Lotus

 

A discards and junk pile,--

a heap of things having run their last mile;

lying at home,

Rust and dust winning over chrome,

I take it to a dump site,

Fly there scavenging black kite,

A foul-smelling hill

giving a repulsive, obnoxious chill;

strikes you with a stunning sense shrill,

A reverse pit

for our consumerist soul’s shit,

Hanky on the nose

avoid we hellish dose,

The stinking heap,--

excreta born of our growth and leap,

My junk I throw

with breath paused and tensioned brow,

Then I see him work

amid all this squalor and murk,

He works with poise and ease,

Scavenging consumer shit for meager lease,

This is the junk worker’s

office, factory, firm and field

welcoming him with its tiny yield,

He looks at me with a smile,

A flower in odor vile,

He isn’t ashamed or apologetic about his job

where scavenging rodents throb,

He sorts the squalor with ease

unbothered about the dirty, repugnant squeeze,

This is the dirty pit of his karma holy,

Absorbed he is without complex and folly,

His gentle toil

in the mucking soil,

He squeezes the muck

for some survival buck,

His bearing shows he honors it,

Doesn’t cringe and complain a bit

unconcerned about all this shit,

As I dump the waste,

He welcomes me with a smile chaste,

I forget my running haste,

Looking at his smile and honor to his task

without any frowning mask,

I feel at ease

and make him tease,

‘My junk won’t have much,

it's worthless such,’

No problem, he says

with a smile as if he prays,

From my pile takes a little cardboard box,

smiles like a pleased clever fox

and says thank you

with a bright, clear, clean soul’s hue.

The chameleon Casanova

 

In need of love too much,

he turned out such,

A benchmark of love he set

where even the most loving woman won’t bet

to raise the bar,

The nocturnal bird hunting far,

The quest for love best

putting woman after woman to test,

Lifting the drawbridge on one,

welcoming another for more fun,

Softening the brutal blow,

Searching new peaches with better glow

on a fresh face,

Leaving the old ones with teary trace,

Placing funeral wreaths on loves dead,

Their eyes seas sad,

Exploring feminine gold,

The macho spirit bold,

The digger with many affections sold,

An expert miner of love’s tenderness

ready to harness

and dig their tremulous softness

with the spade of his jagged breathing

on their trusting necks,--

sublime infusion of lust and desire

into the veins of love on fire.

 

His love’s insatiable greed

counting as prodigious feat and romantic creed,

Even in a woman’s presence

he feels another’s absence,

He goes with an ease no nonsense,

untouched by accusative conscience,

The enormity of bleeding wounds

and their ghastly vestiges,

or slayed feminine prestiges,

don’t perturb his soul

for the nastily played role.

 

A victim of the frivolous impulse,

naturally ready to repulse

any sense of right or wrong,

Around him the fog of illusions throng,

With a mad craze

he handles their florid rage,

He gives a purified rebuff

to all their lamenting, teary stuff,

He has storage bins

and decorated coffins

to keep, count, bury the loves dead,

Walks with a proud head,

He is reeling with anger vile

under that seductive smile,

Below that cuddling surface grace

he has feverish impertinence hidden on his face.

Relics from the past

 

She snubs, ricochets, recoils

like vintage motor’s crank handle,

Her muttering is like an argument

where everyone seems right

and wrong at the same time,

When she fights with him

she seems like a sailor

raising the gangplank

sail out and gone forever,

But she is right there and her presence

and absence are equally heavy.

 

In the transparent silence

of a sheltered cove in his heart,

she bangs, blasts, booms and boos

like a militant, atheist and anarchist,

He on the other hand

is always vexed and conciliatory,

The cheerings of a youthful past

try to console him,

As he lapses into glum reflections,

the memories draw him safe

from the hiccupping scorns and storms,

He seems festively fried, cooked, boiled

by the intensity of her persistent heat,

He walks hollowly with dreary steps,

But he knows it’s too late to part ways,

They have shared many decades,

With disorderly, downcast endurance

He surlily bears the nausea of life.

 

This is the woman I loved, he wonders,

He can’t hate her

but finds her the most irritable creature,

She feels the same about him,

Now he finds her a mere

cranky, villainous peace-guzzler,

She sees him as the summary and cause

of all her disappointments in life.

