There is strange circus running in my head.

There is strange circus running in my head.
I can see the acts, one after the other,
repeated in an endless loop of madness.
Days go by and sometimes appear together,
before night comes to soothe me in her arms.
I am in love with her charms.
I wait to hear her croon,
that belated song of melancholy
by the light of the raging moon.
I wish I had more time to stop by her address.
Exchange words and silence the unsaid
and become alive when all else was dead.
But an air of the most unbearable stillness
is waiting suspended over my bed.
I am lost to the world of words,
I am lost to my family and my friends.
I have squandered a lot in my life.
I have screamed and cried and bled.
The colour of my blood is still a crimson red.
And I wonder if anybody’s ever heard me…
or if anybody’s ever felt the need for it.
Or was I simply abandoned for the dead?

There is a strange circus running in my head.

11:07 PM
26th July, 09

They are rebuilding Kolkata on every street

They are rebuilding Kolkata on every street.
Brick by brick by brick.
The old crumbles, dying and diseased…
They are rebuilding Kolkata on every street.

They are putting up flyovers and malls now.
Marble and glass and steel.
Old lovers with broken arthritis…
the city has forgotten how they feel.

The lake seems tired and morose,
small puddles on smaller streets.
Shadows grow longer everyday
and old rickshaws are obsolete.

A fog of memory and nostalgia descends,
and it is darkness all around.
A solitary tree by an abandoned heap of sand
thinks of all that is lost and found.
A quaint little tea-shop, lonely and lost,
stands on a forgotten ground.
Only hazy images remain, some snippets of conversation…
a carefree laughter, hair caressed by the breeze.
She is lost in these lanes of time.
Her eyes forgotten, her smile eclipsed.
So, I search for her in the pages of my youth
and I wonder if someday we’ll ever meet.
Then I look around and feel sad,
for they are rebuilding Kolkata on every street.

1:45 PM
21st July, 09

Shadows in the city

It is night. Lit by orange streetlights
standing in a never-ending serpentine queue.
Everything looks askew.
The moon seems pointless and vague.
There are no stars out,
the city has blotted them all out.
The city has erected ugly structures,
of cement and mortar and sand.
Forged in iron and a modern glass,
it has let its history pass.
Now all that remains is forgotten poetry
in the decrepit walls of lost lanes from a lost time.

I search for my youth in these lost walls.
I sit at home pointlessly, for hours at an end.
The television and I, both try to pretend
that we are indeed having a good time.
A nice easy day at home
relaxing after a week of hard labor in a corporate office.
I do have my friends and we drink our whiskey fine.
And we all pretend that there is happiness at the end of the line.


Weeks stretch and weary months go on.
I have been living my piecemeal life without complaints.
But slowly it is all shrinking and coming down to a dot.
A dot, a dot… a dot which the city will blot.
Till nothing else remains except for the time slotted
by the swipe-card on the corporate register.
The only log of the passage of time
as we change our clothes and move through it.

7:26 PM
4th July, 09

Untitled

A mobile phone is vibrating somewhere,
I can hear it belching an ugly sound
like the muted screams of a slaughtered animal
in the last throes of death.
The bed-sheet lies crumpled and the window-sill is wet.
It’s a strange day today and I can feel it in my head.

6:23 PM
5th July, 2009

Lonely man

The world swims in the sky of stars
as I lie, prostrated, unassuming on the fields of grassy, green grass.
I have walked a long, long road
and my feet are as weary as my soul.
I have left too many pieces of me strewn around in the universe.
Through time, through time…
I have left pieces of me, broken and lost,
along the way.

I have walked and tended to the wind,
as it sang that strange melancholic song of whistles,
combing through the arms of lost and ancient trees.
I have tended to the weariness of that strange wind.
The ground lay burnt and bare. It bears the scars
of a thousand farmers, present and past.
Its seen drought and its seen them starve,
I have also tended to the loneliness of that immortal expanse.

I have walked streets of traffic. The cars they give me a headache.
There are bill-boards all around.
Beggars, eating leftovers, are all around.
I sigh and walk on.

With every tick of the clock, the silence grows on me.
The chasm widens and my scream disappears as if it were a dot.
There is a massive black cliff hanging on my head,
it grows and grows and never stops.
Waiting to drown me.
Waiting to obliterate.
I no longer have any more points to state.
I no longer have any more reasons to wait.
So, I sigh and walk on.

Madness rarely has a name.
Madness, everywhere, is all the same.
Madness, has a grammar
Madness, always has a time.
Madness is therefore, always sublime.

I lie on the grass and make a note,
a note of all the notes I wrote.
Far beyond the struggle of laughter and of forgetting,
far beyond the realm of history and of understanding,
I count the pieces of me strewn about.
There have been many. Oh, so many.
I quietly count them and make a note.
After all, the world’s still hung on Gogol’s over-coat.

I count my loves and I count my kisses.
I count the days I spent wishing beautiful wishes.
I count the nights of ecstatic rain washing the streets.
Loudly as it crashed upon a corrugated roof close by,
I have heard that music.
I have kept it in my soul.
And I have left a little piece of me there…

I count the days I lazed around by my window.
Looking out on a cobbled path of bricks,
under a maze of branches and leaves.
I have smelt the absurd smell of dust on my window grill.
I have breathed softly on the delicate cobwebs,
full of symmetry and a profound will.
I have kept that smell in my soul.
I have frozen that wobbling cobweb in my soul.
And I wonder now, after all the thousand years
that have come to pass since then…
does that cobweb still wait for a spider?

I am scared of the pyre. I am scared of being reduced to ashes
that the sacred river carries away to the sea.
My hands I have loved all my life,
my face I have argued with everyday.
All that effort to hide it with masks,
what a pity, if it was all to be washed away.
No body. No form.
Only a photograph, forgotten and forlorn.
So, I hope to be buried someday
on this very spot where I lie today.
Where I lie and
I wonder now, after all this time,
what would make a good epitaph on my tombstone.

10:07 PM
1st July, 09