Reconciliation

Its just like that!

You get used to the shrouding vacuum opposite to you

while you sip an orange juice

while you sketch a dream in words

Once your melancholus narration of the unseen hope

crumbled down to the vacant seat against you.

The songs which you wished for yourself

kept on avoiding you.

You were left desolate -stranger on the 'messenger' with the wildly angst

Around the candle light, the emptiness opposite to me

Transpired into my other self.
I was holding my own hands

Reading the nuances of wayward palm lines

I was feeling my own breath against my face

Against the mirror I found my mate

cloaked in the rag of my desperation.
Now, wrapped in the hug of my own fingers

I linger for eternity

Long walks in the boulevard, beside my restless mind

I join my hands with my own self,

the other side of my own hollowness

scattered visions

In the frozen wasteland of dreary time
You lit a flame of kinness
The colours which inebbriate in the rain
The moments which pierce into our conscience
All fades into the horizon
When your light kisses the strings of infinity

Ants creep against my eyelids
They share with me their thousand eyes,
A world which crumbles down to million colours and scents
A dream which scattered into splash of joys
Pricks of honey combs at the tips of grass

On the silent portrait of your unending passion
We lit the saintly candles
We pray to you, the relief from the other worlds
When death couldnt silence you
The wax melts and falls on our eyelids
We emerge out of the frosty evenings!!

While writing

When I try scribbling down
Beware of me
Unknown fears grip me
Putrid demons possess me
Till the last drop from the stylus
I should erect a signboard – beware of a beast in pain

Memories which maul me apart,
Silent crimes chill out my ear
All those stale dark scents
Appear on my nib.

Scent of her which turns to
The stench of decayed ruins of imagination
I pray for the life of a moth
To live full for just two days

Weep!

Weep, my friend
Till you attain the calmness of this river
Till you become this river
Daughter of river faded away behind the sombrous woods
She erected a labyrinth around herself
Impermeable,
A stranger is there only to lose his way!

Weep, my friend
For the golden fields and mango groves,
The song which she still owes to you

The stormy oceans are still there beckoning you
to become one among the salty drops.
I must unlearn myself,
The tragic art of hearing music from emptiness
The murky world of never happening loves

Oh my friend
Start liberating the world and words
From your whims,
Your imaginations strangulate the space and time
Let them go on its flow
Never warp the delicate strings
Leave them to its peace of unsung hymns

Free your eyes from the shackling words of non sense
Breathe an air of reality
Half brittle, half bitter
Become one among the ocean drops
Never stand apart
You won’t hold the mighty oceans or the silent river

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Mango groves and golden fields kept on lingering on my mind for such long. Now its time for the reality check . If you can see any common strings between last three posts, then there you are. The recurrence of golden images! the futility of imagined world and puzzling minds.
Last 2 weeks were such a period of turbulence that I couldnt resist writing them down,if not I couldnt survive anymore. All my teardrops ossified into crystals forming shapes that mocked at me. People around me were a little bit afraid of my sudden short temper. Although later I explained to all, attributing all blames on ICICI!
The illusion of being special always misled me into imagined world from which it is always hard to escape.
I dont want to explain anything more, thats it !

There is an evident change thats prominently marking the tone ofwords. Its the pain of earning for distinctness. The abyss of mediocrity is attracting me. I cant hold this existential angst. I am going to settle down in this mediocre world. I don't want to know any more I don't want to stand apart.

I remember a poem of mine in malayalam long way back, declaring my independence from all established notions. The poem which wanted to be a water drop left separate from all oceans, a bud which earned to be out of all forests.

Now its time for checking the pulse!

I am going back to the same ocean of common worlds and words.

Scattering wind

How shall we survive those grueling past of all-shriveling storms
The strings of our words are torn apart
Never will this ocean let out any curse from its bedrock.
I wonder whether the lost souls of my childhood will come back
The exorcist has sent them to nether worlds

The grinding music waned away,
The music which stirred the silent souls;
we buried them long ago

We wait for the cold winds over the dry lands
Carrying the frozen seeds of those rhythms,
Laments across the ridges
Scratched away from wombs,
Mourning of eyes which never take forms
which never see sunlight!

Nameless

Everyone left our spaces;
Guarded by great walls
We turn strangers to ourselves
One day suddenly
All those paths forgot my name
Wiped out my foot prints on their chest
We turned strangers such easy
But
The scent of yours which drove me crazy
Never happened kisses
Are still in this air
Still none of them will embrace the stranger
Only the distant mirage calls him to deceive

But I can still see the golden rays of her land
The mango groves which shed the pristine dew
The river which meanders across her abode
The scars which indigo made into the dusty soil!

