Dreaming Jazz

Flying swans'
purple dreams
Norah Jones'
purple rhymes
un-rhymes
through the double bass
of her vocal chords
like lonely nights'
organ grinders'
healing touch.
And you're tongue.

Ph.D

You move like the patterns in windows media player
creating images,known
Illuminating, fading into my ignorance, dark
Like books I can never fathom.

Pehaps I mistreated you,
knowing little, that you will keep coming back
like a haunting cello in the darkest corners of my night
to fuck me up
and take away
everything
everything I have
in a world
I am forced to live in.
I guess it’s your turn
now .

It is not to say that I did not long for you
It is not to say that I did not wish for everything you had to offer.

But we have played this game far too long
This hide
and seek, this fake indispensability.
Guess I am tired now
And its time I go home
Leave me
Alone.

Chausath Khamba

We all rose beyond our skin , our dress and our religions that we wore , under the moon lite silhouette of Chausath Khamba at Nizzumuddin Auliya that night. Ustad Shahid Parvej Khan was magical at Jashn-e-Khusrau. Indian classical doesn't even need words. Like poetry painted on the wall, it is just there.Never owned, never spoken, almost never written.

Concert Tickets

Those who can buy
they get it for free.
They don't bother,
for the songs are free.
If songs could plant
a money tree,
they would surely
be, crowding like a bee..

Those who can't buy
borrow, they long to see
the mystic of their heroes,
but, can only afford
the last seats.

Still others,
wait for their turn
and sing along with the CD
For its full house, said the TV.

Of rivers and river-islands

I went down drunk, to the forlorn sandy beach by the banks of river Brahmaputra, on a Friday night and sat pondering over the star-lit shore, on the other side. The river rolled on through the eastern breeze, calm- like the night, almost deceiving us, hiding, escaping the rage and fear that it can bring. Amit Bharali, beside me, my friend, my companion through the years of learning and love-less-ness. As he spoke of how in Majuli every young boy still wears dhoti and how every single one of them could sing hymns and folklores effortlessly, I traveled to another river-island, a little far - Sundarbans, where Brahmaputra meets Ganga to finally merge into Bay of Bengal. If rivers could meet each other, merge every drop, to reach the sea and flow into the depth of a wise ocean for ages, why is this eternal divide? Two strangers lost in time , with almost everything so similar. And Papon, he kept singing 'Mon mor uri gussi jai' over and over again to remind us all that all is not lost,all is not lost, yet. I drifted to my hostel at Assam University and could see the faces of my juniors I so loved. I remembered the Teel petha, bamboo shoots and khar-filled  after-holiday -hostel- lunch. If only we could love our mutual cultures, without forgetting our own, see through the rumours- distorted further over time and forget a history, a bad history, while respecting identities and showing middle finger to the politics of divide,we too could be rivers.We too could be rivers mixing, merging, greeting, each other little by little, drop by drop, falling into a vanity-less depth of a wise ocean.

Silchar

Your dark pavements may have given away to new street lights,
and those make shift lamp-lit rickshaw headlights have been replaced with battery bulbs,
But you live in alleys where people do not visit.
Possibly to hide the lies that you cannot spell -
Or, the whispers of dirty rumours you never get tired off.
Your innocent attempts at embracing modernity seem rather naïve- Fumbling,
crawling, falling over
and busted naked. Almost every single time.
Your shoulders are weary of stones.
Stinking gutters of hypocrisy
and mediocrity, and broken roads,
of hope once, of disgust
now, ignored through years of slumber and laziness
and an age of rage-less youth.
Your universities
do not speak the truth

You, were the one burning through the 60’s, rebelling, chanting
denying the mask they wanted to hurl on you.
You, were the one singing songs of change by the banks of a tired river,
wearing bright eyed-spectacles, and humble cotton sarees, bearing torch- truth radiant smiles,
through ragged and torn roads of poverty and Partition;
marching ahead of time, defying
space.

