IMPERATOR

In the year of grace something or other
The new emperor was crowned
With a minimum of fuss. (A near thing,
For his predecessor had anointed another.)
As new emperors will, he looked around:
And saw the shambles staring

Him in the face, the ruin he was heir to.
The waste and ravage of the Caligulas
Was comprehensive; words failed him.
Shaking himself, he wondered where to
Begin the long slog back from this pass:
Briefly, fears assailed him.

Which of course was good. For it set him apart
From his forebears, who used the seeming
Infinitude of the empire’s strength
To plunder at will: fear played no part
In their relentless scheming,
Each milking his reign’s length.

But it’s bad for a ruler to be frightened
Into inaction; so he set about trying
To rebuild what wasn’t destroyed
In a day by decreeing a heightened
Sense of purpose for the dead and dying –
Which, as an entertainment, they enjoyed.

The dumb multitudes soon set him at ease,
And a pliant Senate endorsed his vision –
There were no Ciceros (long exiled
To the obscurity of the lesser colonies)
To question the mechanics of the mission.
And those that did were reconciled

To despairing silence: there was just
So much after all that they could do.
The deafness of centuries befell
Him. History moved in. Ages thence, his bust
Joined the marbled others. The face was true:
The eyes a dreamer’s, you could tell.

***

INCIDENTAL

It is natural that you should cross my mind.
After all, by cosmic timelines, it isn’t
Very long since we said – or didn’t –
Our mixed goodbyes. You left behind

Bits of baggage, as I’m sure I did, even if
No more than shredded labels – places
Extinct as only pasts can be, with traces
Blotching a scroll or two, an occasional whiff

Now and then on my now settled course.
I don’t dwell, but register the fact
As a watch would at sea, a mechanical act,
Incurious about its source.

And consign the event to the morgue,
Unremarked: a laconic entry in a log.

***

POETRY PRIMER

“I wandered lonely as a cloud…”
Hmmm…one squirms a bit,
though perhaps kosher for its time.
And that “crowd”
(line three), while we’re still at it
makes for rather awkward rhyme.

The oded nightingale and autumn
fare slightly better, though not
much. “My heart aches, and a drowsy…”
Well, so does ours: they’re tiresome,
laboured, overwrought.
One stops short of lousy.

The romantic died hard in fact.
Shelley unbeknownst, leapt
an age when he met
his traveller from that antique tract:
cool, Olympian, adept,
as spare as you could get.

Still, far removed from sweeping
winds, the sear of green to brown,
and arid acres that would kill
or mute the song of hearts leaping –
lovers woken up to drown,
and the distant lilac-breeding April.

***

A FUCKING ABSENCE OF

I
Words.
Too many words, too many,
This is an addiction,
To spill the wrong words
Cupped in your hand
And let it baptize sinners
When all they needed
Was a fucking bath.

II
Drugs and alcohol.
Never too much, too little maybe,
All in the wrong veins
Like the legs and hands
Leaving blank pages
And empty roads
When all you wanted
Was to give your mind a break.

III
You.
Never enough, or too much
In my head and body,
Always flitting about
In these sanitized words,
Wine and substances, ingested
And rejected and now inflicted
On the general population who need a laugh.

LESSON

And then there is death. Always.
Some of you have contemplated
It, in the active or the abstract.
On some the fear of it preys
Like a worm, unstated.
The flutter of the final act.

Unnecessary really, its terror
Made more of than it deserves:
The dark needs but light
To expose the error
Which ignorance serves –
Dawn to the louring dread of night.

One could be pragmatic about it:
See perhaps in its inner
Vacuity the blown up myth,
And with cold reason rout it.
As routine a chore as dinner:
Something to be got over with.

***

QUICKSILVER NIRVANA

Quicksilver nirvana

I've come to a place
That's green and misty
Where joy is a pimple-ripe fruit
In a garden
That's taller than me.
Where purple fish fly peacefully
Across a yellow moon

That disrobes its light
Into an enchanted pool
Where I see a bright green lizard.
Its eyes bigger than the fingernail moon
Its smile cleaving its arrow face,
And beckoning me to step in.

I refuse.

I am in place
Where joy drizzles like salt crystals
In slow motion
Or perhaps snowflakes through a microscope
I can't really say.

Still smiling, the lizard
Comes undone, fading deep into
The starry blue pond
Leaving strains of a hopeful melody.

