The Fun Life We Are Having

The Fun Life We Are Having

  

Fixtures aren’t that bad, those things stay put

And may even glare us down as we get near

Nothing to do but do the circumventing

And the ducking and weaving,

Digging and hauling, till you topple, or they topple

Fixtures are all in the brain, they loom

Like pyramids, containing the condensed

‘Wisdom’ of centuries, they are logical in structure

And do all their battles with obsolete dicta

When they fail to move us we move in to move them

Hence it’s nice battling with a fixture

It can’t move while we can, it can’t smile

But grow old and vanish…………

 

Yet strictures are definitely gooey and sticky things

They play obtuse, use swords and abuse

Speak in dialects unknown to the civil tongue

Get red in the eye, show aversion and gore

Issue edicts, talk of gods and sub gods

Quote from obscure texts- Hence all strictures are

In the mind, fed by a deep sense of insecurity

They harbor the memories of battles lost

Honor stripped, positions sabotaged, they deny logic

And delve into the abyss of the past to gain strength

When they hunt us, we can’t be blunt or pull a stunt

The battle isn’t with words, it’s with blood and spit

It isn’t nice to go to war with a stricture

It walks in shades, and works through our minds

Options against them are nonexistent

Other than to Issue a few of our own

 

Tercet

(One)

A cart is being dismantled
Parts separate
The clock is still ticking on

(Two)

It’s some famed macro lexicon
Words are micro
Ideas enunciate a leprechaun

(Three)

The terminal looks deserted
Vehicles don’t ply
Jelly fish still swims the seas

The imp possible’s

The imp  possible’s

  

He peeks at me through the half open door

But I don’t dare say “come in” to him

I know he is trouble

He is the holy terror of the neighborhood.

 

I tip toe to the door

And try to close it ever so nicely

I had almost got it done

When his tiny nose came crawling in through the slit.

 

“You gave me a fright”

 

I murmured to the short brown hairs

 

The imp is merely one and half feet

But his eyes look several thousand

 

“Ride” He points to something beyond with his open palms

 

I had heard of his ride

His father had just got him that the other day

 

The other boys all had big rides

So he needed one too.

 

One can see him wheeling it among the other boy biking fanatics

(He can’t yet climb on it)

And quarrelling with them

He calls them “bitches” and “sluts”

No one knows where he learned them

And the boys are pretty pissed about that

Strangely those are the only two words he could clearly utter too.

 

“Hmm, hmm” I say troubled. I like the imp somehow.

 

He wriggles past me into the room and starts handling things

 

I try to get some sense into him

 

“No, no, not that, that’s my pen”

 

“No you can’t take that, that’s a

Laughing Buddha, the favorite of your aunt’s”

 

(He doesn’t believe in aunts. This aunt being my wife

She would probably murder me if that statue got broke.)

 

The little terror was having it pretty good in my writing room.

 I again tried to normalize things.

 

“No, you can’t, I said you can’t, that’s the mouse of my computer

The lights you see in it are not fitted there to attract bees like you.

Don’t ever think that”

 

Well he has seen the morning paper by now.

 

“Now don’t tear the paper, there may

Even be some news in it you know”

 

I manage to remove every other item to where the

 Tiny devil can’t reach them.

I surveyed the room; there is not much he can do now.  

I turned towards my computer.

After a while I start hearing noises from the inner room

 

Well the imp had locked himself in that room and was making

Hell inside

 

As all good things happen in our lives, my wife comes in just then

And starts wailing

 

“What have you gone and done now!”

 

What, what the hell do you mean, he is the one doing that!

 

And you let him into the room. I had my trunk open, it has jewelry

 

I relaxed. Wonderful.   Its only jewelry. No big deal.

 

One thing you can say about a human wail, it tends to attract people.

Soon there were all the girls in the locality around the door, the big boys smelling mischief, were not far behind.

 

Girls started cajoling the imp

 

Honey, open the door, wont you, you like chocolates, I have plenty

 

The revelry inside picks up momentum

 

Sweet, it’s your mamma, I have halwa for you

 

It’s getting merrier inside

 

The boys want to break the door down.

 I wouldn’t have any breaking down of doors.

 

All the while the girls  are directing

 Freezing and deeply pitying glances at me.

The big guy, don’t know how to control a child,

Now he has got the little guy locked inside.

 

I am all too familiar with the way girls think so I hold a poker face to it.

 

The cajoling is going nowhere.

 

The imp is grunting and whooping inside and there is a constant noise of things breaking.

 

The time was getting late too.

