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.