Dawn to Dream about the Dearest

Today morning opens the door
To a quiet and quite mysterious winter day
Outside so surrealist
Thanks to snow and winter mix
A perfect time to close eyes
And think about you

Or
Rather
Think about us
Where we started
How we fumbled
Into the vortex of ecstasy
Jumped over hoops
To live and let live

Our paths
Cross and crisscross
Merge and diverge
After a snow storm in June
We walk again
Hand in hand in soap bubbles.

We walk on rose petals
Spiked with cactus thorns
We drink nectar from the flowers of deadly plants
Eat fugu sushi in golden plates
To be together
To enjoy again
Today
The Valentine’s day.

Spring cleaning

In my childhood
I learnt to do daily chores

In the morning
To brush, to go to toilet
And take a bath to clean my body
Every week I clean my clothes I use
And so often I clean my bed sheets

We dust and vacuum our house once a week
And go through my mails every day
To clean up the unwanted snail mails
Messages in Outlook and in mobile phone
On a regular basis
I get rid of old files from laptop too

and update the software bundles

So quickly,
My desk becomes a mess
So I clean it regularly and file documents
And once in spring
We have a garage sale
To get rid of what we don’t want
But we did or thought we did
Once upon a time.

I always forget

To clean something else
My mind
That has accumulated

Stuff for generations
From my childhood believes

To traumas, nightmares
To what my parents said to be true
To what my society taught me to be right
To what my old books said to be state of the art.

With time every thing has changed
But I never bothered to look at my mind
To wake it up from siesta
To question

The validity of my believes and thoughts
To update them
Or to delete the obsoletes.

My mind
Remains a storehouse of fossils

An old banyan tree trunk
Of all I wanted to survive in the past
But may be hurting me now
Still
I do not dare to remove them
And confront my own inadequacy.

Temporarily in Phase

Like a Tibetan prayer wheel

Every thing repeats

Twenty four seven

From my heart beat

To the musical overtures

Moon’s wean and wax

The glorious sunset follows

The picturesque sunrise

The winter roles into the spring

That jumps quickly into the lap of the summer

Which hibernates in the den of the winter again

Every thing repeats

From cell cycle to earth’s serenade around the sun

As if the world is running on a treadmill on a spot.

On the other hand

Only the change is the signature of permanence

Gone are the days of the manual type writers

The slide rules

The black and white TVs

And fountain pens

Every body is looking at the LCD screen

And typing awayIncessantly.

Instead of tuning the monstrous radio

I listen to the music online

Calling India does not consume a day

Or cost an arm and a leg

I don’t even need a phone

To call some one overseas.

My tiny tender baby daughter

My ever sleepy baby boy

Are all grown up and on their own now

The thunderous voice of my father

Is silenced for ever

My baby sisters’ kids have babies

Youth of my mom and even mine

Can only be seen in photos.

The eternal rhythm

Of birth and death

Of heartbreaks and ecstasy

Of gaining and losing it all

Of soprano and silence continues

Ignoring the job that time does on all of us.

Wild Flowers of the Paradise

In so many different colors you come
In so many shapes
In so many places of the earth
Buds on thorn bushes
Or in stunted tree trunks

So many places you blossom
In the middle of the desert
On the neon lights
In dark alleys of Mumbai
Or in front of the temples
On noisy street corners
Where people spit

Your petals wilted
Darkened with the shoot
From the passing cars
You struggle to get away
From the ants and flies
Not inviting many monarch butterflies

Some times
I see you on TV here in America
Before and after effects
Of some one’s effort
To dust up your petals
Sprinkle the plant with little water
From the plenty they get
By showing your miseries again and again

Wild little flowers
You have no say
Where you rise
Where you blossom
Where you disappear
After bearing the seed
To perpetuate
The wild flowers of the paradise.

Babru
February 3, 2007

Sisyphus's Dream

Every one chided me
Don’t sit there
Do something
And I did
Read all the books I found in the village
Played soccer and volley ball
Ran on the tracks
And wrote poems and dramas
Even acted a little as a child.

As a student
I was busy
As a worker
I am really busy
Exhausted when I come home
To eat and do more work
And then sleep
With the thought
Tomorrow I have so much to do.

In my dream
I am working too
Stumbling on my ways
Due to mishaps and limitations
Working and working whole night
To wake up exhausted
And start my day again

I am on a treadmill
Twenty four, seven


Then I read
“Don’t just do it
Sit there”
That was strange to me
But some thing different
So I did
I sat there closing my eyes
Watching my breath
Calming my nerves

But my mind was the autopilot
On a whirl wind trip
Ruminating my past
Inspecting my fears and desires
Entangled in the web of confusion
I was lost in my self
I never knew
‘Just not to do something
And sit there ‘
Could be so hard to do.