Unslept

Escaping mirages of doubt of a mind sleeping sleepless with the past.

Escaping itches of bug-like bugging doubt sent back in time by a worried future.

Escaping pricking pains of dreams I won’t kill – though they feed on me mosquito-like.

Escaping men – morning walking in a sentry go, or dating their morning milk – I escape the colony into the closest open wilds bicycling onto unpaved roads as night cycles into the dawn of day.

Feral – feeding on carrion – colony wastes and hastily half-buried pet dogs matted, mangy, hyena-haired and jackal-legged, these curs gather here lying in circles catnapping, stirring at my passage, woken by the screech of the bicycle’s chain and gears – the silence of my unease – some glare and growl in alpha-male ballsiness, some slink away phantom-like into the indistinct light from yet-to-wake-up leaden skies.

These skies don’t belong to a rosy dawn – nor to an economy-driving monsoon. They are more dark cloud than silvery light. They won’t rain – however much they scud around or pregnantly pose and brood. Like burning camphor they are memories of permanence sublimated into hazy clouds. Like questions that questioned too much – not knowing the answer to their own ennui – they give way to rainless skies – as I cycle
from unslept night to sleepless day.

Quarried Silence

I spend some moments
and buy some time,
loose-changed by life,
like these quarried deeps,
my soul in the bankruptcy
of stillness drowned;
parentheses of doubt
in me eddy with truant rhyme
while today’s setting sun
in a crimson-tinged epiphany,
photo frames dead stone
bearing living tussocks of grass
and dusk waters rippling with
the beginnings of night’s silent disquiet.

Granite Gaggles

Undressed
in a twisted row
naked – no barbed-wire clothes
rough-hewn
granite poles
stand waiting for
the giant ink-blot
of grey clouds
that they limn
to rain some more
and go, so
light leaks out
and writes odes
to the chisel-marked
grain pattern
beauty of each –
draped in wetness
and bathed
in a setting sunglow.

Winter Sun, Rourkela

Perhaps
as the sun does not burn
and day’s a continuous portrait
limned with gold;
winter’s a time
of moments preciously slow.

Even intruding thoughts
of summers past,
move with sloth
like the mustard oil
in which garlic has been boiled
trickling down my chapped hands.

Echoes

Show me
that shade
of green burnished with gold
in which only rice
growing under a winter sun
can glow.

Sing me
that song
of women bent with babies on their backs
with the squelch of mud for music;
in that very timbre
that unschooled lyrical flow.

Take me
to that age, those days,
this day, these fields of winter paddy
these women, their silence
even this winter sun
seem distantly alien.