A Morning Raga for the Dual Sim Summer Afternoons

Afternoons are black

Not like your eyes of course

But like the black candy-bar handset

Samsung Guru

I will toggle my dual-sim afternoons

As I toggle my two hearts.

From the wall

The wicked air-conditioner grins

chillingly 

Trees sulk in their own shadows

The blaze of the noon

Stands like a stranger

Across the street

Giving me missed calls.

I fall in love

with a fragile baby gecko

Noiselessly scampering 

Across the cool floor

Hence, when I leave my house

This afternoon

I will leave behind

My brown eyes in the bedroom

Sparklingly clean

Like the unused marbles

From my childhood.

(22-6-11)

Sexing My Turtles: Sachin Ketkar

True, I have to breed them
For I crave to watch their babies
Swarm all over my room
Under my mattresses
In my bag
Between pages of the unread books
Behind the murky rocks of my mind

Naturally, I have to find out
Who does what to who and how
Who does what to who and why
Who does what to who and where
Who does what to who and when
And the knowledge of my own species
Doesn’t help

The male has an organ or a penis, or phallus
Depending on what biologist you read
The organ might be dark-grey
Purple or blackish
With an expanded head
And a sharp spine at its tip
 And it is large when compared
With the turtle's size.
It might be seen on occasion
When sunbathing or drinking
When the front half
Of the turtle is submerged.
You will spy it if you are lucky
If you are not
Then you will have to try out
A combination of steps
To arrive at some conclusion.

I am not so lucky.
I put several of them together
Watch them crawl over one another
In slow and unsteady motions
I am curious about the secrets
Of their desire their chemistry
Their patience
Their primitive lust.
I see them disappear
Unhurriedly

Behind the prehistoric rocks on my mind
I draw out my pen
(Or organ or penis or phallus
Depending on which critic
You prefer)

And sit sunbathing
On an abandoned sheet of paper
My front half submerged
In strange reptile waters

And before I understand a thing
Unknown salmonella infects me
Laying me low with poetry

Jan 29 2013
9:59 pm

TWEETED HAIKUS

My dreams the migratory birds
flying across the full moon
absolute silence is their hearts

The full moon shines
in a silent little pond
Death is a mere ripple

Little white butterfly
visit some other flower today
mine wants to sleep in my leaves

They will catch me
if they decode my fingerprints
on your mind

Recession hit God
starts a BPO in Bihar
He is outsourcing work these days

Shakespeare on the Thames
sighs secretly with the fog
he misses the Avon

a homeless dark cloud
 begging near the temple
what shall I drop in his bowl?

The aged moon
totters on the stick
thinking of his pension

a sparrow
snug in her nest
dreaming of jack-the-ripper

 (from my twitter account)

INDEPENDENCE DAY 2012

Sleep is dinner for the dead

we serve severed heads
On the silver plates of dreams
soaked in the sauce

of our blackened blood
my fingerprints
on the gossamer wings of Time
have begun to fade

Waiter,
death is the last blank check
I will be signing
And it will be your tip

I am ready
For the next course.

FIVE RECENT HAIKUS

i)
termites swarm towards my face
bit torrents surging
towards their peers

ii)
bamboo-leaves turn blue
like the moth-eaten page of Facebook
i already hear the crickets singing

iii) a spider snoozes on his web
dreaming of his mate
-you have one unread message

iv) google chrome crashes
sparrow droppings on my screen
-oh! for the good old days...

v) internet dongle winks
porn soup is hot and ready
-anarkali disco chali.

One Monsoon, In a Forest

Foliage of your emerald feathers
Envelops your body
I run my fingers through
Your wet leaves
You preen

You close your eyes
And rest your beak
On my shoulders

We have become the evening forest now

An overcast sky
Descends upon us

Collects us in its arms

I see you have fallen asleep
Your red beak
Listens to my beating heart
You breathe monsoons
With your silences

We don’t have a nest
We are the nest

Don’t be afraid of opening your eyes
I won’t fly away from them

2 Sept 2012
12:27 am

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)