Who erased all the rosy scenes
As if a wicked spell that changed us upside,
The beast of two years which prowled around
Separating our births
Or the world of words which obliterated all our feelings
I remember cursing all the letters to their doom!

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Yes, I am back to my diary after a long period of lull. To say the truth, early I was free most of the time , escaping the attention of Managers pretending to work! But this time they have got hold of me and assigned me hectic application resposibility. But that doesnt mean I was going without turbulence. But work was gaping at me all the time. This time again at a break down I wrote something down to get relieved. And here it is.

‘Love is so short , but forgetting is so long’ -
Neruda

Stranger

In your sacred dome, I am only a stranger
In the city where your holy blood drained,
I, the half naked, rush ahead
Carrying the wild seeds of incest.
In the census of memories
Let the trumpet of stranger reverberate.
The parched dry wombs,
Justice which lost the shining head,
I am burning up an olive to declare all aimless wars

In the grimace of deserted amphitheatres
You may not see my face

Among the generations which loose strands after
Your last supper,
I am only a red bearded
Who pawns the thirty silvers at the brothel.

Let this rendezvous
Fill in our memories dark flames of oblivion.

With in me lies the scorching Naplam who burnt and stripped her,
Also the annihilation of cluster bombs;
The hemlock which drops onto the eternal springs.
I deepened my fangs on her
Who complained like a mother
about the lost brightness in my eyes.

I am seeking the citadel of sins and also
Blossoms of blood
I sing the psalms of sins in the dry memoirs
And prepare the sacrificial dinner of sin on her who
sleeps hearing bedtime stories .
I am the one who
Nipped a thousand buds before the holy birth;
The neo thalidomide of this century.

Still then you are not recollecting me
Am I such stranger to you!

During dark nights
I groan along with the howling wolves

Let me go
To raze down all the burning lights of this city
Then to find my place
In this city of never ending frenzy.







This poem was a chance discovery while I were in home. I had decided to compile together all my earlier writings. It was not at all an easy task. Spread across unhinged pieces of flings of paper , my earlier words had already declared independence and gone hiding. I had written only in Malayalam those days, and my plan was to translate them to English and post in blog to carry on for further days during the draught of words. Certainly the main source of inspiration has deserted me or rather I want to move away from the source.

A random thought: When you bid bye to your home and travel ahead , don’t you feel it is your home which deserts you(although the truth is vice versa)

I wanted to keep with me a nice reserve of poems to update my blog, though it violated the purpose of keeping my Blog as a diary. We must be flexible enough to change definitions and move ahead unhindered, not tethered by any ideological shackles!!!
But my words were intelligent than me , they kept on struggling in hiding , never came to my sight and only one poem born 5 years back surrendered before me , and that was this above stranger.
I believe I wrote this for my Hostel literary competition. Those days I was too much under the influence of Chullikkaad( seriously it was an addiction!) and naturally many overtones of my words stroke a semblance with that perspective.

And then it started, my endeavor of translation. Firstly I wanted to recapture the mood while writing it. I pondered over the lines again and identify it. Usual haunting of mine- the picture of Kim Phuk the Vietnam girl running naked out of a napalm bombing. Entangled with it was my nihilist attitude of those days intermingled with the mood of guilty feeling.One thing I noted was the reference to biblical themes juxtaposed with the modern world.

As it is told sometimes ‘ Poem is what it lost in translation’

To give an effect in Malayalam I had provided a structure suited to recite , but while translating it to English I found it hard to maintain that tempo.
And what resulted was this poem in English. I am posting it anyway. It looks disfigured and amputated to me, still!!!

Return

Accept me, home;
After the virulent roads of rusty rhythms
From the darkened streets of empty graves
I am returning.
Exorcise from me, the infected breath of white deaths!
And fill in me again
The sparkling air of your villages,

I have heard and seen the prodigal sons returning
as refugees to the bosoms of squandered pasts.
From their rabid cities of hollow frenzy they could sense,
The meteors have disappeared from their skies and
Village fields have blossomed again

Ghosts from the present keep telling about
The stolen kisses that never happen;
Hands which I am destined to miss;
The pain at waiting for never returning messages;
Now I hope awaiting arms of embrace
So gentle but passionate, in my home of forgotten pasts!

Purify my tears about lost love
And lost half baked words
Send me back, the rains of reasonless joys
The moments of childish smiles

On despair song!!

