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

A research in love that wasn't published

On her last birthday

I gifted her atoms

I had trained to self-assemble

into molecules forming letters

of her tongue-twisting name

every time she had her

amazed gaze fixed at them.

As I watched her ,moved,

savouring a view of my love for her

I was relieved to see my sweetheart

and my equally sweet molecules

finally reaching out to each other

or atleast trying to.

But not long after she begged me

to enjoy the beauty in the

little things in life-

I asked her then to peer through

the eyepiece of my microscope

and as we settled down to

re-examine the universe

our cheeks touched and we smiled

in hope maybe now we would get to

see the world through the same pair of lenses.

But when I felt I made a discovery

I raised my head to find no one and

I was once more alone in my own epiphany.

When everything is backstage

Last month's blackout ,you knew

this darkness incubates change,

Howls rise in the moonless sky

we become the growling lions

of the concrete jungle we built

the wind sits in the empty chair

we can hear it turning blank pages

but maybe it is writing

Unshackled hands are groping

for old,battered candles and

we hope the limp wicks

will glow in passion soon

as strangers will mate

under blushing stars.

Rusty hinges creaking,revealing

lizards dropping,cockroaches ferreting

Things grow and spread limbs

and elope to nowhere

And even though we tiptoe

who knows when we run

into the anonymous enemy

before the curtains are up

and we witness the revolution.

A proud peg's prattle

And thus the round holes
are getting their hot,round pegs
day after day after day
I sit on my high shelf
square and unchiselled
steadied by my sharp edges
too proud of them,these edges
to lose them at the grinder now
rather I shall shuffle and sharpen
myself into a weapon .
and as everyone begins acting
in their favourite movies,
romance and charity
shall always
keep this vagabond busy.