The wheel of time

 

A child’s sparky fascination,

Its smile radiating tenderness,

Enjoying free gifts of joy,

Holding the coins in piggy bank

bigger than any gold mine.

 

An adolescent’s evocative showcase,

All out shimmering and sizzling,

The highly stylized teeny hoppers,

The follies of love or infatuation

sinuous, clandestine and damning.

 

Mad with love

the youth’s audacious installations,

Ephemeral love on moonlit nights,

Rigorous and virulent in its grip

(almost sinister and vampirish),

Flamboyantly goofy, zipping and zooming,

Squealing adrenaline rush,

Frantic and fidgety,

Spectacular and grand.

 

Stirring, intrepid spirit of middle age

to carry the domestic yoke

amid all the social cockfighting,

Skimming over the competitive scum,

The shifting, virile nature

of the greying years

spangled with nostalgia

for the erstwhile peaks,

So much the passing time speaks.

 

Now on the other side of age,

The realigning of compromised reality,

The poignant reminiscences of youth,

Now surface the skin furrows uncouth,

Time’s acutely roving work

etched on the skin’s landscape now,

The startling storage of lifelong pursuits

now almost wreckage,

The soaring imaginations gone,

Draped in humbling eerie

the thoughts of afterlife swarm,

Gingerly waggling nostalgic gait

seems just death’s bait.

 

The trivializing passage of days,

Gone are the bright rays,

The world just a turbulent grey now,

Snippets of life barely chugging ahead

through a dreadfully narrow lane,

And a scowl and frown,

Or some odd chuckle,

Thus goes time bulldozing over us.

 

The touristy venture from

self-congratulation to self-flagellation,

Bones in disarray,

Eyes grave and serious,

A helpless witness to the shifting landscape,

An invalid clinging to convalescence dreams,

Begging for stipends and allowance

of some more drab fruitless days,

Pleading for pennyworth of life,

Poor and miserly soul

soliciting help from the angels,

Taking it to be a paradise,--

but drudgery in dungeon it is,

Horrid apparition of death hovers above,

Aah, the subversion of life and its fraudulence!

Then the last wish,

‘If nothing more, give me at least

a splendid, ceremonial grave,

Let it not be a pauper’s grave

without mourners at the funeral.’

 

The last breath fluttering a farewell

with one final wish,

‘Let there be

silk-thread embroidery in my name!’

Broken twice

Broken twice,
First by her,
then by her replica,
No fault of theirs,
Just my folly 
because I looked for solution 
in the same problem,
I looked for the remedy to the pain
from the same stone,
Getting broken twice 
is born of my choice,
I don't blame them
because that's all they can do
caught in their own pain,
So what if I got again slain.

The dying year

You salute the rising sun and the upcoming fates,

And dump the rest as mere names and dates.

But my burdened self on death bed (or in labour pain?) sighs,

'Dears, you forget those fallen promises amidst these hasty byes!'

Hope

 This foggy, cold midnight says,

The next sun will have fresh rays

that will warmly gloat over the wrong shades

bitingly, filthily draped around the 

beleaguered, beggared, deprived mass of flesh,

Tomorrow it just won't be mere trash!

A beginning it will be, all new and fresh!

The queen of a reverse world

 

I stand upright in my reverse world,

With my own shape uniquely curled

as per my own unchained ways,

Your nights are my days,

You are free to scorn or spurn

or even try to burn

my freedom wings,

O thou vain kings,

futile will be thy taming strings,

How can you tame someone whose soul sings

the songs of formless love,

Eagles you can't hunt this dove

because when you pursue me

you have your legs where

your head ought to be.

Lord's searchlight

 

It’s a rapidly greying, gloomy world

and the Lord has to hide and peep

through a hole

—a thin sunbeam through a hole in clouds—  

to spot any trace of

truth and honesty

that may be lying around.

Owning the entire self

 

Here I own my entire identity;

no need to just run after

fractions of myself that are

eulogized as pathways to the ultimate.

It might be that this ‘I’ in me

breeds my wickedness,

But doesn’t it sire

my art, writing, music and painting?