Last poem of mine (look I still sneer at myself to call that a poem!) was supposed to be a poem of despair . Well pre decided about the intention, however(use of but is not assertive!!) I hoped and prayed to the unknown source to let the words come through me.
Nothing happened. It was done in phase of two days. It didn’t carry any meaning either, just a reflection on my changing moods. Besiline , friend of mine had asked me to include his sign on the words of despair as he also wanted to tell some thing. But well I couldn’t do any justice to him nor my intentions. The mood of despair changed to a feel of comic, meaningless and wobbly. Then I realized one basic thing in my life , all I need is simple things in my life. A word of gentleness , a simple bye for assuring I was there with them, a tender look to acknowledge you don’t hate me!
Well here ends my soliloquy, to end with, let me say one thing. My last poem may be a bad work of slackness. But because your children are crippled or blind, will they feel less important to you? ( Words of A Ayyappan , my icon as a poet in initial days. Now no more I read him). I am jotting them down , word by word, sense or senseless, each imprints of my life onto the cyber strings to remind me further down the lane who I was .

A Song of despair

Heavens know my truth;
My actions before every word;
Never mind those capricious hunks of lies;
I want to write this song of despair.

Dreams are worth these dead ends;
Indeed
After the praise of flanking beauty,
And the endless sugary hymns
A wail at the walls is what it expected.

Still, words are there in air
Waiting for me to pluck them.
The inebriated words, it can seem;
But I promise you, they are still from my heart.

But tell me, the unknown omnipotent
Source of all my words
What am I going to write down?
I feel only the dark numbness.
My keyboard pulsing each moment
Waiting for my nod of finger
To go on at an ease of slash.

I wail at me without knowing what to cry for.
I dance at the never stopping rhythms
A lament carved out of meaningless steps.
Don’t say they are out of my boozed shaky legs.

But with a single bid of bye ( although careless)
You oozed out of me
the last tempt to do the words of despair.
Now, the even the infinite source is chuckling.

After all who wants to hear a song of despair
If not for others whom I am going to sing!!

I still have your handwritten signs
I can wrap myself around your twirling letters
I can imagine you words on laptop to be the words of love
In this cyber world ,icons do carry many things!!

Further on my change!

Once I wrote only about my nightmares
Why did I forget to mention all the sweet dreams?
My words filled with the anguish
Of a crippled leper, who denied all the alms
And shouted all at the empty streets.

In those days
Fragmented statements and bad prose
Invited the editors to revise them.
My words slept eternally in the ignominy of bins.

My friend opened the basket of guavas,
He searched for the scent of lost lusts.

‘Love conquers everything’
I found that scent back on the time warped web.

Unfinished

The last poem is not a complete one. Disrupted by the awareness that I was turning up a little late on reaching office and amidst the traffic our Cab had been always on the junctions at wrong time.
But I couldn't resist loading it to blog, as this had become my diary actually. Whether one reads it or not , it s my personal notebook.
I am not sure about whether I will be able to complete those lines.
But it was towards the end of the travel that it came over to me about how even my style has changed.

yesterday I tried to scribble on my note book some lines in Malayalam. But I couldn't proceed after three lines. A kind of block has occurred to my natural style ( language as well as tone).

but surely I do want to get back at my mother tongue very seriously as it can determine my fortunes with in 3 years if everything is going as planned.

Any way I am diverging my focal point about the transformation. As I had talked with Shabin that day there is going to be some love poems on my blog. I could foresee my style of writing. Even in the 'after the dry run' the style has clearly denoted this change, I believe.

From a poet who fumed and repented at everything, wanted to burn away the last vestige of vanity I am turning into something else.

Does it matter or not ? Who cares about the rumbles of an unknown confused guy anyway!!!

On My Change!

When you laugh, the dreams are unleashed in me
We liberate words from the chained sentences,
Letters from the words
And syllables from each letters;
And only the voice will freely graze over the vast plains of love.

Your words ,although of the other world
Fill in me, crystals of fine snow.
A desert mist comes down on the parched cracks.
I am turning into a balladeer of love
From the fiery rebellious man of fury.

And I become the sculptor who hide in the carvings, his love,
A ghazal singer who frame the words of beauty.

I really wonder
Where is the fist of fury I once settled into;
Moments of meaningless despair;
The words which I imagined to burn the universe.

Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of cancer cell- Edward Abbey

Nazir Qabbani

I came to know of this Arab poet only recently. A Syrian Poet who strived his wholelife for the cause of Arab unity and liberation. His words were too harsh it didnt please never its leaders nor its sultans.

