She...

squats on her knees,
folds her legs at times
on the passenger crossing ‘sky-walk’
near Manipal Hospital
which I take to cross the road on busy mornings.

And as I crib to myself for the day -
full of silly number matching and nonsensical calls on how to split the very same silly numbers -
that God gives me,

she sits there every single morning,
her white hair strewn all over her forehead, ears and neck,
with moist eyes,
a shapeless mouth that she uses to speak to herself
and
ears awaiting the sound of each dong that little coins would make on contact with the floor before her.

I saw her weeping today, her grandson sitting next to her, consoling her,
as she grabbed the six little coins that I slipped into her coarse palms;
she looked at me, tears in her eyes,
trying as hard as she could
to stretch her shapeless lips to a U, that they could never attain…

I froze,
stopped,
looked away
and
ran,
trying as hard as I could
to un-stretch the inverted U that streams from my eyes found easy to flow through…

Miscible!

"What's a soliloquy?" she asked, her eyes wide open like the mouth of a goldfish, hungry and restless.

"Its a talk, baby!" he reclined on the red sofa, "one that goes on and on, without any room for conversation". He sipped his coffee, "Can you imagine? One person...one voice...one topic...on and on and on...a looooong story...some hurried characters, jumping in and out...huh?"

"I wanna be in one of those, Gooodooo," she quipped. "And I want you to be next to me, in each little story in that story; we'll have a little house by the river, a small garden around it where I'll grow my roses - white, yellow, pink...red...I'll look at their leaves and learn to love them...You keep the flowers and I'll keep the stalks...in any case, we're inseparable," she smiled!

"Inseparable?" he took his spectacles off. "One handsome boy will come riding on the horse, look you in your eye and hold you by your hand before mounting you on his new-age vehicle and taking you away".

His eyebrows twitched, "Will you give him your roses then? You should..." he said, "if you wont, then I sure will," he smiled, "coz he'll feel its fragrance right through his lungs, deep in his soul."

"So," he paused, "are we inseparable, my baby?" he leaned forward.

She thought for a second, "Daddy Goodooo" she screamed, "Whats my name?"

"Huh?" he shrugged.

"I am AG...you're the G in me," she nodded, "on a horse...or with him...or in my new garden...in this city...on the rooftop...in outerspace...I will always be a G no daddyyyy?..." she cleared her throat.

"Sooooooooo...its a never ending soliloquy..." she stood up, walked upto him and kissed him on his forehead, "we ARE inseparable...coz...i am you...understood?"

Dyslexia...

noun.  brain-based type of learning disability that specifically impairs a person's ability to read...occurs after a brain   injury or in the context of dementia

Crowds of processors
Clouds of speed smoke
Mornings of rushed hushes from A to B to C to...

to gray uptown patches in the roots of the scalp
where there's a land between all the hair,
roads with a white surface
shining after the shampoo like clean sand dry after showers of rain...

to somewhere inside, into the root of the root,
some brain cells mixing into some abnormal flesh,
juggling nonsense
perfectly normally
as if it were
from whipping a whole lot of sense

scents
sent
cents

scant

scarce
scare
scar

me
you
him
her
they

all
dyslexic!

PS - "One of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing...so hush little baby, dont you cry!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJOtaWyEzaI&feature=related

Battle with Fire...

Tall
like your wind pipe if straightened and planted in the soil,
they flare up from somewhere inside
and in asymmetrical up-down movements,
they reach you –

like a snake’s fork-tongue
for a whisker touch,
a brush,
that can spread venom like tumour with light’s velocity…

heat ignites,
argues, screams, points its index finger, slaps,
                touches, kills, separates
reignites –
                   you and yours –
                                                 just firefighting…

Battles in Wind...

He came in the sharp cold and brought with him speed that uprooted trees
making each particle of miscellaneous matter dance in a spiral of togetherness
as if
some rakshasa was bellowing in deep sleep
and exhaling all negativity from the pit of his large stomach.

He shook each little soul standing in the market today including
clouds
below heaven
which succumbed to the unremorseful screaming of breath's fury
before being sqeezed of their contents.

In the AC's soundless breathing,
I woke up with my eyes wide open
and felt like a rakshasi
next to a snoring invisible rakshasa...

Battles in Rain...

Like a single strand of thread
and a single line of thought
the fragrance of geeli mitti -
copious yet sparse,
abounding yet invisible -
caught me unguarded
and tied itself tightly around me;

and like quicksand,
it engulfed me into a wonderland
as the red volvo, my war vehicle,
swung to Rahman and echoed in Swades' music.

I smiled, respired, resigned
in the single stroke of breath,
in that single journey from work,
to fate
that brought me home to myself!

PS - Bangalore rains, though not in full swing yet, connect those single isolated dots, like fluid from straw, to seamlessly complete the picture cald me! :)

Vous c'est Moi...

I think of the best things about me sometimes and I can attribute all of those special parts of me individually, one by one, to appa or amma or both. I mean, there's nothing that I am from what I've done/felt/wanted by myself. So its like that physics principle of 'Energy can neither be created nor destroyed' but the difference is that here, its like a reality check - of how totally insignificant I am and how there's nothing I've done really in 27 years...

But then, putting some more thought, I think, on my own, I've embraced my pointlessness :)...like conveniently...n in a lot of ignorance, I'm thoroughly at peace and totally blissful :)...and I now have another reason to say I'm very selfish...coz amma appa I think its so easy to love you coz loving you is like loving myself...

And in this totally pointless discovery of the pointless me, I've managed to create the most pointless post...(sigh)!

Crucibles

Trinkle trankle trumple trample
crucibles of thought,
dash against each other
like atoms in motion

and like metal containers
they make music from unknown friction.

Cling clang ding dong
the heart bell rings -
Open the door, let them in...

In you in me in us is them that will be through you and me and thought and action in life its traction our passion reaction between laughter tears fatigue prayers before me's and he's transform into we's in seas of dreams in moving clouds of night's skies as you and I ride steer fly swim between atoms in trinkled trankled trumpled trampled crucibles of thought...

Blank-ened!

What do I say
about nothingness
when what there is to it is what is not there.

Its like this.
There's a you
and there's a me
and there's the breath
that transforms air and its chemistry into life.
From nothingness.

When eye meets eye
and hand meets hand,
there're those miniscule droplets of tears and sweat
that contain tiny transparent bubbles, like little, self sufficient worlds.
In nothingness.

As your heart melts in moments of peace, bliss, anguish or pain,
fathom the depth of its hollowness,
in the vacuum of your existence,
you'll know all you wanted to -

from nothingness to nothingness!

Thought

When eyes yearn for the voluntary blink
and gaze meets the dot-particle,
there's a blur that appears,
then disappears,
behind the round world
that sways in its untrackable orbit
throbbing in musical rhythm.

Thought is nothingness that soul's magic transforms into heartbeat...