Sri Krishna Finally Speaks Out on Love

Ladies and Gentlemen
Its my honour and pleasure to be here
As a keynote speaker
In the International Conference on `Erotic Love’
Though I think I am not the man for the job

It is precisely because
Millions of women and men
Have been madly in love with me
And billions of poems
Have been inflicted on me
That I have nothing interesting
To offer on the subject
Excuse me for using a Shaivaite metaphor
I am simply crushed
Under the Kailasa of clichés.

I am better off
As a Professor of Metaphysics
And pontificate on morality
Or as teaching the bunch of idiots here
Cheap underarm tricks
Of hitting effectively below the belt

However
Let me take up this opportunity
To make some things clear.

Love has nothing to do with the Gopis
Garbas, Flutes and the like
It has absolutely nothing to do
With the things like Bhakti blah blah
(I leave such things to people like Narada
You know what kind of guy he is)

And as any speaker
In the pre-lunch sessions of academic conferences
Is allowed to indulge
In an analogy or two

Love, all that I can say about it
Resembles what Yudhishtira mumbled
To his teacher
When the venerable Guru inquired about his son

Or that love resembles
That stray arrow
Of the non-descript hunter


Which clearly saw through me

3 July 2010

TWO NARMADA POEMS

(I) Karnali Dec 2008

Though there isn’t much river here
I find my way
Out of the thatched sheds
Which cover the river bank
Dodging

The nauseating leftovers
Of death’s ritual dinner
Broken earthen pots
Shocking heaps of hair
Of shaved mourners
Women’s undergarments
With no women in them

No, I haven’t come here
To submerse my ashes
I am not completely cremated yet

Most of it is pale xanthous sand

This dried up river resembles
An old decrepit Hindu beggar woman
At the emigrations counter
She scrutinize my papers
For forgery
I have nothing to declare
Except my innings

You can’t cross borders
With your poems
She says

But I am a translator
I protest

You son of a bitch
She says with a toothless grin
And sparkle in her eyes
As she tears up my tourist visa
Into shreds

You bloody son of a bitch





(II)
Chandod
(For Dayaram 1777-1853)

It is over
Before I can make out anything
This small walk in the forest
Ends with an ambush
Of aliens
A mob of a million temples
Attack me
With their ugly whitewashed faces
Uglier than the whitewashed faith
That spawned them

I lost faith
Long time before
I lost my virginity
I don’t think I will recover
Either

I am taken
To the birth place of a medieval Gujarati saint-poet
It is an ill lit square room
With the poet’s poems and information
In the notice boards on the walls
It looks like an elementary school
In the village
The place where God’s most unpoetic creations are born
Is equally prosaic

The phrase `saint poet’ loiters aimlessly in my head
It is an oxymoron
Ambidextrous and androgynous
Every saint has a past
And every sinner has a future they say
But poets have neither

I chance upon a poem titled
` Love’s Satire’
In English translation
On the notice board

Got it pal I say
Got it
We have been doing it since ages


(4 December 2008)

When the Extinguished Sun goes to Sleep

When the extinguished sun goes to sleep
He spills his colourful semen on the touch screen sky
He still dreams of the harvest he has to reap

Syllables once erect and taut are now in a heap
The wet phrases that lubricated once are now dry
When the extinguished sun goes to sleep

Now the sleeping bats no longer leap
Sun has scribbled his will on the blog and is ready to die
He still dreams of the harvest he has to reap

Moon fakes her orgasm and pretends to weep
Stars pretend to be aroused in the pornographic sky
When the extinguished sun goes to sleep

The sun is the shepherd who likes to slaughter his sheep
The sheep yields to his digital knife without asking why
He still dreams of the harvest he has to reap

Mountains refuse to be tall and oceans refuse to be deep
The liquid crystal monitor refuses to be my sky
When the extinguished sun goes to sleep
He still dreams of the harvest he has to reap

Sachin Ketkar
4 Sept 2010

Sex, Coffee, Ontology

Sex is just a conversation
They say
I say
Not to you but you in my mind
let me take
your nakedness in my laps
enfold  you with the blanket
of my being

I say to you
Not to you in my mind
But to you
'Want to join me for a cup of coffee?'
You say
'Thanks,
Very nice of you. But some other time.'
I go and buy a cup
for myself
Coffee
is just a conversation
I hear them say.