Your libraries are now lonely
You don’t wear white shawls.
Your winter sun
can no longer be peeled off
like an orange.
Your grandmothers do not sing of rain.

You pride,
rather foolishly
In the name of concretes,
Multiplexes and boxes you own. In filthy songs you live in.
In dog-shows and doctors and their expensive wives. In tastelessness.
In monarchy and confusion, and ugly buildings that hang like shabby gutka packets in nearby shops.
You pride in things that you can count-
In places we live, when we leave.
You pride, as we abandon.
You pride being forsaken.

But you fail to see that you live in curry-coated- fingers, dried in long-conversations of faraway afternoons.
In torn local newspaper-bags, bamboo vegetable shops and wired egg containers.
You live in midsummer Bhatiyali songs of sweat from short wave radios in sweet-shops, where everything has stopped long before.
In long black umbrellas and local snack hawkers of yellow bulb lit evenings. In annoying songs of unknown singers sung with their eternal sad voices aping Mohammad Rafi in untidy salons and in innocent love affairs at book fares and debate competitions.
You live in theories of love, life and simplicity that you taught us- In after school tennis ball cricket; and, in clay wet lane walks, meandering between paddy fields, with a young friend.
Now you adore everything, everything you taught me to shun.

We left you to return
We live now in hatred
in dry cities, with a hope to come back to you
But with every revisit, you seem distant.
Elusive, to the point of no return.

Where do we go when we are tired?
Where do we return?

For if she fades into time- forgotten,
She will just live in memories of such heinous crime.
So, she must live, she must live, She must live to fight.

Gwalior

Fading day light transcending through the senses, high, like ragas with all of their gamakas into the crazy, cold Gwalior skies. Doped and drunk for years, liquid- like Indian classical, and all the shivering memories it can bring. The road is long, a thousand miles and wide like a sea of void. Notes reach to the furthest horizons, red like fire, and red like my mind- cruising through the grey cells of past. Fast. So fast, that you cannot breathe in the air that runs in, every time you open the window in the highway full of miracles and cheap alcohol. And the streetlights, they pass like lines in my notebook, torn and dead; ever ceasing, forgetting. Water- like notes loop in your mind, drowning yourself in thumries, bleeding, crying, sighing for love and everything we have ever longed for.  White sheet of hope spread on the floor- peace and salvation, of humility and compassion- where everyone, old and new, rich and downtrodden seat, sleep for 4 nights and 4 days to lose themselves into the mystic of divine. And the instruments of God, players from all directions, create and recreate an aura that sings of oneness and love. Tansen  floats in through the breeze of wilderness and rain, in control of everything , every note that has been played so far. Gaus his master, resting at peace, tapping his fingers to the complex talas and rhythmic structures that hang in air, like planets in the sky. Love is all we need, love is all we need to carry on through the years of desert and drunken nights.

Into the glossy world. We're shining like the crazy stars in the sky.Speaking fluent English . Ah, the endless balls and the pop corns and the lights and dance and the zooming disco-lights, eating the nerves and brains of little kinder tender soul of originality and art. Eat them all. Eat. eat eat. Ravage them. Suck the blood, pull the money out of its chin, sell its veins  rape it and rape it twice. There is nothing to talk about, nothing to cry for, nothing to realize, nothing to die for . Just dance, dance and dance.

A Brave New India: MBA in Saffron Robe |2 poems |

1. The MBA generation

We are the MBA generation. We dance. As people in distant villages die – failing to save their hills and forests, we dance. We call them terrorists, we count growth rates. We dance to the happy songs of brighter days. As the night falls, and the hungry children on the streets are raped under neon lights, we dance. People and policies lose their meaning. We grow our hair, we grow our beard. We dance to the music of growth and shine. Histories change to saffron; people turn to slaves, prostituting their wits through the shiny glass wall. We dance, as our libraries filled with war and greed, and discotheques, burn through the ashes of midnight cigarettes. Torn letters of Ideology stale in the gutter. Postmodern existential escapism shake hands with filthy cleavages of MTV roadies. We dance, as another dictator falls, a terrorist hanged, and a fascist reborn. We dance, as liberty increasingly means liberalisation; and democracy, an oligarchy.
We dance. We dance.
A generation of confusion and mistrust,
of lies, and decorated words,
with meanings more than one .
A generation of deceit
and dance.

