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