16/10/10

Some Recent Qasidas on Pain

I

I raise my glass
To toast you, Pain

You are butterfly made of silver
Blooming in all sorts of places
A uranium rose
Whose sharp petals
Cut deep into all seven layers of flesh

II

You are language
I peel off the syntax and lexis
Of the legendary onion
Layer by layer

Till I am the only thing
That’s left

III

You are the daylight
Which keep
Men awake

IV

My being is your gynoecium
I gather
The pollen of death
From your hirsute feet

A poem is about to germinate


29 March 2011 11:31 pm

A Line of a Poem

Is hardly ever the shortest distance
Between two spaced points.
It is actually a misfortune of a sentence
To become a line of a poem.

Usually, it is doomed to incompletion
Disintegrate into fragments
That make no picture if put together again.

As your name means a line of a poem
I gather the fragments
Of the meanings of your name
In my faceless palms
To see how my line of Fate
Merges into your line of Destiny.

The small white butterflies
Of your scintillating laughter
Punctuate
The lines on the palms of my poems
Perching
on my unwritten commas
And full stops
Which are usually
Commencements of a new sentence.

I can only respire
My line of a poem
In my effort to escape
The rocky prison house of prose.
In front of my eyes
I see the sentences crumble
Into the fragments
Of irredeemable distances
The stoic sparrows
Peck at the common crumbs
Altercating over the words
In their insatiate beaks.


Thursday, July 22, 2004

Wait for Me

Like dried teak leaves
My eyes have come off

Bored crows people
The forsaken branches
Of my leafless fingers.

The sun has dropped his smooth round skull somewhere
On my treeless grounds.

I am waiting to grow into a great babul tree
In this wasteland
Where no sun grows on the trees.

My eyes gather near your feet
Blown by the barrenness of the winds.

Crows look at you
As if you are unwanted stranger.

Somewhere a monkey stares at you
And you do not know.

In the crowded thorny shrubs in my lungs
Hangs a no moon night
For
In the shifting sands of life
I have buried all my twelve moons.

My thousand eyes
Dry like leaves gathered around your feet
Blaze like the intestines of a deadpan earth.

The bored crows
Fly away into the soul
Of white inert sky.

The smooth round skull
Of the sun crumbles into dust.
I am waiting to die

Like this huge leafless baobab
On which the monkeys wait
For the fruit and a leaf.

Dust gathers on the tired tamarind tree
That has forgotten its own taste.

Dust gathers on the brown soil of my eyes.
Dust gathers on the round abandoned skulls of the sun.

Monkeys look emptily at the shadows
Of the crows which are no longer there.

Gather the ashes of my eyes in your palms.
Weep the tears blue as the earth
On the silence of my pyre.

Remember me as monkeys
Remember the fruits
When they are hungry
As the crows remember their mates
In summer. Remember me
As the leafless baobab
Flourishing on the tombs
Of the inhumed moon
Remember the rich green felicity of their leaves.
Wait for me where no one waits for anyone any longer.

My Mouth is an Old Useless Tunnel

My mouth is an old useless tunnel
In which the abandoned corroded railway tracks go in
But don’t come out.
You are the light at the end
Of my mouth.

My face is brittle like a mummy’s
When I try to take it off like a tedious mask
It falls into thousand pieces
On the floor.

Let me remove my hands from my elbows
And offer them to you in a dish full of oranges
And grapes.

I want to make a garland of my ten heads
Interwoven with sliced watermelons and pumpkins
For your neck.

Allow me to take out
The funeral procession of my brown eyes
And bury them
On your nipples.
I will wait for marigolds
To burst forth on their graves.

