About the man who invented the wheel

A man filed a patent for his invention
of the wheel,all rights reserved for
mankind,he was told.And then he
went to the court,soon he was
wheeled out of the courtroom ,on the
stretcher of law.
In his never-ending
dream,he saw wheels within
wheels.The wheels of the world kept
turning.

When Moses spoke to his basket

The Basket it was that has
made me me.It wasn't a complete
abandon,it couldn't have been,
ensconced in a basket woven by man
to be returned to man.How the river
that suppressed its desire to teach me
swim, to servilely carry me back to
humanity,to lead the very species that
deserted me.
And now a thousand years later,when
they talk about Apocalypse every day
on TV,
how I wish I should have leapt
out of that basket back then,learned to
swim ,grown into a Moby Dick to rule
the world once the Great Flood consumes
mankind.The water is where I have always
belonged .

Writing the immortal poem

Here I begin writing
my immortal poem
and I want to use words
whose meanings will not
change over the ages
-a wish I am denied as
the readers shall change
anyway,the subtleties
of today are destined to
dissolve in the cliches of
tomorrow,and now I am
perplexed as consequently
metaphor seems an impossible
ambition.A string of symbols
that echoes in the psyche of
the future-it could only be
a song that you can close
your eyes and bale out of your
throat.I should have penned the
anthem of a country or the
hymn of a new religion,but
for that I need to be a man
of some significance.
Helpless,I cry at my occasion
I shall pass this blank paper
then,carrying the fingerprint
of my failure over to posterity,
hoping that many ages hence,
someone can always read a poem
into the creases left by the hands
of history.

In-vitro imagination

You have been hooked to your
tube for my days in the tube
the spectacle of my conception
has been your favorite reality
show and when I became the
whole lucky enough to be more
than the sum of my stolen parts
you sentenced me to my term
in the womb ,a mere rite of passage,
another tube .
Soon,you will pluck me,
for your own consumption
through the tube of my life
the walls of which are as
deceptively transparent as
the one I was conceived in,
the only difference being I
now harbor a wish to break out
so that every now and then I
have run headlong onto it.

That night of total darkness

Overnight the holy truths broke
out of the prison of sacred texts,
the farther they fled from prison,
the tinier they became,till all that
remained of them was an army of
a million mice hurrying for a mass
suicide in the high seas.
Splash!!
And the world ,still sleeping sunk
in the waters of ignorance.
Books and archives,now emptied
of weighty knowledge spilled over
from the shelves,triggering a giant
tsunami of lost words and phrases
in which you feared for the life
of friends and family.
Life or Death,you thought.
but as you saw the city rebuild from the same
ruins,you could tell it was all a matter
of choosing Right or Left like always
You never need to live
upside down in an inverted
world,as ants scaling falling
towers will tell you.

Land of far too many clothes

History has always worked
day and night in invisible,underground
sweatshops to stitch up new clothes
for men,with a such a rare diligence
that there came to be too many clothes
and too few men.And even fewer Gods
and just one,sole piece of land.
The clothes have begun fighting
among themselves to dress up
the Gods and cover up lands they
cannot dress.For how can a piece
of land ever slip into a cloak like man
does?But clothes keep fighting nonetheless
and you can hear the blows loud and clear
as the pants kick and the sleeves throw
a punch .You know what a wizard
the tailor named History is.
So,undress at your doorstep
get naked and stay ,locked up
inside your houses while the clothes fight.
Do not step out or the clothes shall shoot
you at sight.

The Hostel

These thousand rooms are
leaves drooping from branches
twisting into one another,where
windows watch each other and one
wakes up to the knock at the door
of the other, the convenience
of flushing our differences down the
common toilets,letting our quirks lay
dormant during these dormitory years
the consumption of dogmas dished
out in the mess where a thousand mice
gnawed off a monstrous block of cheese
daily,
This panopticon though deserted still
contains in each of its cells a mind
leashed to a machine and when one
knows that this is the only life left
to live and love,it is only obvious
that these released convicts cherish
their jail years,prisoners as they
will always remain to some convention
or other.

When bombs sit down and talk

Little Hans followed his football
into the thicket to find a
sleeping bomb from that war
that war of our times,times
when we danced in the bar
to the music of the distant gunfire,
a music still lingering in my ears
as I see Little Hans dancing over
his discovery-this reclusive piece
of metal might just be the last surviving
member of a family which wiped out
millions(of lives)
And thus I tell little Hans
how every day we should be reminded
of the modesty of these unexploded
bombs,in the shadow of whose mercy
we live on.
But then I see his blue eyes full of
hope,and I fail to add
that there might come a time
when all those favourite alien archaeologists
of his,
who stop by our planet
will have only unexploded bombs
to excavate.

Inspiration

The Last Speaker's Last Words

The tongue-shaped tombstones
of the graveyard where my
my modern cousins wait to bury me
with honour and walk away ,
my tongue still trembling, trying
to free away from my dying body
and float in the air full as it is
now with the voice of my clan
I know this death shall silence
something more than me
but there is always the hope
that with my ears touching
the walls of my coffin I can
keep listening in to the music of
the rest of my dead kin talking.

