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