Come, tell me how you live.

The moment in the photograph 
Was decision or serendipity? 
The photographer is being photographed 
Exposing our naked vulnerability-

Of never being authentic;never being fake
Ah! memory at the age of perfect counterfeit.
creating auto awesome stories of your taste
The closed circuit cameras that keep asking  

Come ,tell me how you live?

Where you put your dentures as you sleep?

Whom do you miss when you wake up?

Where you vanish when the light recedes?

Jigsaw falling into place

Black swans swimming ,

the dark waters of 

innocence and frailty
As the photographs 

in frozen hardwares

begin to  betray memory.

Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think

The years have passed
Taking field notes of  the  hues of the day
The gait of the millipede, the smell  of burnt  hay
And the  occasional measuring of heart beats when she is around.

Thinking that you  are going home
Like  each of the faces on a passing train.
For them
You are  also a passing sight.

Preserving pain as if they were jewellery
In letting go you thought you were wise
But all hope inevitably fall in that precipice
You cannot step into the same river twice.



(The title is the name of an essay by David Foster Wallace )

It seems that I dont know a Thing

One day a lot of furnitures were  moved.
The house revealed some long lost treasures
Like a red ball from  childhood, a crumbled answer sheet of a failed exam etc
The afternoon sun came directly through the glass windows -now that the curtains were not in their places


One day she was married off
The night before we stayed awake
And decorated the courtyard with flowers and kite paper
In the uneven light of tungsten bulbs
The shadows were  dark and new
The floor was cold .. you could feel the sand beneath the feet

When they had returned from Honeymoon
They had brought green apples from the aeroplane
The photos they took in London showed a overcast day
He thought of a land where it always rains
And the water drips down the beautiful green apples


Then she turned up one year later
With a baby in her lap
And when she gave it a bath
The water turned hazy
As the baby splashed the water
It seemed like a photoshop glow effect in real life.

Then one day they cut down the guava tree
And built a new rcc house there
He thought nobody would use kerosene lamp anymore
In such a beautiful house
The petromax lamps were no more at the shop
Perhaps it was to do with the kerosene becoming blue.

Looking outside the window
He had a shiver as he thought of time
Everything is changing.

The abyss

If only you mattered to me more
If only tomorrow had the certainty
Of tomorrow only...
Why these repeated visions of an abyss
and my smallness?
Each sentence known or uttered
Never did justice
To what if feels like to see a freight train
Passing at midnight
Like makeshift houses
Each love was just a name
For the vacuum in my heart
An insatiable ambition
That always leaves me behind.

Stewisms

Oh, squiggly line in my eye fluid. 
I see you lurking there on the periphery of my vision.
 But when I try to look at you, you scurry away. Are you shy, squiggly line?
 Why only when I ignore you, do you return to the center of my eye?
 Oh, squiggly line, it's alright, you are forgiven.

We made you the store house of our guilt and shame
So we had to hide you
Each step towards the temple
was a departure from nature
what the water washed away had to accumulate somewhere

There was no denial on your face
Only we denied ourselves
What did we want then?
The father reaching out to us?
Oh the uncertainty!
The fruits of denial dispersing through posterity

Whichever Way You Come From

If everything had turned out alright
Would you have been here?
The small man hugging the giants
Will forever invite caricature.
"Oh to be true and feel the flow of the world
through oneself"
It was you
"There are mysteries best solved by a good night's sleep"
It was you
With a mouthful of charcoal and
Confusions that should  intrigue a writer-
You played both their roles
The writer and the character!

Nobody knew however
The weight of your ego
They had no model for a human ..perhaps too human
They had no model for a man who knew he was a man.

What remained was to eat drink and fart
And talk endlessly about false starts.
And whichever way you come from ...
Everybody can see that you are here
In this endless afternoon ..this humid tropical air.

And do you measure your dreams?
And have grown up  with no would have beens..
Do you know what red yellow and green mean?

Well  nice to meet you
Where do you live  now
Where have i been ?

I sell things that never were
But can you tell me what blue means?

Deeper Into The Night

The day marked by boundaries-
Edges of things and time.
Divided into discrete  ideas
That keep their distance
and wait  for goodbyes
after making love without contact
Till the night comes
Like a black chiffon sari
falling on top of another
Continuity like your body imagined
and the fragrance of invisible flowers
So close so close
you are ..the hidden stream the speech of birds
leading my trembling heart to a dream of dawn
The sun comes up
And you are gone.

Mountain Flower

Not These -
City lights or country mornings
Friends or enemies- so well organised
No,  these cannot be the truth
That I want.

Truth was like the mist fallen
On a distant mountain flower
Truth was like the delicate poem I am yet to write
Truth was that distant glory
Your bare desolate hand
Resting on the balcony.

But truth it seems-always  evades
A human story
The essence of the mountain flower
Evanescent and so solitary.




