I don’t know who I’ve missed

the one who you have missed is an universe in itself
made of numerous other universes,
and our sense of space is an illusion,
so is our time.

your absence is your presence

Will love overcome love?
I keep asking
every morning, deciphering
the coincidences,
dismissing them as ghosts.
And then you pop up
suddenly from the cyber-haze.
“May be today”, I hope
You are oblivious, I had been warned
and yet you stir so much
“Perhaps she knows,” I say
I open my book of fallacies,
try seeking refuge in truth tables,
I deny metaphysicality,
I stay away from moral in this season of love
as if it’s a cadaver
Soon everything blurs,
A sickness takes over me
I talk to empty space
asserting, positing:
"Your absence is your presence".

The sky

This sky with her moon
may have clouds playing games
often hiding this luminous crescent
in a slow ballad of the night

But your presence?
I am addicted to it
Its slowly consuming me
Every moment
Like those nights
Devouring children of light

My only assurance
is that you are vast
and probably as infinite
As my love for lost maps

irony

i need a night to stay awake
i need colours to get lost in an illusion
i need a polarized world to formulate an answer
that is what is expected out of me,
to represent a dichotomy
an aberration
a curiosity
that finally establishes a tomb
and an altar of life
that wants me dead. 

the sum

did you know happiness is a summation

a progression,

a distraction,

an obstruction,

an escape,

did you know that happiness is always at risk

but it still is an exercise, a vocation?

of asserting your own existence to your being,

the one who is lost in a quagmire of possibilities

you can't express happiness in a piece of paper

but it is tangible

seen in your actions

and the exhaustion that follows.

did you know about happiness secretly?

a secret you wouldn't let go of,

you will rather deny all knowledge,

gently laugh over the prospect

of being called a cynic

than admitting that you

have been happy

all this while.

Exposed

We still are not sure who declared the war on our nation in this Age of peace. But all of this came as a big shock for many of us. Someone even compared it to a neutron bomb, in which all the structures, inanimate objects stay intact but all life slowly disappears. On that evening we saw millions of stars, which kept getting bigger by the minute. It took a while for the Guardians of the Ether to realize that these were humanoids, all photographers, who had been para-dropped from giant skyships, 20 kilometers above the surface. After floating in the upper atmosphere for an hour or so, these capsules started descending over our cities. I have been told that these capsules have the capacity to align with Earth’s rotation, fall exactly at a designated place, much like those laser-guided bombs from our savage days.

These humanoids did not spare anyone, took pictures of all the clandestine deals and embarrassing moments of the high and mighty and poorest of the foot-soldiers that held on to the idea of this state. These pictures had all the fodder to make one gigantic satirical film of our time -- from the most embarrassing pictures of politicians having an illicit affair, President of a Corporation a

nd his hidden wealth to thousands of pictures of bureaucrats happily sleeping during their working hours. One of my friends was captured in urinating inside a neighbor’s garden. They immediately relayed these pictures to the rival nation’s broadcast channels. Everyone mocked this nation and its people who were somewhat complicit in its failure as a state. We tried a similar maneuver but by that time an asteroid was at our doorstep, and everyone panicked, including us thinking that we were going to be obliterated. Now there is no shaming, no nation, no control … absolute savagery and it is beautiful.  

Satellite

When you built an altar in the sky
you built a moon,
you extracted it like a tooth,
and it floated in front of my eyes
for a brief lifetime
and now you send your minions 
to fetch rocks from her.

flame versus sun

your sun may come,
but we wont stop bumming
around the flame
that casts a shadow
over the valley
on the darkest night

Horror and humour

For those who experienced teleportation, they have not been able to explain that moment -- when they were disintegrated and then reintegrated. Some described that moment as the most primeval, peaceful and perhaps, a state of non-movement. One said, "After reintegrating, I drew energy from that primeval state. even if it was for that moment." He has immediately dismissed as a follower of a cult. Another felt that he was inside running through the forest of his own hair, then he slipped and soon he found himself hanging on the edge of his toe nail. Someone listening to his experience, shouted from the back saying he was high during teleportation.