Stranded

 

On a murky corrupted afternoon

As the harsh rains hurt

The sparrow wings of time

Hiding in the tired wet boughs of an unknown tree

Or in the gloomy unmanned windows

With its intolerable soaked translucency

I m stranded

In a small grocery shop, without an umbrella

Unable to go to my dank dark house

Or return to the dark edge of memory

Where I came from

I wish the rain would stop breathing

I wish its heart would die a brain death

I hear it flogging mercilessly

With its silver black whip

I have a reverie of a black-and-blue world

Running for cover

I hear the disquieting reminiscence

Of an alluring voice dripping wet

From a distant branch calling out to me

I at times wish it would rain on me someday

Leave me stranded

Between the betweens of the world

I at times see in my trance

My ancient sarcophagus

In your eyes

I dream of my stranded tomb

Between the moist love

Of your tender breasts

I see my parched fingers thirst

To touch your mad eyelashes

Soaked to the skin

In the heavy sterile rains

Of my tropical rain forest desire.

Stranded in the terrible blank space

between

the agonized craving for silken darkness beyond oblivion

and the  anguished craving for ripe secrets of your mouth

I stand helplessly waiting for rains

to flood my gutters and streets

13 June 2003

Traces I will Leave Behind

Every breath that leave my body
Is an encrypted confidential message
Only death can unscramble.
It is useless to hack it.
Death is the only ultimate interpretation.
There no text remains.

Paper boats leave
The abandoned dock of my being
Sailing soundlessly
On the invisible rivers
Of my ancient breath.

Traces I will leave behind
Are crumbs fallen inadvertently
From the absent minded mouth
Of death.
Let harmless sparrows peck
At the grains of my words.

I will not leak the secret
Once I am gone.

My Simple Congenital Thirst

Pale fingers exfoliate like hair

On the edge of my amnesiac skin

Reaching out

To the dried carcass of the sky.

My simple congenital thirst

Branches out

Of my pores

Shedding   eyeless brown leaves

On the famine

Of my earth’s black mouth.

The parched sky peels off

Like a cheap blue paint

The decrepit arteries of the dehydrated soil

Crumble

Like the ruined drainages

Of extinct civilizations.

My stultified heart a palm

Whose fingers have come off

Can still hold nothingness

Like Shiva’s translucent semen

Can still keep count

Of my deaths with its mute thumb.

I have planted

The stillborn foetuses

Of my eyes

Near the ancient roots of peepal

The male rocky hands

of the last earthquake

Will awaken

Their disfigured faces

They can still startle you

By sprouting from unlikely places.

Sinbad’s Afterlife Blues

Ocean is an old discarded myth.

I hear the leisurely blue songs

Of the whale swimming

Serenely

At the back of my mind

I view her sprout jets of love

As she dives and crashes

I thought she was an island

On which I could live

But she fled.

I have gone down under the waves of sleep

Waters as voluptuous as death

Have engulfed me

When I open my eyes

The world turns its back upon me

They say

She is just a blue apparition

On an inky night

Her songs are the merely moving ridges

Tumbling over one another

Plug your ears they say

Now that I am just a pallid corpse

Floating like a weed under the sea

I will reach out to her

And let her secret songs

Run like silk through my veins

12 August 2010                     12 pm

Texture of forgetfulness

Texture of forgetfulness

Slips away from my fingers

I don’t even remember how it felt

Probably it was like sand or silk

Or like a young woman’s curves

Or like nothingness

Or like feathers of a dead sparrow

Texture of forgetfulness is like daylight

Inside which we can see everything clearly

For instance when I am on my bike

I don’t see the vacant spaces between vehicles

The spaces which would be vacant

And those which are already vacant

Texture of forgetfulness

Is like the eyes

Limpid and sharp

In their absence

I don’t even see

What I am not seeing

Even the invisibility

Is invisible to me

Texture of forgetfulness is like a poem

We have forgotten to write

We don’t even remember what it was

And how it went

Or where it went

I dream of touching forgetfulness

Which is full like a cup of tea

Or empty like the forgotten sea

I smell the texture of forgetfulness

It smells the touch of mother’s saris

Before she went away to sleep

Or dad’s trousers

When he used to take me out for Bruce Lee movies

I listen to the texture of forgetfulness

It sounds like the music of the forgotten son

Which you can’t even replay in your heads

Texture of forgetfulness grows like a cobweb

On a winter afternoon

I feel like a lazy spider

Spinning the web of my forgetfulness

Trying to trap some unknown buzzing words

Which I don’t even know

They exist.

