Wednesday, December 15, 2004
I sit here on the precipice
With my feet dangling
In the dark abyss of time
On the far-line I espy
A pile of neatly stacked skulls
Of large circular eyes
With the mountain air
Hissing through them.
You see other skulls had thoughts,
When their holes were eyes,
That wished no brains in them.
What did the old man think,
When , lying on a string cot,
He saw the smile of death
Where the banyan met the sky.
(Pol Pot, the infamous dictator of Cambodia was responsible for the genocide of a million innocent people in the name of ideology )
Posted at 02:25 am by adukuri
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Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Fire and water :A morning in Sivakasi
Stillness could not be heard
Only the the airconditioner’s drone
A shrill peacock-cry from the bell tower
Pierced my morning silence
The temple bell rang and rang
With its thick tongue in fever
Images , some fiery , some smouldering
Came dropping from the white sky
Clusters of acacias that had grown
Waterless under the skin of the earth
Spread their ghostly hair evenly
Into the rainless , blazing August sky
The girls with jasmines in their hair
Stood unblinking all day, in the hall,
Bringing fire into people’s lives
Dark sweaty men made balls of fire
Old ladies kneaded fiery dough
There is fire in their tired hearts,
In their minds , on their hands
But no water to quench their thirsts.
(Sivakasi is a small town in South India which produces the largest amount of fireworks in the country – an industry which is entirely labour-intensive employing about 2,00,000 workers,skilled and semi-skilled )
Posted at 09:49 pm by adukuri
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Hanging of a child-rapist
A silver-locked man shook his head
That was a clinching moment
Darkness spread its wings
What was to happen , would.
The walls were closing in
Like they had been threatening
All these years , nights and moments
Their pale textures merged
Into the corners of his mind
The time has come to experience
Slow and painful unfilling of space ,
Sudden and abrupt ejection into Time
Just like that little girl, you see,
Whose piercing cries precipitated
His own descent into hell
On the other side of the glass wall
Her lips seem to be moving
He cannot read them, now,
The mists on the glass have thickened.
(Based upon the hanging incident of a youth from Kolkata who was condemned to to die for the offence of brutal rape and cold-blooded murder of a school-girl )
Posted at 09:39 pm by adukuri
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Thursday, December 09, 2004
I hate desire because
I love freedom too much
Food shackles me and
This biological thing
Envelops me in violet hues
My spirit is bound down
Amber evenings are
Preludes to colourless dreams
With convoluted plots.
Always the protagonist
Of carelessly woven dreams
I have failed to act out
The script given, verbatim.
Many times I am dead
In my own dreams.
And I reach the end
Of my own dream-script.
Sometimes green snakes
Rise high in the air
From low hibiscus trees
Within striking distance
I have these funny airplanes
Crisscrossing each other
Fluttering their noisy wings
God alone knows when they
Crash on our pretty homes.
I puff myself up to hoist myself
From atop my skyscraper
To float like a bird in space
The body weeps, like soul,
Cries it heart out and away
There is this viscous feeling
In the pit of my stomach
The butterflies there are
Prematurely emerged caterpillars
With half-formed wings.
Posted at 09:57 pm by adukuri
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His brush touched up
Cheekbones to new heights
They cast nebulous shadows
On the wrinkled lower lip
His own eyes became
Large semicircular sunflowers
Waiting for their butterflies
That would emerge only
After the flowers wilted.
In the wee-hours of the city
He pictured Time, perfectly,
On the murky banks of the Hooghly
Waiting in the discarded jetties
of its deceased jute factories.
The faces were all there
Jutting out unnecessarily
Their cheekbones swelled
In their bony hardness.
Their eyes were fetid fishpools
With a muddy sediment
Of decayed fish long since dead.
The faces were there, all of them
They occupied his space
There was no flesh in them ,
But only powdery bones.
Posted at 03:16 am by adukuri
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Sunday, November 28, 2004
Then the flowers bloomed
In our laidback backyard
My little sister shouted
And clapped for quickening
The pumpkins grew fat
With glowing textures
She asked why our palm tree
Had withered for no reason
Our favorite water -snake.
Shed its scales on the fence.
She scooped out a handful
Of the fragrant earth
Made it into tiny balls
Caught a grasshopper
By its wings and made it
Hold the balls, one by one,
That was a milkmaid
Carrying pots of milk.
