Measuring Spring (Version 2)
Here landscape has turned jade,
and in general attire has become shorter.
I too wear shorts occasionally, and
occasionally eat American. Not often.
In my dreams, there hangs a gulmohar bleeding crimson. In my dreams, I still row a boat in rivers of dirt covered men. As for gunfire, today's news carried enough.
Fashion, that I don't know. Which shows now top the charts, that I don't know too. In the weave of days and nights I prowl, rattling the cage. I etch my words on silences.
Exile is a evocative mask. I have frequented its use in the streets of red light districts. There eyes line up every night to catch a ferry to this land in a fair exchange of flesh for cash.
Today rain imprisons the sky in steely bars of water as swollen time attempts a closure of wounds that bloom rabidly. Everywhere your ghostly kisses still pierce my skin, like rusted acupuncture needles which now cause pain.
I take long walks in wild grass, and carry home clothes burnished with scattered seed. Scattered too is "Myself" after I set out on drifting continents. Sometimes I measure my waist, and sometimes I measure my forgetting like this.
2002:04:21 23:30 Atlanta
Note: While this clearly is a non-poem, it still contains, I think, an element of truth as seen through the eyes of a still new exile.
My Poems
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Our Body Electric (Version 2)
You enter me, and I enter you.
In between there are no parallels.
This is our body electric, whose strings echo and echo when I dig my fingers into your skin. We raise and fall to an old dance engraved in our bodies by blue guitars and hollow flutes, by drums heard in the whispering wind.
I fall into a starry sky threading supernovas onto purple banners of silk, garlands for your closed eyes. I am awash in the smells of We Ocean.
A beat begins, Sufis clapping in the distance, coming towards us, rises into a crescendo. This is the sound of mineral striking mineral, and music: jazz blues rock duelling rock blues jazz. This is how I begin another descent into silence, which finally brings me to you.
Note: I had promised myself to revisit fragments I had dumped here over the past five years under the rubric "My Poems" when their number crossed the 500 mark. I checked, and they stand at 510 or so; of these I will be salvaging (i.e., rewriting) what I think are worth salvaging, and take the un-salvageable idiocies offline.
My Poems
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Nana
Come sleep against my sleep,
in this narrow bed intended for
a prisoner or an ascetic, some warm
part of you always in my cold radius,
the distance between us as small
as that the wind traverses between
two reeds of grass and as large
as that between the moon and
its ruffled reflection in the bay.
Note: Written during Alison Balsom's superb (and free - O, how I love thee, New York) performance, on the trumpet, of Manuel de Falla's song "Nana" (Spanish for "lullaby") last evening, as part of the "Free for All" concert series at The Town Hall. Also if you are in New York the next two Sundays, you must go to the next two concerts, as I would: the complete set of Brahms's "Sonatas for violin and piano", as well as Bach's "Well-Tempered Klavier" will be performed!
My Poems
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