19 November 2015

Poems from the past

I, the Living

A Social Perspective

Just another day in my monotonous life
a spark of madness hitherto unknown is  born.
I try to foster this random depression
with images, imageries
however banal they come:
I just shift.

I, who used to be part of colourful mardi gras,
am gazing now at the solitary beach
infested with huts and fishing nets;
no more vista for breathers
all roads in and out
trafficked
by marches varying in reasons
from hunger-strikes to identity-crises.
There seems to be no existence to meaning
since pauses have acquired importance;
since
the watch in the tower (that never works),
ceaseless mortalities,
kids returning from school, with drawn looks and low hung haversacks
have had cessation of interest.

There seems to be no point
since
nature man created
wafts an unwilling body with the sea of life
letting hover like a leaf in fall:
my thoughts are blinking at me, too.

A Family Perspective

They call me a parenthesis!
At home - a thesis of my parents?
Sometimes a sub-ordinate clause!
I wish I was unborn
that my father was left sterile
or my brother the only sprout
and I had lived as ethers in mother’s imagination.

But he is fond of me - 
I too add to his ration quantity
and tread, satisfied of submission, 
a resigned, battered path.

A Memoir

Then?
Ah, I fell vague
like you feel, when you smell
the indentations someone’s breath had left
on your pillow.

I feel my estrangements
me, my thoughts, my inspiration...
and drawl lugubriously within,
blink at the tubelight’s demi-jour.

The side-stuffed mosquito coil
with its head inclined
like a satellite receiver at the
meterologicaldepartmentcampus - that’s me, we.

A total stranger misbegotten to someone’s feuds.
- Nov 1986


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