Our coconut lost its frond
In last year's lightning
It had given us years of
Coconut crop, you see.
Their juice was so delicious!
During the butterfly season
My sister counted the cocoons
And watched the butterflies
Break out one by one.
This season wild flowers
Have grown where she last slept
As dusk fell noisy cicadas
From invisible crevices
Made fine music for her
There is now nobody
To count those cocoons when
The butterflies will emerge.
Posted at 12:32 am by adukuri
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Saturday, November 27, 2004
This September I have turned yellow and seventy
The sky's translucence no longer mystifies
Holding out hazy undefined amber promises
This air is still crisp and there is promise of
Excitement on the leafy floor of the forest
As the mongoose scurries among the yellow leaves
Tens of thousands of zany butterflies of many hues
Have burst out of the bushes on the Tirumala hills
Striking the stunned panes of the passing cars .
At night I open the window with rusty hinges
To feel the September draught resurrecting
The archived sensations of my withered skin
These limbs feel cheated of pleasurable walks
On dirt tracks lined with fragrant ketaki bushes
There is now not even fear churning in the belly
The creaking bones , powdery and forgetful,
Cry out in sorrowful unison waiting for deliverance
My senile mind , at times agile, refuses to sleep
Unable to muffle the burst of the creative voice
My sonorous monologues have no serious listeners.
I sleep fitfully and dream of the beyond
Of what lay beyond the Sahyadri mountains
Of the gusts of howling wind passing through
The swaying red sandalwood trees on the other side
And of the myriad mountain streams pouring
In steady trickles into innumerable check-dams
I think of death , the beginning of the tunnel
Not knowing where and when I would emerge
I am sometimes afraid of the all-enveloping darkness
Darkness closing in slowly amid the staccato cries
Of noisy crickets from invisible crevices.
I turn to my left and go back to self-obliterating sleep
It is only when I lie supine that I get my nightmares.
Posted at 12:44 am by adukuri
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Monday, November 22, 2004
When we were wee-boys, in knickers,
We threw pebbles at the mango tree for fruits
Later, demons came into our lives
In the morning, when the white birds in the sky
Whizzed past the tall palm trees behind our house
We called them out shaking our fingers at them
Thinking that little pieces of their milk-whiteness
Will somehow enter our pink fingernails
We tried catching the water snake by its tail
It swished the tail and mock-bit you
Making you think that you would soon be dead
The tamarind tree hosted hundreds of suicide-ghosts
At night little flickering flames floated in the air
From out of the phosphorous bones of the dead
Then a little bird flew over us, in our own sky,
With its mournful cry which said titiya
Our dear cousin looked up, lying sprawled
On the bamboo stretcher, with his eyeballs screwed up
The whites of his eyes were inexplicably opaque
Nobody told us why he could not come with us
To hurl flat-stones on still water surfaces
To make them frog-jump three times over.
Posted at 11:06 pm by adukuri
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She looked through the corners of her beady eyes
The hemline of her crinkly frock went up and down
As the mock- intensity of his fierce gaze unsettled her
He smelled of musty caves hiding heaps of shrieking bats
That time he had smelled of freshly bedewed grass
Enough were the chemical exchanges between their souls
A thousand doubts wracked her brains and his ,too.
Their summer-hot bodies intertwined meaninglessly ,
His hairy arms covered the precipitous down of her belly
Her glassy eyes pretended to half-close in rapture
The soft silk sheets of yesterday were there all over
The florals on the calico faded to a mixture of kitschy colours.
Then his voice had floated on rooftops and palm-fronds
Like golden-winged butterflies drunk with viscous nectar
Close the windows please , his Adam's apple moved up
The fan whirred listlessly from the wooden ceiling
The lizard stuck its tongue out to catch an unwary moth .
I see an aura of death; the holes of his eyes were full of it
I can even smell death in the folds of his clothes .
Posted at 10:18 pm by adukuri
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She stared at the wooden beam
The wood that was once a tree
A tailless lizard came from
Behind the wooden beam and looked
At her for the seventeenth time
kitta kitta kitta said the lizard
She who had become 'it' stared
Unremittingly at the wooden beam
At the beam that was once a tree
The beam looked at the tailless lizard
The continuum flowed endlessly .
Posted at 09:59 pm by adukuri
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