2. Utopia

Shades of Saffron hide
In a sack full of afternoons
Saffron Soul. Saffron kites. Skin. Soil.
Saffron is a colour.
Saffron Pyre, Saffron Sins
Saffron polity of killings
Death however has no colour.
Saffron lies, Saffron traitors
Saffron salvations of deceit
Rebirth
Saffron is just a name
Misused, time and again
Leaves that turn saffron. Fall
Saffron, a thought
Humble.
Saffron Kids, Saffron monasteries, Saffron chimes. Waves.
Saffron, a feeling
Saffron sands of time.
And so, those who wear
Saffron in their hearts
Cannot kill.
For those who kill
Surly cannot seek saffron.
And those who remain silent,
Are wary- wary of the mistrust.
So they weep.
And in Saffron they seek
In Saffron they sing
Saffron songs
Beyond polity and religion
Beyond race and colours,
Beyond pride
In Saffron
they seek
In Saffron they sing
Saffron songs.

The find of the month for sure.

"Trees, oh trees
do you remember me?
from before

and birds, oh birds
can you recall my songs?
from before

fire, oh fire
i can still feel your warmth
like before"

-Thijs Kuijken

nuts and bolts

We are all little Philip Kotler books walking, talking, propagating and living laws of marketing through our smiles. We are not fat, we cannot be thin. We speak in a language that is strange to ourselves. We cannot be in silence, we are never wrong. We speak or cannot speak, fumble in vanity. We are sure, even when we choke. We always have to do something. Go out . dance. eat TV. read parties. drink contemporaries. No room for slackery or laze. No room for thought. Only thought is ours, only vision is ours, ours is the only paradigm. We use theories. Trait, fool, rape and use them to prove our vested interest. All we want is to be in shape. we are mere transactions. We shine. we shine. We shine through the tallest shrines, prostituting ourselves through the shinny glass wall. We assure , reassure ourselves of our pride, our position, our hierarchy, our vanity and shine, every time we speak our mind, everytime we see someone weaker than us. The shopping malls teach us how to walk, and the lipsticks make us sound intelligent, movies teach us whom to vote, leaders show us which movie to see and the restaurants teach us a wave of new vocabulary, invented through gloss and maskara. We are but a spare part of a machinery rusted in time. Unused. We fit or force fit ourselves into big round machine that rolls on for years until we destroy the very structure we are holding on to, to fall apart. Those who cannot force fit, or those who do not want to force fit, float. They float through the space of time. And everyone else, little useless nuts, forcing themselves into revolving volts,under pressure, ask the floating nuts "Which world do you live in?"

And all that I have learned
seem to fade away
amid shinny city lights.

so many different worlds
so many promises
I fail all.

Them,
every single one
has so much to say
I listen
I lose
again.

You, who, inject isms and use oxymoron words to console us.
Do not care to justify your taste, it won't be necessary.
This is your time.
Can you 'de-regulate' our minds?

For Prabhu : Where ever you may find him

I didnt want to write a poem
I just wanted to feel better




So this boy travelled from a nameless village
Far, in the dense forests of East Orissa
where people can still smile
in spite of the poverty they wake up to
everyday.

