The life song of a dead tree

My wood is all but dead and dry,

I ought not have a sad tear in my eye,

Nor a pining heart's sigh,

My roots are now the soil

that fuels the fresh leaves' toil

for new smiles and fragrance,

Much of what was once above

is alive now below!

A journey through time

 

Past and future

are parasitic in temperament,

Always seek to expand, grow and stretch

beyond reality,

beyond practical limits.

 

The poor ‘present’ is a casualty,

It’s like a pointed peak,--

small but high, lofty, uplifting

where the upslope of future

and the downslope of past meet,

intersect and forget their tension momentarily,

And that’s when we actually live.

 

In childhood, we’ve more of ‘present’

and hence we’re lively,

The youth’s a run for the future,

As we walk, we leave behind a trail

and future shrinks,

past stretches,

There comes a point

when all we’ve is the ‘past’

in our old bones, dimmed eyes,

Again we arrive

at a phase of dulled, dimmed present,

Just a grave to look forward to;

few surviving memories

in the tiny vanishing puddle of life,

mired in mud,--

a few fishes flapping sometimes,

The past meaningless

and the present

almost a curiosity about death.

The scrap yard of love

 

That’s how I gathered her,--

a sad pile of

shards, fragments, broken pieces,

But that’s love,

Broken pieces feel like

soft rosebuds in your arms,

They bleed the skin

as you press with gentle warmth,

You become a maker or mender,

The broken pieces get together

and acquire a shape in the kiln

of your care and share,--

a lovely woman in your arms,

full of dreams and desires;

strong, confident, vigorous.

 

Love first softly brushes,

then sadistically crushes,

Now it’s your turn to be broken

and spill out of her arms,

Get shattered and scattered,

Waiting for some enchanting

treasure hunter of love

to see the potential in the broken pieces,

To gather you up, your fragments

in her lovely arms,

Love will sprout again,

Giving you a new shape

in new arms with fresh charms.

The fungus on the self

 

If you allow loneliness to push you,

it’ll gorge on your choices and confidence,

It’ll corner you like a little mouse

shivering with fear,

seeing snakes and cats

in all that which moves around.

 

Loneliness is the crazy lover,

It’ll pursue one, always,

That’s its nature.

Whom does it catch?

The one who can’t outpace it.

Who are its prey?

The ones heavily burdened,--

with guilt and anger of the past;

or foolish illusions of the future.

 

Beat it, outpace it, confidently,

Like unburdened, swift horses,

Light like wind,

Swift like arrows,

Clanking their hooves on the cobblestones,

Pacing to the tunes of the present,--

Now,

Not an alley, side street or crossing

misses their confident eye,

They make choices,

They are self-assured,

Loneliness lags far behind them,

The bulb of their presence

dispels the darkness

where the night-bugs of loneliness

sprout like poisonous fungus.

Being in the womb of nonbeing

 

A dole out from the infinite unmanifest 
to the finite manifest, 
I am just a tiny speck of cloudy phenomenon 
casting its shadow in a little valley. 
From the unbound infinity
to cosmos 
to solar system 
to Earth atmosphere 
to this little fleeting shadow, 
I am simply a ripple, 
a pulsating throbbing 
through which 
the whole feels its own being!

Strangers

 

Little instruments of intimacy

in the vast machine of love,

Enjoying the soft brush of lips,--

a solid stone fort’s support;

a steely assurance,

Melting into each other,

Skins seeping into each other,

Leaving no further distance to be covered,

Making a single entity

in thoughts, feelings and actions.

 

Then the walls crept between them,

Big stony walls,

Intimidating blocks

separating them,

Dividing them,

Cutting them apart,

The jarring fissures,

The glue-work of abandoned love

seeping and cementing the walls,

The walls crept high enough

to leave them complete strangers.

 

They carried each other’s torn skin flakes

on their changed identities,

The dead flakes of martyred love

sticking as sweet-bitter memories.

 

They walked along the stony walls,

There are no doors or windows,

Nostalgic entreaties fail,

Hope is lost,

They know that

both of them died in their own ways,

Losing a part of the self

in losing the other,

Thus they moved ahead wounded,

Then drifted away even from the wall.

A good human being

 

A collector of broken things,

An assembler of discarded pieces,

Making it a better world

without setting it as a goal;

just by being selflessly kind;

just a safe, secure bubble of existence;

being loving where

the outside strife won’t break in;

sometimes even giving shelter

to the people who shun love

purely due to the

fear of losing a loved one.

Belittling bestiality

 

What is the purpose of attaining freedom,

if you stay locked up inside yourself?

What purpose your wings serve,

if you decide to stay in the

cage of dogmas, curtailing conventions

and belittling beliefs forged by others?

What purpose your mind serves,

if it’s fogged with the clouds of

others’ hate, greed and ambitions?

What purpose your legs serve,

if they merely follow the mass

sleepwalking after a hypnotizing manipulator?

What purpose your hands serve,

if they are mere instruments

to fulfill someone’s evil designs?

What purpose your eyes serve,

if you see just the craftily managed

scenes to pamper the little man in you?

What purpose your ears serve,

If they just drum to the beats of

jingoism, rhetoric and false narratives?

 

If you are such a person as above,

you die as a baby even in old age

because you left your senses unspent;

almost untouched and virginal,

Born as a baby and dead as a baby,

Where was life during those long decades?

Warring with the self

 

I was sufficient already,

But then I began to see myself

through others’ eyes,

And my sufficiency crashed,

Something missing in this,

Something in that,

Sadly brooding I sat,

Pampered by fate

as its pessimistic, sulking pet.

 

Long before others,

we judge our own self,

Our own critical eye

cuts, bruises, lacerates, downplays,

devaluates and thumbs us down,

Showing us in poor light,

Long before the outsider’ shears

prune our self-specific, luxuriant sprawl,

we commit self-inflicted wounds,

And around these home-made wounds,

we keep building defensive ramparts,

Whereupon we stand like a hound

and throw catapults

at the imagined enemies around.    

The stamp of love

 

We will recover from hate

but never from love

if it has gone wrong,

Brightest smiles have the potential

to sire bitterest tears,

Lovely sweetness can easily

change to ugly sourness,

Petals hide thorns.

In love we are

on the edge of a precipice,

That’s why it’s exciting

and not boring like

the plateau of other common emotions,

We are at a titillating height

and feel floating over the lower terrain,

But we are on the edge,

On an edgy adventure of

body, mind and soul,

Mostly we fall below into the pit,

Dump or get dumped

into the heap of pain,

Then we see some lovely new face

peering over the edge,

And again we crawl up,

holding the rope of hope.

One may climb as many times

as one can manage

but the bruises of at least one fall

remain there forever on our flesh,

However hard one tries to heal it

with the ointment of fresh loves,

the scar but remains

with its peculiar purple leering smile.