There was a nine year-old boy too. He carried an illustrated book version of a 400 year-old cinematic curiosity, The Fly. The boy just wanted to experience the disintegration of a story about teleportation as it was understood in the 20th century, while the machine disintegrated him too. Before he went inside the chamber he smiled and told his mother: "Yesterday's horror will be today's joke".

Memory in an image

I walked all over time,

prayed that it must not stop,

until I am filled with memories

like those new cameras

storing everything

in its mythical pixels,

negotiating the presence 

of light for every small detail

that entered through the diaphragm 

of my soul. 

Longing

the sea is a lot calmer today, she said
the slow surf over the long beach
drew her even more swiftly
and after a while,
when suddenly she stopped
a big circle of water swallowed her feet

listickler

today has been declared as the field day for making listicles
whaa! what are listicles? Are they hanging low? 
nooooo! they fall on your head. whatever you're reading turns into an event.
here's to all the listicles. 

Four lines

Tosh, Himachal Pradesh, 2014

The Hole 

When we heard the thunder clap
greeting the eagle
eagle found a hole in the sky,
and the she soared above the clouds

The Heart

In four lines we will tell you the truth, said the newsman
and in the fourth line, truth came
but not from his mouth,
his heart spoke through his nose

The Charge

There was a runaway battery
the flashlight mobbed him so bad
that he escaped the case
freely charging everyone

The Fall

When the mango was ripe
it refused to fall
so they made a halo around the fruit
and called him a man.

The Body

Here, take this body
make a nice portrait of it
forgive all the tar oozing out of its lungs
forgive all the overflowing vessels of blood
for they have been restricted by its constitution
and don't forget: the body is used to being decorated by its metaphors
they say, the end of a body is a linguistic demise
"after all, there is no reference after the demise"
but the loss is in words
the loss pertains to time
so take this body and build something on your own,
stuff it with all the powers of godliness
possibly a mannequin for display
or may be a clown to laugh at
or the bust of a hero
slowly rising above the gardens of living

Faith healer

Oath:

We shall weed out poetry with justice
We shall weed out justice with news
We shall deliver
We shall fry our livers

Declarations and prayers:

1.
all hail the flying spaghetti monster.
i am mad, so is my head
either you are crazy or i must be god.

2.
demon demon demon
what did you with all the semen?
seldom serendipity suffered you
not until she buffered you
on her ice stream.

3.
intelligent design
you may prosper
but i will still whisper
my lord's name,
the flying spaghetti god-head.

4.
o my country
you are filled with horrors
of nationalism
why don't we lose our virgin teeth
and start eating landmass
like what we did to the pages of Malthusian recipe book?

5.
o terror of space
tyrant of lace
my mind is opium
vast and empty
silver and chromium shell,
product of confused metallurgy

6.
all hail the status message
and the ceremonial passage of time
as if it ended in few words
like "hey ram"
after he mistakenly shot my jilted lover
at a video game contest
with a laser gun.

7. Enough is Giraffe
Enough is Steffi Graf
Enough is Telegraph
Enough is not Enough.

Crude

Image courtesy: http://alchemyandenergy.com/energy_work/shamanism__soul_retrieval

An astronaut turned shaman was fasting in a lonely asteroid. The celestial body in which the Shaman lived had long been imagined by his generation as a diamond mine. The spaceship’s departure in 2112 C.E. was celebrated across the Earth, which would have ended all the strife around these precious stones. But after four years since its departure, diamond lost its position in the hierarchy of all the desired stones. The mystery ended when his spaceship landed in this asteroid circling around Saturn. The market for diamond had shrunk, humans were more keen on preserving themselves on fine exo-silicon devices mined from the lunar surface and distant moons of Uranus.