He came to the capital
The urban El dorado
To get himself registered in a course
in the best university of the country.
He was bright, his visions clear
You could tell that from just one stare.
He found a home, he found a shelter
In books and manuscripts that were ages older

Soon he started to realise
How the world around
can harm your eyes
He shouted a slogan, he bore a torch
And in time he was seen heading a march
He gave speeches, he inspired people
And night after night he slept on his table

But human we are and we must stop
People with hearts who dreamt a different dream
So like vultures we ate little pieces of his mind
And left him at the door step of time.
Rumours and smirks rolled over the place.
Now he walks through the road where once people hailed his name.
His friends, ashamed,  disown him.
Estranged, he lives like a stranger to his name

People called him mad, they made faces at him
He didn’t bother for he lost his claim
He felt he was walking through an asylum
Soon the books betrayed him
The writers too
Life and theories mismatched
He cried out in pain,
“Whom do I believe? What Do I call my own?
Writers have changed their name
They wear masks on their eyes and lipsticks on their knees
They don’t write anymore. ”

They say he was seen near a garbage bin
Looking into a book in it, he dearly loved.
It said that the world could have changed
If only we remain human
His shirt torn, his hair shabby and long
He stood there with a smile
He could barely stand.

Today when they speak
about their prolific PHDs
I understand
I understand why you wanted to lose yourself my friend
I understand why you always carried a smile.

Two trains move opposite to each other through the realms of time
One that brings old to new
Other that takes new to the old.
One that remembers
other that forgets.

And you tell me stories of the tallest shrines,
I am sure you have never cried,
I am sure machines don't have a human mind.

Take me to a land
where music is music
and poems are poems,
no never a lipstick
to woo them.

Today, I woke up to one of the most saddest mornings. The horizon lost in mist, the trees seem greener than they should, the sky wore a jealous blue and everything seemed angelic . As the Buddhist chats from the Tsuglagkhang traveled through the thin breeze, like a short wave radio, time was moving faster than I would have liked. Sadness. Sound of rain water falling on my roof from the trees, after the rain. If only we never had to return. How tough does it get to return to everything that is considered a good life?

Lazy mornings
innocence
lazier afternoons.

Hippies dancing wild
to Gunja Gun
whatever happened to politics.

Mcleodgunj

Scheduled for publication

Spoilt peace of mind
Facebook fights
answers lay within

Cold mountain songs
 peace, breeze
 Its all in your mind.

Midnight shiverings
endless sky
stars float below me.

We live in a time when realities are manufactured by burning pages of history, rewritten to support false claims that are politically sensitive and humanly insensitive towards oneness. While we sing of oneness and peace, adore dylan, seeger and marley, our intrinsic selves are always in denial with the artistic and intellectual affiliations we try to wear.

Ólafur Arnalds

Published inWinter Issue 2012, Pyrta, Shillong.

Summer, rain, autumn and winter,
Some grow up being wiser,
I grow old being idle
and dull

You're Little Room

Scheduled for publication

So the heat of the parched day turn to dusk. And dusk, like the birds, comes back home to the night. Nights fade into a certain dawn that doesn't promise much. The light illuminates into the ruthlessness of a day. Life is like an orange. Life and all its busy friends are like planets up above the sky. I however like the squares more. But on a finer observation, everything seems like a circle, rotating and revolving, until death comes and we fall like shooting stars in a wide, black, weightless,helpless,formless space . Space. Void. Like our thoughts that waves into nothingness after you have thought too much. Life, as it is, remains unexplainable and useless, like it has always been since creation.

Just when I thought all poetry had died, it rained.

There is a certain something we often feel in going back to the same place over and over again. A certain joy to see things remain as they are, exactly the way they were when you left. Tangible changes didn't bother me much this time . It's the honesty, the simplicity,and the love people and friends had , overwhelmed with ingenuity that this cold , quiet place can only bring, that has remained the same.

The ape story

Jerks dance high,
naked,
covering their lust with manufactured stories
of Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison.
- Makes some of us
hate these musicians,
for no fault of theirs.
But whose followers
could not keep
the promise
that they tried to keep
through the signs they left behind
wrongly interpreted...
Now used as a lipstick
to trap this world
in a maze.
The earth is an orange
with layers of labyrinth
each set by an ape
of a different kind.
to trap
a grasshopper.
A dream is a dream
A nightmare remains a nightmare.