There were conferences.  

Without my participation of course I being the main culprit.

A consensus was being arrived at.

They want to break the door open.

 

I got fed up and moved towards the door and shouted

 

You little capsule of trouble, I have your bike now,

 It seems a good bike to me.

 

There is dead silence for a while.

 The imp has pretty good ratiocinating faculties.

There was the clatter of latches being pulled and handles being turned

The imp shoots through my legs towards his precious bike

 

I look at the guys and girls and hold myself humble.

 

The girls are not impressed at all.

 

My girl says

 

You shouldn’t have called him” a little capsule of trouble”

He is not a capsule.

 

There were pitying looks all around on the girl’s part.

 

 To call a child a capsule! A little darling at that…..

 

I was getting pretty pissed at the patronizing attitude of the girls.

As if everyone is nice out in the world.

As if such imps could get along without being mauled once in a while  

That would be tantamount to  an injustice wouldn’t it. 

 

“Oh, should one call him “mother Theresa l” then” 

 

I ask

 

More pitying looks

 

“You guys should know he destroyed every single item within his reach.”

 

Then you should have moved them out of his reach. 

 

The girls hotly respond.

 

The boys are enjoying the beating I was taking.

 

Well I was not taking it any more.

 

I say coldly.

 

Thank your stars you don’t have anything worth it where he can reach.

 

The silence was one that you could only cut with a laser beam

 

 The boys are trying to maintain composure and terribly failing.

The effort making their faces into grotesque sculptures

 

They now think hard and astonishingly  vanish from the site

 

 The girls are having some sort of spasms and there were many an

 Interesting look directed towards me.

 

They leave as if the world is full of joy and they are enjoying it

 

Slowly the coast clears and peace is established. 

Chances are……….

Chances are……….

A boat is seen, slow

Crossing a river

Chances are that I am in it and seeing the

Lukewarm water and the shadow of the boatman parting underneath

And the shore line receding and gaining

The sun coming after us in undiminished speed

Only hidden partially by the water

That I am listening to the ancient song the boatman sings

Watching the drips of sweat making furrows

On his bare back, a back parched and grainy with the sun

And his long bamboo pole, while hastily being

Immersed in water making a faint noise on the sand of the river bed

And its hard grating slide through the sides of the boat

The whole of the body tensing, bend as a spring

Thin elbows straining, wiry muscles taut

And relaxing as the pole rises, water running over them

It could be I witnessing…….moving with the waters

Traversing with the needles of the sun over my body…….

 

It could be me on a fading noon on the river, seeing

The ripple of water spreading as the boat labors across the current

Fishes in dark outlines swimming with us

Bubbles bursting on the water face, birds swooping through-

The heart of small flitting bodies, debris attaching and detaching,

It could be me dragging a leg through the tepid water,

Feeling the seemingly porous and blackened wood of the old canoe

Deeply frazzled by time, like that of a buried carcass, dull black in the sun

Chances are it could be me or someone in me or someone I knew

And long since forgotten yet seeing through me, revisiting places

And events he felt and held fast to, chances are

It’s him sitting here, running fingers over stubborn keys

Making them play to his tune

That we are one and the same or fragmentary portions

Of the same self or I am an aggregate of these selves

Living through them, realizing one or a few as chance would have

 

Chances are, it’s magic and I am a magician

Par excellence

 

Ideas and Crimes

Ideas and Crimes

 

As I feel  it

The dented wood of the desk seems to tremble

The stains and odor have long left its surface

Leaving  deep sword strokes of memory

To  gape their wounds wide

Every day at school

Baby hands would trace

Those outwardly blunted creases

Familiar with their

Deepest  grooves

Yet those cuts run deeper than they know

And are made by ideas

With razors sharp, hacking through

Soft flesh, cutting it

Into disfigurement

Annulling something alive and

Enacting a spectacle of dread for

The children to see

 

As I watch , I now see

An ancient procession still wending its brutal way

The faces grim, eyes hard

Muscle bound, crazed and angry

And still carrying stone clubs

To crack open naked skulls

 

……….As if the past is ever extant !

 

In Conversations with Two Friends

In Conversations with Two Friends

  

1)   The empathetic Friend

 

“It bewilders me why

For one who so dislikes the deep

I find myself looking into the jaws of

Tiger sharks with incisors

Sharp as surgical knives…….

 

(Never favored the deep in life

And hate to go scuba diving

There are enough seas within

To dive into, as a kill time)

 

It transpires that

I got somehow absorbed into the mind

Of a little seal

That was about to be devoured

In the cold of the violent arctic seas

 

I stepped back into myself

And cheated my certain doom

 

Yet I doubt whether this is going to last.