And for just an instant
In the circular echo of the pool
I see all I want from life
Written in picture-script
A little like Chinese.

A quick breath
And they disappear slower than they came
As the fading lizard drags away with it
All that I think I ought to know
In this life and others.

Sandhya
September 07

OH WELL...

“Does it mean nothing to you?? Fame
I mean, accolades…adoring women…stature
Of a god, you know…Does all of that
Leave you cold? Why, it is in the nature
Of poets to hunger for a pretty pat
Or two, the heady wine of acclaim!”

The incredulous tones of a fellow-poet
Who’s known and seen it all, now dismayed
By my cheerful obscurity. Who knew,
Such indifference argued a shade
Of something other perhaps… A hue
Of conceit for those who’d know it.

But sloth – for such it is – has no lines
To read between, and inertia’s bland
Of meaning: both enough to keep me grounded
In my unfamous state. Hard to understand
No doubt, but reasons well-founded.
Poets? I suppose it takes all kinds…

***

Is This What We Have Come to?

It’s raining black rivers from the skies tonight,
Incessant angry rivers of our sorrows,
We shiver, cold and wet like drowning rats,
In our warren holes, cracks, and burrows.

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

Around us the rhythmic Bollywood dancers,
Shake their legs; thrust their hips in motion,
We are like amorous dogs baying in the night,
For a touch of the idols we see on television.

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

Why do we live in constant, unfounded fears,
Of credit we have used, and loans unpaid,
To buy the follies that rot at home from disuse,
When Warren Buffet lives in a two-bedroom pad?

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

Have we broken our errant promises,
To our brothers who till the soil, grow grains,
Not to decimate forests and mine the hills,
So they don’t twist and turn nightly, for rains?

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

Instead we celebrate our borrowed money,
Indulging ring tones and crass downloads on the net,
Then we huddle and cry when the skies open up,
And nature weeps the black rain of regret.

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

The Platform

On the platform the hiss of steel,
Is like hiss of snake; the clang of wheels,
It’s the 8.30 a.m. local arriving,
And, the 8.31 a.m. local departing.

Travelers, their faces expectant,
Thoughts of home and contentment,
Faces staring at the far horizon,
For trains to arrive to their destination.

The announcer’s trained voice,
Impersonal in its insouciance,
There are voices humming,
Insistent shouts and hurried running.

Tired-, haggard-looking men,
And sweet-, spent-looking women,
They walk, shuffle legs, and shift,
Churning; regimented mass of three shifts.

The bhel-puri is tangy and sweet,
Mixed with the vendor’s own sweat,
Eat we must, spit, and drink,
Of civic sense, we must not think.

Births, this platform has seen,
Deaths, when the lights turn green,
As bogeys trundle in in the night,
There are many a curse and a fight.

There are aimless people here,
Embarking, disembarking to nowhere,
The weak lights cast shadows everywhere,
The neon light’s glow is so bizarre.

Some faces tragic, some faces sad,
Some are bored, some are mad,
Some long to rest their weary heads,
On the soft comfort of their beds.

The platform is now empty,
And, now, full of girls pretty,
Their talk and walk fills one with hope,
But, age has caught up, you dope.

The stoic platform in the early dawn,
Look, how it reposes in the sunny morn,
It bakes in the relentless heat of noon,
And, at night it sleeps in the glow of moon.

J

-----------------
I work very close to a railway station, in fact, I can stare right into a platform from my office. So, I have been working on this poem and hope it works for you.

MINX

Having dispensed with the honorific
in two days flat, she supplanted a softened
first name to take the edge off the former.
Still, it wasn’t strictly his own: all too often
he’d weighed against that hated misnomer.
The bloody thing was not even chic.

His given of course was no less detested –
(his kind being happiest without one) –
buried, save for the odd wifely exhumation
now and then. So what was begun
as a gentle jibe at their age equation
(a lifetime separating luscious and grey-crested)

suddenly sprouted, grew a soul and throve
as love’s surprising spur. The doldrums stirred,
her sighs bussed a sail or two
to life, a tentative swell answered.
Supremely assured, knowing what she must do
she added wile to wind and drove

him out of his wits: she was out to kill.
While he, long becalmed in inert seas
was unused to storms. Taken pleasurably
aback he marvelled at the unwonted breeze,
before being swept aloft inexorably
in the typhoon, gale, blizzard, what you will.

***