And these songs they listen are dead
so are the muse
just like the world
and the listeners too
Art being a Viagra
thoughts buried  in the coffin
unsung,
or rather over-sung.

Little saffron monks, they fly across the horizon like faded Buddhist flags that fall from the sky making sounds of wind-chimes made of sandal wood and mountain rock high, floating across the ice age of glory and salvation only to melt into unfathomable cloudy gibberish of a doped eastern sun. 

This rage is a cover
Pacifying the guilt
lies all over, pointing fingers on air
Even a death isn't enough
for them to learn
what life couldn't teach
and all the lies
they preach
will soak
in time
will soak
in truth this life would bring.

An old tree with lemon shades
Yellow leaves that fall with grace.
The citric sun, and the arid heat.
Old secrets breezing through the stone buildings
It's summers here in this land of Djins

If rain comes, it should wet our soul. And when it comes, we will breath-in Shillong, every single time skies don't seem blue. Memories of cold , sad pine winds will bring us peace through the lonesome roads where dry leaves fall. Pain would rain on us, for in our lives we lost the meaning of happiness in this pursuit of rain. A little bit of rain and a little bit of memory will keep us soaked, together, in pain.
And those paper boats of hope, from shattered water bodies will float. Towards the eastern sky where we once promised to kiss the rain.

You rise like the sun in the darkest depths of my insomniac mind. Each day, you shine, like a river under the moonshine. You shine, across my lonesome valley. Of broken promises and pain. You run through my veins. Many deserts that I have crossed, years lost in aging, drifting indifference,  now weep. Now weep in rain. Rivers born in sand lands, like questions raised in time, now melt, melt to the sea. Sand dunes turns to crimson clay. And it shapes a dream, safe. Safe enough to be real. No questions, no doubt; no fiction, no half measures. Just an overlapping image that increasingly melts into another like an array of  songs with similar chords. Almost like an eclipse that shines through the edges of darkness like a ring. There is room to breathe. Room enough, to refute cliched notions of degrading poetry under the roof of regularity and peace. There is room for thought. There is room to create. Room for love, life and beyond. And, there is room to feel strong.

Colour blind.... I wish I was.
Colour blind.... I wish I was.
Nevermind.... I wish I could.
Bullet proof...I wish I was

Questions deaf...I wish I was.
Answers numb.... I wish I was.
People blind.... I wish I was.
Nevermind.... I wish I could.
Bullet proof...I wish I was

Ridicules .... never understood
Sarcasms.... never learned
Humiliations... never heard
Insecurities... never felt
Colour blind.... I wish I was.
Nevermind.... I wish I could.
Bullet proof...I wish I was

A little short...can't read the signs
A little slow...can't reach the line
A little dumb....I wish I was.

Bullet proof...I wish I was


Prompted by 

Memories are always more beautiful than living them.

Noboborsho

Another year silently passes by
and we keep forgetting
the promise those yellow fields sang

Walking through the streets
million miles away
Where the wind brought some of us
Many years ago
I see the fading stories of blood and mud
buried through the sands of time

New. White clothes. And sweets.
Packets full of gifts
cant buy the time that has decayed
A generation forgotten,
who keep staring at the evening sky from the posh balconies, where they surly do not belong.
who keep drifting away all day, and more so, on this day to a place they called home.
who keep holding on to the silver water and the silver fish and all the silver moonshine they left behind.

And then, a generation that fades away
almost ashamed of their identity.

Out there on the other side of the country
the river fades,
There are lot of poems . Lot of poets too
many who write better things.

But the feeling and some of the people who have felt the suffocation
the pain of eternal fading
are now forgotten.

yet another year
another day
another new dress
and a little bit of holding on to the mother
more sweets, gifts, a movie or two

She still stares straight into our eyes
frail as ever.




P.S : and i forgot the bugging SMS -es...... this is really a tribute to the man, Mr Ghatak, you live.