 

The domestic air ominously infuriated,

He just draws inspiration to life

from a few cuddle-animated moments

sired by youth’s pleasure-hunt,

She clings to life probably because

she still remembers her dream about a Knight,

Brooding over their morose consolations,

hard-pressed by time, the inveterate plunderer,

Bearing time’s hostile, incessant onslaught,

they draw the essence of life from stale breath;

from the sweet undertone of

those initial moments of pleasure

which were accepted as love by both.   

Carnival magicians

 

Bitter hearts

throwing angry darts

and putting sanctifying rituals

through moralistic victuals

and convention’s balm

on the slapping palm,

They are carnival magicians,

from pigsty and brothels,

—pigs and whores—

The servitude and vilification,

in innocence and perversion,

Being benevolent and harsh,

In eternal fidelity with ethics

They bury massacres under funeral honors,

Brutal and barbarous,

but with secret astuteness

they trade the promise of everlasting love,

They can win a woman’s or man’s affection and confidence

and later desire

to sire

pleasure

and be in love,

They can turn holy

even the whorehouse tears,

They can smile

hiding their rage and crudest fury,

They carry an antique rancor

in their heart’s wild beating,

Their slave plantations

are acts of charity,

Their loose-tongued thunderstorms

pass as sermons in kindness,

They are the sunning alligators

with a splendid lucidity of goal.       

The moorhen

 

The day coming to an end,

The sun with its consolatory light on the sand,

A moorhen cackles and croaks

as if mired in the swamps of pain,

And I stand there

vulnerable and taciturn,

The shadows of grief on my face,

The moth-eaten memories

searing the soul,

Was it just flaming desire

coming as real or unreal love?

Bathed in pain and grief,

In confusion and boundless need of love,

in clamor and dissonance

I create the mists of enchantment,

And in appeasement of unworthy memories,

I try to inhale smell from paper flowers.

 

The moorhen cackles as if

with vilest insults and provocations,

I know there is silence

Hidden in its noise,—

the maternal poise

to protect its nest,

Then it stops and comes at rest,

Maybe it feels that

it's someone drenched in the rain

of pain,

With compassion and self-assurance in its eyes

it gives a last cackle and sighs.

The pilgrim

 

How to ease the conscience

off the burden of love?

The seductive, sweet meandering

across the rubbish labyrinth of emotions,

Was it the blazing heat of passion

or the unhurried touch of innocent love?

Whatever it was but I’m a pilgrim now

seeking peace for the soul

with a broken heart,

Purifying myself with bitter tears,

which are sometimes tears of raze.

 

The proven infidelity of love

giving an affliction of the soul,

With a speared heart

the pilgrim seeking the secret code of love,

And the bleeding stones and thorns on the path,--

her inflaming proofs of disloyalty.

 

Thus the pilgrim goes

still holding the image of that thorny rose,

Mournfully reciting the hymns of misery,

Gathering the rotten, sour fruits

fallen from the sweet tree of love,

The wayside bushes snubbing

with perfidious, malicious sneer;

boughs crinkled with wrath

like natural brutality in her heart.

 

Pilgrim, where are those adolescent jaunts

and big reserves of steely character?

Thou turned out to be a soft prey,--

the stone cut by a blade of grass,

The air sighing with

disillusionment and disenchantment,

Ruined memories scattered around,

The mirrors of falsehood surround,

Her velvet, docile dove’s gait

hid a haughty heart’s clawy bait,

Her starry splendor

was full of devouring despondency,

Her slender courtesy

hid savage snares for masculine fantasies.

 

All along it was love without hope,

It made me prone to

dupe my own pride,

Now, the solitary sandy swirls of

her lovemaking resonance

wafting with exultation around,

And the pilgrim walks with

his wounded masculine pride,

shorn of light and gallantry in the eyes,

Memories echoing like horse hooves

on cobblestones in the dead of night,

striking at love’s cuts and bruises.

 

The pilgrim lost in the pale mists of memories,

Moving like a mule

carrying saddlebag of stoicism,

All soiled with her illicit love,

the pilgrim goes seeking

the oasis of love.

 

The desert has its storms,

The pilgrim has his own,--

bristly and jumble of nerves,

enigmatic and conglomeration of oddities,

There I go on the pilgrimage of loss

and after long-long barren miles

I gain something,--

a sad but dignified autumnal smile

in lieu of all her sweet guile.

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!’