Graveyard Ghosts, or, I Flee From Them

I buried these traumatic fears
and this pinching hurt
I buried them alive
I dug them a grave, I made
them a coffin, I disowned them
And I left them to die.

But my disobedient passions
burst out of the grave as ghosts
They pursue me and stalk me
and sometimes, they find me
Like the accursed Eumenides
Desperate to live, I flee.

Immunity

The holes in my eyes

Were burnt into them

As yours bored into mine

Piercing the insides of my head

With the swift sharpness of arrows

Examining my soul.

Barbs from your mouth scalded me

Cut me into meat-pieces.

I thought I needed to develop immunity

From you.

Night, and night follows day

I operate like clockwork,

Sleepwalking, gliding, dragging my steps

Searching for your face unconsciously

In likely and unlikely places, I know

I need immunity now, not from you,

But the absence of you.

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Head Hanging backwards
over monkey bars at age eight
Feet at the top, the world
turned topsy turvy.

Head hanging backwards
over the boat, the river became
My sky, and surreal reflections
My world.

A sidelong glance at your face and
My heart leaps up and I behold
Worsworthian rainbows
in the sky.

I thirstily search among crowds
The next face could be yours, after all
And will o'the wisp memories become
my shadowy companions.

In Sandy Shores

Blown by every wind that flows

Hither-thither, I am a reed

In sandy shores.

where does the wind

Come from, where does it go?

Toppling ,uprooting me

Winding its way into large pores

Of the sandy soil in which I grow

At the water’s edge.

I must recede within the interior

I must find the clay of the mainland

I must abandon this life of rootless edges

And growing on risky precipices.

They told me clayey soil has smaller pores

Where windy-watery intruders may not nose

Where warm and secure rootholds oppose

Every windy-watery stream that blows

And every firmly rooted reed thrives and grows.

Cocooned

You lie enclosed in your cocoon
And I sleep oblivious in mine.
Neighbours,
We live as strangers.
Only the whispering wind brushes
Us together, and we touch, at times.
Stray insects that crawl over you
Crawl over me too.
When the cocoons burst, will we
Recognise, will we realise
That we are sisters born
Of the same butterfly?

Broken Things

Broken things

Are broken.

Yes, you may cradle them

Cry over them, try

To mend them, sew them, patch them,

Use feviquick glue on them, break

Unbreak your heart , say

That time will heal them.

But broken things

Are broken.

Yes, they can be mended

Broken things perhaps

Can even be made whole again

But even broken things made whole

Can never me made the same again.

Sorrow runs deep through cracks and crevices

Refuses to go away again

Do not try, do not desire

For broken things exude flyawayspirits

Which visit you, haunt you, talk to you

But can never be brought home again.

Punctuation Marks

Punctuation Marks

You fill the empty pauses, you are
A comma. You are the parentheses
Of daydreams (this comes in useful
In classrooms, trains and market places)
You hover like quotation marks
Around every word I say,
The backdrop of this play.
My life is a story, it has coils of words
With events, characters, colours
An intricate plot and an open end.
This rapid river sometimes
Has lighter tones, which turn shady
And cloudy in places. But it has
No pauses, it is unpunctuated.
you are the colon
The semi colon which gives meaning
The genotext of this phenotext.
You are the accent, you mould
My pronounciation. Dot my I’s and
Cross my t’s, You are
The language of my imagination.
The story would still be a story
Without the punctuations, but it would
Be endlessly garbled speech
You, even in absentia, are just the full stop
I come home to. Period.

Six Poems Published in Kritya

Six Poems are up in Kritya- an online worldwide journal of poetry based in Kerala. The poems are 'Asomiya', 'Irom Sarmila- a ghazal', ' a photo-poem for Nabina Das' Mer-City picture', 'On Poetry and Photography' , 'a poem in response to J M Coetzee's Disgrace' and, 'Choices'. You can see them here-- http://www.kritya.in/0702/En/poetry_at_our_time.html

They are elsewhere on this blog, of course, but I am not posting them again, as six poems take up a lot of space. Scroll down, or use the search button, or better still, just use the link! :-)

I realised some of the links in Blood Prints in Web-Worlds don't work because the url's had changed, so anyways, now they work! All the links are "clickable"!