I came across two of his poems recently ; just posting two lines from them

"Our enemies did not cross our borders
They crept through our weakness like ants "

Following lines shattered my consciousness even.

" My grieved country,
In a flash
You changed me from a poet who wrote love poems
To a poet who writes with a knife."


Do expect some more posts from me intertwined by couplets of him .

After the dry run

When a poem starts winding down your aged heart
When you receive it from the unknown air
After the lean seasons of words which hide in strange valleys
When a silence condense down to drops of poem.

Then you remember the sweat at her nape
The wonder she sets the swirling hair
And how she canonizes the long dead images
And their cemeteries in draught hit time.

When words starts dripping through your pen
And paper turns its zestful curve to finest tone,
I can forget the groaning words and dreams
And sing a lullaby to the new born kid.

I can feel your throb of vain
And write it down the rhythm of heart
And as you walk along with me
Hand in hand as I wished it all time
Chirping voice sings my words
Foggy morning paints my images.

Share this spring of thousand dreams
As this theatre warms it soon
Touch my words and do a kiss .

When a poem is being born,
Stars add to its lust
A thousand glitter of twinkling words.

When words flow through the dried up patches
And kiss up the dreary banks with fervent bubbles
I forget it all and deeply lost in kiss of love
And relish myself in eternal truths of world.

Final Visions

That gun starts pointing at me again
The curse from the Babel has struck its blow
I stay here on the cold ground waiting for the last trumpet

The trail of the final trumpet is approaching!
We celebrate the Doomsday here
Wish my baby a diabolic smile
To do a gentle trick of the beheaded lizard

The dreams are worth the frightening end
The screams are squashing me to end
Spare no time!!
Spare no words!!
Keep on growling on the ground
Keep on feeling the cold world

Dream wilter has come already
Submit to him our final challenges
Let him preside over our silly qualms!
Let him decide what rolls first
Our heads or our hands!


I scribbled the lines on to the mobile . That time I was about to explode. The stifling emotions wanted a valve to escape. My words were not reaching anywhere. Language was becoming a barrier infront of me. I thought human emotions could permeate through all the linguistic superficialities. But my convictions failed me. I couldn’t break through the protective layer of language and words.

Resigning to my own shell I could feel the burning heat of furnace. Back to lyrics of Jim Morrision my alter ego I felt like crying. I wanted to sing ‘Spanish Caravan’ to instill in me the peculiar stage of hope. I couldn’t , all I listen was the nightmarish visions about the end.The image of a revolver pointing at me was recurring all the time. I wanted to write a rock lyrics for Jim if he could sing in the other world. And this poem resulted.

I wont call this one a poem either , ‘poetry.com’ kept it for one week and purged it afterwards and still I could see many trivial and useless web of poetry hanging still there. Chronogically this poem must have come first on the blog, but it happened otherwise.

An Ode to Nandigram

The above poem came to my mind after hearing Budhadeb s new industrialization plans bull dozed over the lives of hapless residents in Nandigram.
Being a leftist I felt ashamed of him , who sided with the Salim Group of Indonesia ( I cant ever forget the extermination of PKI in Suhartos Indonesia .PKI was the largest communist party outside the socialist world. And with in an year Fundamentalists in collusion with Suharto s Military massacred millions of Comrades and hung their genitals as public display!!).

So far I could proclaim myself being a sympathizer of a movement which had taken side with the oppressed on every issues and fought against the establishments which always favored the Oppressor. Now I despise you Buddha ( I admired him for being a poet among the communist and an avid film lover) , But now I hate to write like him and watch film like him!!

Smiling Budha

When Buddha smiles again I am trembling
I always imagined
My mind as calm and peaceful as a meditating Buddha
But now when Buddha meditates I look for covers
Vultures start swooping down
Villages let out a groaning song,
which gets stuck under their spastic throat
The thunder of heaven flashes the world
Specialties sweep the ground
The land of our dead,
Now lit with neon lamps
is no more ours.

Take your shelter, my wounded human creature
Buddha is meditating once again.
Buddha speaks from the enlightenment
‘Colors do not exist’
‘History didn’t live’
Comrades from the past over an archipelago were all some hallucinations
Their bloodbath was only a sanctifier
for a colorless world.

[ This land is dead, colorless rotten with hollowness
Here exists no grave of our fathers
They are empty as our dream
The seeds are swollen with those empty wishes
Haunting winds just walk across the stunted soil.
]

Thus spake ,meditating Buddha
I wonder what films you adore
I wonder what poetry you appreciated!