There is nothing particular...

There is nothing particularly poetic about the last few days
nothing prosaic too, as a matter of fact.
How do you express numbness
which itself is the pain of an absence of feeling?

I should have learned to paint-
I could paint this desk, or this cellphone here,
and find in it something beautiful or memorable

But words do not work that way-
they are meant to mean something.

Which you and I- we both know-
is often borrowed or imagined,


but when the script is lost
words are like sawdust that abrades the tongue.

Poetry in Motion

There's been complaints here that this blog has become dreadfully seriously boringly incomprehensible- so here's something else to laugh at:

Early Dispatches From the Near Future

The Martians came knocking, door to door,
yesterday at Ashok Nagar Third Avenue,
looking for the Boozhe who had escaped custody.
They found two mottled-livery Pamponelle,
A Zubrische with broken Flinzhe,
a mock-drille samper temperit-
and more, but no Boozhe.

Frustrated, they crisped a watchdog,
reducing it to a whimpering puppy.
They rendered the trees, forking
its branches and scrimmaging
the sodden leaves and water-valves.
The police have preferred a complaint.

Our Odd Minister, called his Even Ministers,
to an emergency meeting in the Cream Pavilion,
after which they emerged to the flashlights of television
to condemn strongly this latest outrage
while giving assurance of the Government's resolve
to leave no stone unturned
till the fugitive Boozhe are apprehended
and handed over to the Martians.

A Meditation On a Merchant Who Had Suffered Shipwreck

Art by: Christoph Rehlinghaus

"In my infinite (anantam) ocean like Self, the unsteady-mind (chitta-vata) attains shanti (prashaamyatii). Just like owing to misfortune (abhagya) a trader (vaNij) loses (vinishwara) his world (jagat) with the ship (pot)."- Ashtavakra Gita, 2.24, tr by I

SALANIO

Ha! what sayest thou? Why, the end is, he hath

lost a ship.

SALARINO

I would it might prove the end of his losses.

- The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 1.

Nothing comes, nothing goes-
Where has his world gone to?
So palpably real, now not possible,
and in some future time
an improbable one, one as such
that existed in a waking dream.

So palpably real, the almost-now world,
the world that prompted this merchant
build fond hopes,
safeguard anticipated threats,
is now gone, no more.

Say, the appointment book
full with its engagements, flight tickets,
the bonds, the guarantees, promises-
the imperative affairs that left no time
for family, friends, fitness-

The demanding, immediate, next-on-line world,
that mocked at philosophising-
the inescapable reality of the here and now
that asked for response, one after another,
now and at the perceived future-
all of that which were real a thought ago-
are wrecked by a news.

Shipwrecked!-
Wonder now, how one thought
sustains a world,
and another dissolves it.



Thought is all, won't you say?
And yet- look around-
this computer, the tree outside,
birds, dogs, cats- all there is-
Life Insurance, MediClaim, FuturePlus-
don't they signify?


In the graveyard, they say,
where the past meets its end
with all its projected futures negated,
lifetimes of effort reduced
to half-burnt rope bones and ash-
the dancer comes alive in the darkness,
and demons and goblins come with him-
they hop, hoot and sing with joy-

Dead while alive, and alive in death
the dead, if they had any sense
would join Him in the dance.


Afterthought:

While worlds are imagined
      in the margins of time by thought,
death holds dominion on created stuff:
In its multitudinous hands it cups
      the dreaming and the dead.
Nothing comes, nothing goes.

Feeling Guilty

Because the patron of this blog, SB has praised some poems here and we could gain more traffic- at least for a day.

If I had not said that eighty percent of the traffic we get here comes from TCWJ., I wouldn't feel embarrassed.

This, as a blogger. But as an individual, I am grateful to SB for the vote of confidence.

Thank you.

A picture of calm

Ripples do not translate
into shudders.

The deck
has always been so;

the undertug muted,
a slow undulation-

This moment
holds eternity

in a picture of peace
except that

a distant bird lets out a triumphant cry
as silver fish flash
slow in the sedate waves.

Weathering the Storm...

I know what I should do
when caught in a storm

I should sit out in the light
snug in the warm blaze of the sun

and I should weather it out-
the clouds would move

and I there
as ever before

silent and quiet,
warmed by the sun

lit in a tunnel of light.

Art Credit: Christoph Rehlinghaus

The Cricket Watcher's Journal

9. Cricket Watcher's Journal

Another unheralded blogger. In depth and refreshing analysis, from an Indian angle. 

- "Top 20 Cricket websites: readers respond", Telegraph.co.uk

 Concise, and true.

We wish SB greater achievements- not that this recognition will make a difference to what he writes.

I feel proud for him (and grateful- this is a lame horse of a blog, and for a short period when I kept track of visitors, I found that more than eighty percent of them came via TCWJ clicking through his blogroll. Thanks for the traffic!)

undone

unloved
unwed
unbred
undead and
unlived.