The central figure of this ploy is the last survivor. One night his old transistor cracks up, he hears recording of the desperate SOS of his colleagues reflected from the diamond mines on his radio channel, as if the asteroid had entered a time warp. The transistor tunes itself and plays back the same old message in which corporation that sponsored this trip to start the diamond mines, abandon it. The corporation announces that bringing back the astronauts would be too expensive when the preserving the humanity is the immediate need. Billions of people wanted to sign up for self preservation inside worlds created by silicon chips. The central figure keeps fasting so that he could save up on his ration hoping one day a spaceship would come back and but the act of fasting creates delusions. He feels the presence of a ghost, which wants him to finish his rations and break the fast and on the other side, he sees a portal opening to take him to distant time in which he is rescued.

The ghost is obviously a need that becomes an obsession and when one identifies it, it emerges out as the significant other. This significant other, as the shaman imagines, is often responsible for all the other corporeal adventures. The portal is the future and addressing him in the first person. Breaking a fast is then a spiritual exercise say, a end of the meditation to cultivate the hunger for more objectivity, sublimity and refined taste in the nature of things. And after the Shaman stopped fasting:

“Till the hearth cools down
there will be no rice”
“What?
Who burned the rice?”

These dilemmas were platitudes
of my time,
when you said
you were kneading the dough
and my hunger behaved like a ghost
who wasn’t keen on leaving me
mortified of his own presence,
Because I was breaking my fast.

The ghost imagined:

“How dangerous does it seem
A man breaking his fast in presence of million stars
Why should I care what they think
I cannot let this sink.”

Then the portal opens and says:

“The newsmen wearing lens caps
strolled in the landscaped gardens
they were the masters of this time,
and I was a performing my feast,
a definite charm,
don’t blame those delighted hands
dressed, acetate laced fingerprints
slowly washing away particles
discharging colours
as if Curie was inside the portal, by me
all this while
imagining my face as a radiating mineral.

They called it crude
when they dug up
they called everything
unrefined
but stopping at the word,
Pure,
their slight hesitation
enforced a certain lack of --
and they thanked the earth,
almost with their half hearts
“no morals in the crudes”
they say,
they just named it,
the irrational
the red sun from the black hood,
planted in the far side of the moon
land with no forests,
azure lunar soil
legitimate land for the mines
a resource not of nature
stark in contrasts
and on the other side,
an eternal shadow
refining light
evoking poetry,
the world of fancy
likened to a piece of cheese.

A child that he was,
infernal and brimming with
million Volts of energy
no diamond could reflect
nor prisms of sand
but this fine dust of Uranus
served his land of plenty.

Welcome to this interplanetary muck
shared by the sons of Debris.

We now live in our dream called heaven
washed everyday by a little sea.
The water crystals
sing about the stories
of heroes who refused to be.”

drop

drop your gun
drop words
dropping names
dropping bombs
perfect and integrated glory of this state
but there is fascist poetry on sale.

Cities

every night, a city limps back to its glory
cities are full of stories
of bye lanes and fast moving trains
cities weep at night
between neon and ozone
cities flock together
discuss their careers
they exchange smog and rubble
leftovers and sewage
cities analyse their statistics
and print newspapers
finally cities mockingly smile at each other
and go back to being unconscious.

Stories

A short story
once met a long story,

they were written around the same time

about the same people

the shorter one narrated his story

precisely to what longer one described

elaborately

but the shorter one

ended quickly

and the long story went forever
and then the short story fell asleep.

dream

This poem comes from an old habit of writing the dream immediately upon waking up from a vivid and a lucid dream


i should tell everyone
not anyone in particular,
but everyone
all of me
and then all of us
and them
who are here
and present,
but i should tell everyone
not address one among all the particulars
not even talking about the whole
but just me and all of us
and the multitudes of
quiet people who are living within us
and the disturbed thriving within my own,
i should tell everyone about my dreams.

*****************************

the dream

i dream like all of you
as if all of you and I were dreaming
the same thing.
seeing same images,
same exhibits,
intended but unaware
deliberate yet lacking in purpose
the dream of all dreams
of seeing everyone else dream
like how I do.