Journeys

         

                -1-

Stretch your limbs on a hard earned
Lower berth, smell the fresh white sheet,
Close your eyes and swing leisurely
With the rhythms of the land boat,

There is no question of being lonely,
Three people may come and sit beside your prostrated body, and indulge in talk, domestic chatter, Indian economy, the latest android, and atrocities on women.
You can shrink your legs or stay put,
Or get up and jump into the convergence,
Company is assured.

Chaiwalas will wake you up in the morning, or the breakfast sellers,
As you lazily look into the day,
The changing scenes amaze you
With new terrain and novel architecture.
Inside and outside, you will feel fulfilled,
Quite a journey it has been.

                           -2-

As you near the giant structure
Made of glass and sophistication,
You feel your stomach revolting,
As a fear equal to an approaching examination grips you, and you go through this and that, and another this born from that, like a machine, watching others, trying to learn new lessons.

Waiting, you can get to see
A small universe, walking up and down the tiled floors, amazed at the
Ideas matching in panorama, faces, clothes, voices and scenes.
Nobody budges a lot, inside, except
Monotonous voices of the uniformed attendants, babies only howl a couple of times, and expensive eatables come on carts to persecute the travellers with zombie smiles, the task gets done,

There is no sky sometimes,
You look for things in the ether for sometime and doze, after desperate efforts to see backwards and front, to see human faces, an oppressive silence
Hangs in the confined and neat space,
As if all wait for a trial and the upcoming results, or for an impending disaster that does not happen.

The journey does not end on the ground,
It stretches further till you get your baggages and walk out of the path
And walk into life,
But here, if you stay around,
It gets lonelier.

This New Summer

Things came sitting
On time' s wing,
Noiselessly stole the poetry of
The summer afternoons,
Stole the aloneness and the lingering
Thoughts that often stretched
From nowhere to nowhere
And got pregnant with songs.

There was a search that
Had neither end nor intermission,
A joy waited expectantly to jump into
The humid moments of unbearable Loneliness, 

It waited without a hint
Of anyone' s arrival or appearance.

The evenings came, dull,warm and not
So cheerless, yet spoke of hope,
That hanged unto dreams of
The real and the unreal.

All that is left of the summer
Is webs of entangled
Conversations, words that get lost in the air afterwards, and a weird
Barrenness, that has come
To stay here, forever.

The Sculptor

The disciples were at work,

And the sculptor stood among the scattered half-built sculptures,

The gods, the erotic dancers and the excited peacocks,

Gesturing commands and hints

His eyes minutely scanning each one, for deficiencies.

The creations were easy to fall in love with,

To posses,, sometimes I thought

How the master was inspiring art,

And thinking of shifting to another house at the same time,

Five months it had been,

And the rents were pending,

How he infused beauty and finesse, how breathed in life

And vitality into piece of stone, I wondered,

When I saw his unhappy wife

Dragging his six year old chubby-faced son

To the bus stop and pushing him into the school bus,

And coming back to a house of darkness and wants.

Yet I always saw, in a quick glance,

That the disciples and the sculptures grew in number

And beauty, no matter what,

And the master was ubiquitous with his shining face,

His thick moustache and folded loincloth,

The god of creation shining in his afternoon face.

Journeys

Journeys are not only journeys

The distances stretching and shortening
Or the terrains shifting,
Because they enter you,
The smoke rising from behind the palms and coconuts, and the gulmohurs in full bloom,
The unending river with its stomach dry at places, boats stagnant or floating
In clouds of white and blue.

The chatters stop at times suddenly
And you dive into other recesses
Inside you, without purpose, and
Come again,
Refreshed, bathed, before going back to
The crowd of monotonous voices
And bee lives.

The Woman in You

There is a woman in you,
Who does not feel anymore,
Neither ecstasy not pain,
When the night lights fall on water
And set fire to it, 
She only looks on
blandly, mute to the happenings and mishaps.

Why the other woman in the
front seat cries,
Wiping the defiant tears
flowing ceaseless,
What the phone tells her just before three
minutes, of a insensitive spouse,
or the news of a sick father?
She cries and sends her silent sobs
to the darkness outside
and to an invisible God.

The woman in you
Sits like an idol
Watching her
Reminded of the many similar pains
That hounded her in many
Past lives.

The journey comes to finish.

GROWING UP

It is not the black and white innocence anymore,
You get pushed in,
Without zeal and intention
Into a realm where the people
Change into strangers without words
And move in and move out of shadows
Sometimes familiar faces turn into
Nine-coloured rainbows
And vanish
And you see them walking in the
Same old sweat- shirts
With the same familiar smiles.

Growing up
Saves a lot of pain
And reminiscing.

It is Still the Showers

Rain came
Lashing at the trees and the houses
Displaces the soil here and there,
But did not enter the rooms
The air inside which
Smouldered with gloom.

In earlier showers,
Front yard to the heart' s intimate chambers
Cooled down,
The joy was sheerly our own,
Without reason,
Except for sky's unpolluted tears of  in torrents
Being the only thrilling aerial incident,
That warmed up the interiors
Of the earth and the spirit.

It still rains,
The pitter patter of the drops
Falling on the leaves,
Serenity passes by the window
Its face indistinct
It' s pace hurried,
As if houses are grooves
For eternally parched beings,
Who do not seek peace anymore.