stare
At a city of glimmering lights in its black fever.

Drop your clothes to stop cups of running over.
Flap your limbs about to morning birds chirps.
Eye contact stone eyes at their stare of kindness
And drop body's fears to turn your mind to stone.



(A 18-meter monolithic statue of Buddha stands tall in our city's Hussainsagar lake)

Our thoughts are pure without any body
Or clothes hiding one, in the trees or sky
Or by wall peg to hang its tale thereby.
Our body is cloth cast off and away.

No tail hangs by this body perfect pure.
Its meaning burns as food in intestine
Its light envelops trees and hills for sure
But in the end, is just sloughed off skin.

Beyond hills of clouds we wear another
To hide nakedness of skin from our thoughts
There we emerge from all-knowing mother,
Entangled in philosophical knots.

Our body is earth of dust seeking sky
Looking for soul that leaves it high and dry.

We began with nothing, we men
Only a song or a moment, a tug
On a swinging cloth, a motion set
By a hand from a kitchen, a face
Cupped by hands, lines traced
Fingers passed in spikes of hair.

Our shrieks bring kitchen running
From milk smells burnt, stomachs
Swell with cries, sunny fart sounds

We hear cuckoo's throats of rain
Gentle songs from a kitchen wind.
Our stomachs are rolls of talcum
Gurgles gibberish of a baby love.
We are nothing if not kitchen song.

(On Mother's day)

Tail wagging

His tails wagging is no barking
Balking at wind, at passing car
Just body friends of wet sniffing
Two pant legs to be followed
Only to be shaken off in a vile
Basement of dark shadows
And sleeping cars in their veils.

Pant legs have no steel in them
And a soft bite is afraid of pain
By four pricks just below navel
Here love ferments but festers.


Lame dogs

Plenty of action is in the street
A dog leg is gone to child's pleasure
By a boy's stone at its whelping
But three legged dogs still bark
At passing cars, their shadows.


You cannot straighten his tail

His tail is like a crescent moon
Its flies like stars buzzing around
Or like a scythe the farmer uses
To bring his crop under control
And cannot be straightened ever
Like a crescent moon or a scythe.

We had left early morning for sight of the phallus stone
Dragging our feet through the stones of ice mountains
Our horses plodded on with us some times and without,
Our behinds aching with their bony backs in contact.

Old men sat hunched up in two feet long wooden boxes
On young men's shoulders , latter feet dragging stones
The boxes felt like our old men's journey of no return
To a stone phallus to be bathed in tears in the snow hills
Where they will join a mountain stream and flow as river
To return to plains and land in the seas of their villages.

The mountains were cruel and beautiful to our tired feet
The horses zigzagged their way up with their droppings
Filling the cold air with a warm smell mixed with bodies
Their tails swished unending imaginary flies in behinds
As they were lost to their green dreams of the mountains.

Old men paddled all the way up in their wooden boxes
Crouched as in their mother's stomachs,with eyes shut
From their lips came muttering sounds like buzzing bees
That filled the empty silence of the hills in the morning.
It felt as if it was a return to where they had started out
Where this thing had begun, the sea of their first floating.

Out there the dawn cracks in a fine
Wet grass with figures stooping low
Their caps slightly askew for a heat
That will happen much later of day
When water bottles tend to throats.


Come down fast for a creature preview
Of men and animals ,birds and insects
From a poetry chapbook of indigo-rising
Joining in a class of yogic mathematics
Of alphabet , one lined Sanskrit poems
Their lines abutting bird calls of dawn.


Our walls rise of bramble, prickly wires
A shattered glass of bleeding bottoms
Of whiskey bottles drunk in night hills
Monkeys stealing coconuts from a car.
Keep walking unafraid of the two-legged
Creatures on motor cycles from behind
Snatch gold from absent-minded necks,
Of three monkeys of exposed manhood
Their stone genitalia left in street middle.

We want our walking to mix the earth
With the sky wonder, its earth-to rain
Toward forming alchemy of a soft dawn
Not harsh on the filmy eyes of wet fear
A fear of not being there with monkeys
To dance with them in their stone world
Only a colored bow to the western sky
Empty of rain but filled with soft hues.

It hurts pretensions from deep inside
Trying to save soul for a body's sake
But a rejection is not an untrue poem
Nor a cold truth waiting to be laid bare.

A room or a stone is no atmosphere
For the reddest moon of twelve years
That will sit pretty by a ladder's edge.

Water tank holds air in water of moon
The latter tossing about as china break
Splinters dancing about to the breeze.

Flowers flicker as moon's star servants
In the fragrance of its liquid soft light
Hurting love in the very flesh of heart
The moon hurts and is hurt by clouds
But temporarily and this too shall pass.