Between the Corners of a Lost Room

Last time they barged in,I had been the
lizard that scurried out between those
big,nasty boots at the door and every
morning since the papers materialize
and unopened,unexplored they add silently
to the stack rising by the days in a corner
of my room where the news of the world
lies languishing ,the dark headlines of disaster
leaping out at me only to bump into the
mountain of books protecting my self
and even in the night they flutter restlessly
their pages grazing against the wall,nearly
waking me up,while I keep up with
my reading ,thinking of how the next time
they march in,searching for me,
I will have shrunk myself to the spaces
between the words I read ,I will feel their
hands rummaging my shelves and before
giving up,unwittingly riffling the book containing
me , then flinging it aside and shrugging their
shoulders before walking away,leaving me
as unread and lost as ever.

Invasion of the Cracks

Even as men in my country
fight to crack up maps,quakes in
Haiti are cracking apart lands,
so one rainy ,cold evening,on my
way home,when I caught a streak of
lightning crack up the skies ,I could
tell that the pieces of our existence
had resolved to rearrange,I wondered if the
faraway hiss of the snake could be heard?
-for if we didn't start running soon enough
the crack could crawl
right upto our feet.

The Telling of Secrets

You can call me the DarK

Overcoat and Sunglasses

known by what I wear if

people know me at all-but

that which I shall tell you now

I could only dress it up in a sound

,a garble,I have been unable to

afford a good word.

If you come close enough,

you will learn it,I promise I

will mumble into the abyss

that is your ear,tumbling down

it shall go and slide straight

in under the door of the innermost

chamber of your brain ,it

will grow like a cancer

in the body of your life

but it will pass undetected

like all their like should

and the sanctity of it all will

not be lost,never will I

tell you who I am,look at me

what am I other than my lips

moving and my teeth quivering

(a mysterious gurgle,like alien speak)

Now before I leave you to

tiptoe backwards and turn

abruptly to disappear around

the last corner,my eyes are

forewarning you how soon,

in your nightmares,you

will blurt it out,the gruesome

consequences of which shall

spill over onto your waking life

for everything you utter,

you cannot be sure whether

it leaked out of you

you will stop talking,thus,

and even if your eyes make

not much of a noise,you will avert

the stare of the everyday stranger

you will spend your days

pacing up and down your room

you will wish to be heard

you will stand on rooftops

and shout it all out,only to

scare a pair of crows away

you will want to be heard,

you will want to be revealed,

you will have become

the secret.

When the animals speak

While everyone around kept talking

of rumours of an indefinite staring match

between us,I wished I could tell you how

every word we hear is a rumour ,but I

did not,for I was doing all I could to save

this silence between us that held us together

didn't Hegel say that eyes are the window

to the soul,and thus if we stared long enough

at each other,our souls would have begun

to rise from our bodies and unite in bliss,

but then words spilled out of my mouth

, dropped on the floor and spread out

invasively and then the faucets in our

mouths turned on,the words flooded

the space between us,the level rising

till we were looking at each other

like fish look at the observer but it was

not long after that we found ourselves

swimming in this sea of lost voices.

Every city has a Godzilla

Waves rise in forgotten sewers

as I clamber upto the surface and

rise in the depth of the night gazing

around,measuring man's progress

I am the sum of the purged memory of a

million sins that you must execute daily

Ambling through this labyrinth of streets,

(seems Man is the mouse who knows well his maze)

ducking flyovers ,brushing past antennae

lashing my tail around,cautious not to have it

tangled in the power lines shooting secretly

through what I imagined to be empty space,

I finally seize my moment of mischief,I raised

my rear limb high and with a thump,planted it,

failing yet again to draw attention,leaned over,

an eye pressed to the window at the 93rd floor,

finding man and machine curiously conjoined and

I made a mental note to resolve this mystery of an

apparently new species on my land.Often on a deserted

road,I readied myself for a rightful roar,only to cough off

a gust of wind ,the sound of broken glass inducing guilt and

fear even in a monster like me ,one night thus,I coalesced

myself and seeped into the earth and for many ages hence I slept

tight below the soporific drone of the overhead traffic and

like how tall trees suck the soul of the dead to sprout up high

in graveyards I have been feeling the weight of skyscrapers

rising,Now I know If I lie asleep for too long,I shall find myself

irrevocably crucified,yet I feel trapped in the cage of a wild dream

or if your priests were to diagnose,possessed by an evil power and

should I wriggle and writhe to exorcise this ghost,the earth would

quake to wipe all out and who then will I terrorize when fired up

by destructive whims?(No,I am not a benign monster,like

King Kong-a ludicrous figment of your imagination)Not many

ages from now then,I will get to be God and have temples to my name

unless one of you gets to be the Hero who presses silly buttons

riddling me with missiles,now you know why I don't want to share the

secret of who had the rare turd mountain rooted to the roof of your Mercedes

or why some mornings the neon lamps seem crooked and unsteady and a

few windows of Liberty Tower shattered,nor will you imagine the paint

smeared across the billboards could have been animal piss.But I can tell

you for sure that this morning when the pot-bellied stockbroker misstepped

over a mouse darting across the pavement,it was me who squealed in pain