 

There are as many beings

As there are projected miseries

Who knows, what gets me into what next”

 

2)  The hospitalized Friend

 

“When you get ill

Or break a bone

Nothing happens to the world.

It’s is almost indecent.

 

For

Didn’t you suffer with the world?

In all the other cases?

You got drenched together in the rain,

And got boiled to the bone in the heat,

Had a runny nose with others, had measles and dandruff,

And red eye and   chicken pox with the rest

(At least there were a few that went

 Down with you in such cases)

You fought the tornadoes and tsunamis together

Got killed and did murder as a unit in wars

Jumped off buildings together to cheat earth quakes

Watched the ball games, went to the movies

Dined, wined, joked and danced

Voted, revolted, putted, drove,

And what not, you did it all together.

 

But when you fall ill or have a sprain

Not even your shadow keeps with you

(The laid up state doesn’t care for shadows)

 

That steals the thrill of life out of you

Making you just an onlooker in the grand charade of life.”

 

All about an Old Chair

All about an Old Chair

Now what’s that you say?

No, no I am not angry, what’s there to be angry about?

So this is an old chair, I too got eyes don’t I?

I too get around in the world

And I know what’s old and what’s young

You needn’t bother telling me

 

I know, great grandpa used to lie on this

Now don’t be ridiculous I said lie, not Lie lie

(People do lie some times, that’s no heart break)

Then grand pa got this

Father used to be ecstatic sitting on it

He had tears whenever he sat on it.

I know its value, I am not iconoclastic

 

That’s unbelievable

Did I bring you up to say such things?

A ‘thing’ can’t be sexist, my god the way you guys think!

It’s a frame of mind; do you think I am one, now?

How can a chair be sexist, that’s ludicrous?

 

“It pinches you when you sit on it”?

And that’s enough o make you say a chair is sexist?

Oh, you now think that I am old fashioned and-

Don’t think like you.  I used to be baby-fashioned like you

Once upon a blushing time, so don’t kid me

 

Why don’t I sit on it? I do sit on it sometimes

I am not lying; you may not have witnessed it

That doesn’t make it an untruth. Tell me,

Is there a sound when a tree falls in forest and

Nobody is around

There is guys, there abso sure definite certain lutely is.

 

It has bugs that bite in it, you say? This isn’t a perfect world guys

The living subsists by feeding on the living

Now there’s an enlightening truth for you!

 

The springs creak? What are the springs supposed to do?

Should they play current musical hits?

 

It’s torn and the stuffing shows through?

Things get old, that do not make them worthless

It at least have some stuffing in it unlike the ones you use.

 

I know, it can’t be sold, there’s no market for it

( The market is the King nowadays is it not?)

That was my one consolation, till you got so fanatic to burn it.

What, is this some kind of a reverse Inquisition,

Are we burning heretical chairs now?

 

Nothing doing, I am keeping the chair, I may sit on it

Or spit on it, but I sure do like it.  

It’s your parent and provider speaking,…now get going guys!

Wordless

Wordless

 

Axing a debile line

I smash into silence

Steel strain

Pervasive pale light of the void

Nothing stirs for moments….

 

In the keen  glare of the mind

Thoughts lull, touches turn away

 

Words, back peddling  through my hand

Seep back inside and are quite

The paper fizzles with things unwritten

The hand is frozen in the convoluted space

And the pen , just a needle with a broken tip

 

It’s the zenith of a wordless nadir

It’s the grey of impressions and images

It isn’t a block, it’s the deadlock

The  wicked embrace of featureless jolt

3 Haikus

3 Haiku’s

 

(1)

 Slight evening drizzle

Smell of earth

Birds are not listening

  

(2)

 Glitches scabs my monitor

I power it down.

Silence shredded by slogans

  

(3)

 As the night changes into morning

Dawn falls behind

Only a few dew drops get hijacked

 

The Case of Coherence

The Case of Coherence

 

From

The myriad things strewn

Over my path

I pick up a few twigs

 

Nothing’s special about them

They were Just  twigs

Broken and bent

Faded to the marrow

The jagged ends

Still seemingly  raw and

Reeking of strain……

 

I didn’t know, off what trees,

They were

And why they were there

 

The next heavy foot fall may

Possibly  trample them to dust

 

I lay them down on the path.

(Not in any place particular

Merely at some place)

 

They were just twigs

Brittle

About to change