19 December 2010

2.55 pm

The Old Prostitute at the Taj Mahal

She reclines against the unfeeling marble
Of this exquisite abandoned hospital
Wearing a startling red lipstick
On her aged black lips
With a hope
That her flesh made light
By termites
Will be of some use
For minds turned horny
Under the influence
Of the emperor’s grand white delusion
Of catastrophic proportions

An ageless river
Reeking with effluents
Rotten myths
And polythene
Waits for that dark silken flute-player to return
And restore her youth, grace and innocence
As they say he once did
To an old hag in the story

There is an empress buried here too

She died during childbirth I learn
Trying to give birth to her fourteenth child

These women must have realized by now
That the flute-player in question
Is not exactly famous
For keeping promises

( 16-3-09)

Who I Am the Reality It Is

A fish
Swimming the translucence of your eyes
A man
Walking this forsaken earth
A poet
Digging my teeth into throat of the language
A word
Whose meaning has sunk to the bottomless depths of darkness
A bird
Who has misplaced his sky
A snake
Who in reality tasted the fruit first
A fruit
Which still bears the fingerprints of Eve
A shadow
Tasteless, colourless and odourless
A flame
That keeps us warm
A myth
That keeps us alive
A fact
As sure as death
A dewdrop
Glistening like your dream
A father
The seed
A lover
A mouth organ
Breathe your honeyed breathe through me
And close your eyes

Revising

The Song-birds Swim

The song-birds swim

The dark green depths

Of my soul

They flock

On the long forgotten branches

Of underwater trees

Intoning

Their deep blue songs for you.

My arsenic heart

Disintegrates

Under the ancient gaze

Of the cold-blooded sun.

My destiny

Dries up like a goggling injury

Revealing the cobalt bone.

The birdsongs are orphaned

And my blood

Black with rust

Weep on my helpless fingers

I weep salt

As there is no water left

In my tears.

Love Songs for Amogh

I

Torment of thirty five worlds
Falls away
With your smile

A resplendent star
In the evening
Of my hazel eyes

You have fathered me, Amogh
Before I die


II


I haven’t come across yet
Love poems from fathers to their sons
Probably
It is not manly enough
To write a one
But here I am
Looking at the blank paper
In front of me

Remembering
The paper white purity
Of your skin
When the nurse placed you
In my hands for the first time

Your first dark faeces
When I changed your diapers the first time
Injecting cow’s milk
From a needless syringe
Into your mouth
I remember your ceaseless howling
On the second night
When your mother had not started lactating

Do father lactate?
They may
For they are females too

This poem for instance
Oozes out of the nib
Instead of my nipple.


III


I absolutely had no idea
My elf
That all along
You were hiding
In some obscure corner of my mind
Playing your usual peek a boo

Though I could feel
That you probably reached out
With your palm
When I tried to hear
Your somersaults
And flying kicks
Inside your mom

I remember
How you wetted
My umpteenth pajama
When I used to rock you on my laps
Sitting cross legged
(Yes, you could fit into the frame then)
During midnight hours

I also remember trying to put you asleep
On my shoulders
When you were bent on staying awake
With your mischief

Yes, fathering a father
Can be a tough job
But you did it pretty well.


IV


I don’t know exactly why
We decided to name you `Amogh’

Your name means the infallible one
An unfailing weapon

But I know now
That I aimed my arrow
At my aging agony

It hasn’t really missed its mark.


