Friction

 

A frictionless life

is no existence,

Because without the rub of pain

was there ever any gain?

The stress, the tension, the pull, the push

keep us touching life’s surface,

They are the agents of survival

guarding us against doom and decay.

 

The friction between

our dreams and reality we face;

between what we fight for

and the result we get;

between smiles and bitter tears;

between love and hate;

between giving and taking;

between dark and light.

 

This friction is what

keeps the chariot’s wheel moving,

This rub between joy and sorrow

creates the spark,--

the spark of life,

This grazing between what is

and what we desire

fuels the palpitation of life

in the tiny point of our existence,

It propels this little heartbeat

in the bosom of vast cosmos.

 

This friction is our causal force,

No point in hating it,

Come to terms with it,

It’s like accepting the grounding gravity

without which flying is meaningless.

Ganga garima

 

सतत इच्छा

 अप्रकट चाहे में प्रकट होंऊं 

और बन गई मिट्टी,

मिट्टी चाहे में ख़िलु 

और बन गई घास,

घास चाहे में बढ़ूँ 

और बन गई नरकट,

नरकट चाहे में छू लूं आकाश 

और लग गए उसको पंख 

बन गया नीलकंठ।

ब्रह्मांड में है 

बस एक सतत इच्छा होने की,

अप्रकट की प्रकट होने की।

A sad stream and a sullen heart

 

A bubbling creek

rippling with a miasma of pain,

A twinkling ribbon of solace

to a sad heart

as it ponders on its bank.

 

Does it—the brook—have the ability

to smell sadness in others?

And offer its own song of pain

as the musical chimes of joy to the visitor.

 

A flowing sadness and a frozen one,

Both of them turning paly

to withstand the shower

of the frozen pellets of pain.

 

The unseen foundations of success

 

The stories of a few winners

stand on the foundations of

the stories of millions of losers,

The stories of the winners

are meaningless and incomplete

without the stories of the losers,

Because what will the chief protagonists do

without scores of minor characters,

They are the unknown, busy ants

pulling the long lines of food for the queen,

The side players;

the little threads

that hold the plot together,

What worth a winner holds

without scores of losers?

What value light possesses

without the pools of darkness around?

 

Locked and sealed

 

The heart that once was

an open meadow

adorned with wild flowers

is now a forlorn, fenced yard,

Its bosom sealed with pavement slabs,

Through cracks in these,

a few grass sprouts raise their head

in memory of better times:

free pastures, wild flowers, holding hands,

an embrace, a gentle kiss and a promise,

All that is now sealed under the slabs

and squeezed tight by the fence,

The few tufts of grass

sullen and somber like a grave’s cover,

entombing a life that once was.

 

That love and its beauty is buried now,

The few strands of grass

peeping through the pavement cracks

hark like ghosts from distant past,

while the present’s heels go crushing over them.

The frozen waterfall

 

A frozen waterfall,

Its flow coagulated and coalesced,

A bluish white suspended corpse,

Bearing its beady threads of eerie stillness,

Both scary and beautiful.

 

A frozen flow,

Mummified tiny streams,

Caught and imprisoned

in the deep chambers of icy winters.

 

A hanging frozen life,

A dangling grave,

Icy ripples, folds, noodles,

paranormal braids,

crooked translucent curls,--

cold, lifeless, glassy.

 

A tangled hibernating mass,

Waiting for the spring sun

to dissolve and melt

and get liberated from the entrapment;

to gush out from the frozen womb of silence;

to chime with rippling songs of life;

to cascade with pride and vanity;

to get back to the business of life;

to flow with the song of spring;

to unleash its frozen soul

with flowing, falling, rippling warmth.

The hunter of sunrays

 

The hungry hole

in the soul,

Gobbling the light

to feed its darkness,

And when the sun

is at its noontime peak,

I peep into its depth

and watch the feeble slivers of light

rippling like some paranormal fish,--

Predatory darkness

eating the slivers of light

like an eternally hungry dark shark

clawing at the sunrays.

The ghost hunter

 

A strand of

the scent of jasmine

on dark night’s breath,

It enters the crack

in a concrete heart,

It bores a tunnel

through the stony mass of pain,

To reach the core where

the ache has perpetually lain;

to be as near to it as possible;

to melt into its heart;

to become pain itself;

to transform its soul,--

its fundamental suffering self.

 

The strand of fragrance

with determination on the tip of its wings,

Chasing the ghosts of pain

meandering like a serpent,

To possess them;

hunt and haunt them;

get them embodied with love;

convert them into the religion of hope.  

Shared bestiality

 

The roaring chaos

churning the individual identities,

Meshing them

to make a peculiar fluid.

Then the deshaped mass

finding a strange rhythm;

coalescing into a weird shape.

An indefinable mass.

An uncontrolled animal

thundering with a collective roar.

The mob.

The crowd.

The rampage.