Superannuation

Twelve’clock of tonight he will be
Superannuated from august office.
He is not demitting, merely limiting
If you please, just stops emitting
All signals now no more authorized.

He wonders why one cannot have
Some extra vitamins superadded
To compensate for loss of years.
He will make fine farewell speech
Effervescent like antacid bubbles.
Not superannuated , he will joke,
But is superannuating, as ladies do
That time of the month every time.

Years or ears ? Excuse , I can’t hear,
Like old man Lear of Shakespeare
In a weather-beaten coat and cap,
Monkeying at the lazily rising sun.

Bees

We are stuck with these bees
To a beard , a week’s stubble
Like burnt brush on the hills.

They hum in ears, gloriously
Pierced for gold, for catching
A sun at its rise and in its fall.

At times we open the bonnet
Looking to catch a bee under .
Queen bee seems to be gone.

A hum remains as of yesterday.
Now passersby buzz as old bees
Sir ,there is bee in your bonnet.

Random

Random is the thing that strikes us
Like lightning under a rained tree.
Any tree could be inviting enough
To any sky’s open bursts of anger.

Why not other tree, asks every tree
Whose birth was accidental on bird
Of a random flying in and dropping
A seed from a random tree far away.

Here we stand in our rain randomly,
Our leafy tops open to an angry sky,
Our coming chance biological event.
We keep asking why not other tree.

Book

At the night’s end is our own book
Of what we have printed all along
A certain recorded history in pages
That lie buried in collective memory.

Memory is the little wiggling thing
In kids , creatures of future skies
Made of acerbic acid of little shape
A rogue tongue wagging little hope,
With rasping sarcasm where it curls.

Our book is not in papyrus of river
But an electric thought streaming
Through myriad acid rivers of time
Flowing relentlessly to grand irony.

Rust

Even the roughest among them
Cannot stand rain , this weather
While it is a nice camera picture
Of iron cable holding up clothes.
Any iron shall love a village rain,
And succumb to long term charm.

Take bald eagle man seen rusting
On park bench looking at the sky
With his eyes , tiny white flowers
Dropped from sky’s white clouds.
His iron slowly collects its oxide
And will drop away by iron bench .

The eagle rusts in its baldness,
As bald eyes fail to swoop down
On lowly creatures, two in bush.
Its eyes slowly rust and fail away.

Forgottenness

Speaking we do, to forget and erase,
The hotel eats a food for our thought
Right up to the chandelier in a bloom,
A memory that is lost of forgot moms.

Our years come back in the thought
Like Christmas snow, bearded men
In each year’s pretending differently,
The festivity in hearts some  fine ice.

Let us now have a clink of ice back,
Drink to the health of the deceased,
Spread flaked rice outside a hearse,
As we freeze the moment in a page
Of forgottenness torn from memory.

Gloom

On the Christmas eve the poet
Would hardy go into the gloom
To witness dumb oxen kneeling
At a twelve of the clock’s elders
Saying so, by a hearth’s embers .

Faith’s embers burn within us
As in the poet’s Victorian gloom.
Oxen are mild meek creatures
From a stew of straw and urine
In a tail swishing sleepless flies.

Gloom sits yet at twelve of clock
Awaiting the paper star to shine.
A few drones appear in a desert
A peace offering by far off men,
Ever lasting peace for strangers.

(Reference is to Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Oxen”)

Meaning

We are a bit haunted, some times.
Sagan bro says we are custodians
Of life’s meaning, freed from past.
Our trusteeship is found in a deed
As God’s camera flashes up there.

In reality ,God’s day’s wet clothes
Hung there for a drying , dripping
In faces, pearls on our eyelashes
Like balcony roses holding pearls
In the early morning rain and fog.

Trouble is we are almost haunted
And bells sound somewhat eerie
As they ring from the garbage van.
The bells ring for all ,for our creed.
And god, what smell to our noses!

Our creed is the garbage dumped
To yard where it burns to smoke.
Meaning is a self-congratulatory
Facebook message going up like
Garbage smoke, beyond the lake.

grammar

we live by a grammar of thought
a beginning with clause, ending
with a noun, adverbs in between
with taut grammar holding them

the thoughts follow cold syntax
of English, with embellishments
of flying strokes and blank verse
with enjambments, never ending.

never ending will leave a mouth
open with a new fly type guttural
consonants by the trembling lip,
upper teeth’s speak in a lower lip

we have since dispensed with all
punctuation for fear of full stops
nothing ends except in a comma
its abruptness will be hardly felt
with the lower mandible missing

Mirrors

The way the mirrors stood
We felt like recent sparrows
Pecking at their bird selves
To an infinity that goes on
In such mirrors of history .

They had built the mirrors
To selves off men’s wealth
And work, but soon wealth
Was over and in the zenana
The women stayed huddled
In incompleteness of space.

The palace is like the queen’s,
Beyond the green of Atlantic.
A king guest offers its manna
And palace stands in splendor,
With banquet for a hundred.

Now, a new hotel preened
Its feathers to men’s wealth.
The nobles in long mustaches
Stared down from roof wood
Like they were old sparrows
Looking at their own infinity.

(On a visit to the Falaknuma palace in Hyderabad)