V

I have hardly anything on me
To pass on to you
With joy

The books I read
Are as dark as the ones I write

My genetic records
Are not commendable either

They haven’t isolated
The Asthma gene yet

Probably
It has latched itself on to you

Neither do I think that they can ever identify

The gene for poetry
Which is probably as bad
Or even worse

For it means
To be condemned forever

To live alone
Like a man with an extra pair
Of testicles
Hiding his shame
In the shadows of the world

VI


In these hands
I have held the ovaries
Of my aged mother
Floating in a flask
Where seeds of suffering were first sown

I have seen my wife
Writhing and bleeding in her labors

I have seen eyeballs
Of my friend's father
Who was quite fond of me
Extracted and bottled
For posterity

I have been overrun
By asthma
In the Oxford Botanical Gardens
Where I thoughtlessly went
And spent rest of the evening
Floating in warm water of the bath tub
As if in amniotic fluid
Thousands of kilometers away from home

I have sat up wheezing
Any number of nights
From past two and half decades
Clutching the stubborn old darkness
Under my belly
For support

I have seen family friends
Swindle my father of his hard earned money

I have cremated dozens of old skulls
And heard them crack in their pyres

I have seen madness of love
In the woman’s eyes
I know the feeling of oneness
When I make love to her


But it is so different
From the feeling of love I have
When you sleep in my arms
Dreaming of innocence
I kiss your small white shoulders
Feel the fragrance of your fingers
Playing with my ear lobes

Agreed
I haven’t seen much of life
But I haven’t been entirely ignorant of death
But to catch a glimpse of love
And to be touched
By the beauty of the whole world
Is sufficient
To make a prematurely graying man
Without youth or childhood
Smile

VII


Amogh, for you
I have attempted the impossible
-writing a poem on happiness

But who cares if I fail
As long as your paradisal beauty
Lights up
The fading lamps of my eyes


24 Oct 2007
11 15 pm

Angles of the Sun (Konark, 23 Feb 2008)

i)

The mice trap lesbian lovers
In their act at night
Priests punish them
By cutting off their hair
Our guide says wickedly
`Women go to beauty parlours
All too frequently these days.’
Smart chap, our guide.

ii)

A dog laps at the bleeding organs
Of a naked woman agonized due to gonorrhea

An old woman with elephantiasis
Teaches her old husband
How to handle his hydrocele

Sixty-four coital positions
A dozen or two less
Than the Kamasutra arithmetic
The algebra
Of impossible
Permutations and combinations

iii)

It’s difficult to believe
The very kings
Who had nothing better to do
Than to fuck around
And screw up people’s lives
Until some other king
Equally good at such things
Would startle him
In his hamam
When he would be gamboling around
With his concubines
Doing all the Vatsayana stuff
Built these magnificent memoirs
Of human misery
Pleasure indivisible
From pain

iv)

I don’t know
If the Sun God
Indulged in these
Earthly triple xxx hardcore pastimes
With the Shadow
His devout Hindu wife
But I am sure
His lady
Must be completely overshadowing him
At night.

v)

A man grabs his woman’s breast
As their child gapes at them
The woman attempts to distract the child
But fails.

A man screws a woman
As another woman beacons him
A woman aroused and wild
Grabs a startled bloke
And sits on his mouth
With her panties off

vi)

You busy old fool
Unruly sun
Trapping us in
All sorts of angles
Acute, obtuse or complementary
Since eons
Why don’t you leave us alone
For a while dad?

Why don’t you mind
Your own business
Of curing lepers
Or lighting up people’s minds
Instead of capturing
Our animal selves
On your pornographic films?

How about finding out
Ways to avoid being swallowed
By demonic heads
Of god-knows-what departments
Of your universal university?

Or finding out ways
To dodge the takeover bid
From Microsoft?

Spare us mister big ass
Don’t throw your remorseless light
So exactly on our gaping orifices
Our weak human fluids?

We want to hide ourselves
Behind our mommy
This kind old earth

Let us be who we are
For a while.

 (1:35 noon, Konark –Puri Rd.)
Note:
I read this poem at SAARC First Young Poet’s Meet, Puri, 23 Feb 2008