(Your bare desolate hand
Resting on the balcony....Jibanananda Das's Nogno Nirjan Hat)

POEMS

After courage shall come  fear
After fear shall come nausea
The rain  is primary & primitive
Like the
The man who forgot time and space
Like a momentary bell on a temple
And a lamp and its warmth
But between infinities
Exactitude
Achilles never overcomes the tortoise
And nothing ever happens

Outside the world of snakes and reptiles
Feed on eachother
Copulate passionately
Only granting you permissions
To leap from one paradigm to the other

The Poem Of Boundaries

You sank into the sea
While I kept looking at the line
Where the land meets the sea -
Separating one  from the other.
The morning breeze diverted my gaze
Then there was air.

I drew the boundaries
I arranged them in hierarchies
Till the water rushed up the land
And erased all my maps

The mermaids  and fishes invaded the land
Giving new definitions of beauty
I hide with my old maps and ego
Thinking whats wrong with me?

Trading Grace

Since our lives are not our own
Then you can hope of salvation
By someone else's devotion
In return for all the kindness
All you could give was ask again for forgiveness
Look at
Cowardice merging into love and then to tyranny
When you take shelter in
The ignorant's prayers
And then you demand it.

Who will understand these age old weeping?
Warped by space and time
Trying to accommodate  infinity in infinitesimal life.

In praise of Muersault

To  bear the burden of your sins
Without God
Without love
Without a friend
Without family
In  a path that leads to nothing.

Is this how the test is?
and who has set it?

Abar sei gan

Jokhon mone hoy sobai bari phire geche
Nijeder itihaas niyei sobai besto
Ekhankar hazarta doler majkhane
Dariye tui bolte cheyechili
Oke
Ay dekh
Kemon kore prithibita purche
Jar mane  chilo
Tor kothao jawar nei
Ja ichche koreo ber kora jaini
Mukh diye
Tai sekhanei dariye roili
Ora jokhon bolto janla diye
"Oi baje cheleta..oi pagolta"
tui chure marti
"todaer sobhyota meki"



Tai aro kothin
pothe chute jete hoy
Jodi sondhay
mone hoy foothpathtai bari
mone rakhte hoy
chute jete hobe
aro kothin pothe
aro kothin pothe

Writing Your Story

You find yourself there
It just  happens to you
You cant help falling  in love
You wonder at the slant sunbeams
Each morning you wake up.

Writing your story
You are walking with me
Thinking
These things happen to you
Like they happen to me.

Hide beneath my good words
You happen to love these words
They ring so true
That's when I envy you

To decide what to  feel
To decide what to see
Do you know you are free?

The Man who

1.As the days pass

You  who searched for dawn
 at the deepest corners of the night
You who looked for  peace
At breakneck speeds
Did you even have a name for your dreams?

The walls emerge at the boundary of each word
And ancient debates that you dint take
Only you have seen the days racing into the night
The tip of the tide never knowing itself
before receding into the sea
But pays repeated pilgrimages to memory
As each story turns to a anecdote
Do you ask yourself
In being wise how much did you loose?


2. Each Day

Each day a want is converted to a need
And a pile of guilt is shoved to the background
Each day we make a new wall
And hide beneath it
Our own dull heaven

Each day we long for childhood
In love's eyes
But how much will it takes to play this game?
How much will will it demand
To convert this love to a need
From a want?

3.Mirrors

He passed by the market
And placed a mirror in front of the coffee house
He went to the bar and
placed a mirror there
We fell in love with her
and placed a mirror in her face
He failed the test and
placed a mirror in his house

So everywhere he goes
He meets his own gaze
And they keep saying to him
"There will be no goodbyes here
Each inch traveled will cost you pretty dear"

Summer Overflowing

The autumn of the summer day
The earth has had its fill of the sun
Colors tend to spill
out of the of the dimensions of things
The yellow turns to a stale amber
In aneurysmatic waves
Come memories
Of auburn days in the country
Of medieval bazaars
Of  enterprise ,of community.

Inherent Vice

I shall  meet you in a bridge
At the edges of the wolf kingdom
With a promise to shed all skins
I see you standing with a bowl of sugar
You the unknown sugar seller
My concealed strategies
Your terrestrial vice
Our war of confused identities
Where to hide?
Cause the wolves are all around
Cause the wolves are howling in hunger
But you keep feeding me sugar
Where do I hide you?
To have more of you
More than these wolf laws can give
But look ...even less
Even less than what you need.

I have Got It

Lord there is so much beauty
And I am not worthy
That I still get pensive
Fearing that I should loose it
Fearing that I cant contain within
The smell of fallen leaves
Moist with the first rains after winter.

Fearing even more that I may end up calling it home
With sweetness that I cant bear
Wishing again to turn back and say
"Look what I found"
But there is no one there

There is always no one there.