the colour harmony!!

  A middle aged female body, Returning home from work Walks like a balance, swaying between Polythene of vegetables and hard earned time. They come in different sizes and shapes, Tired, with disheveled hair and displaced sarees, checking the pace of their steps and the awaiting chores. The sight of that bundle of warmth, walking ahead, like penguins or the rhythms of the quack, brings unexpected tears. Your overflowing heart. Every home needs a middle aged woman, to show the marks of   love women carry on their bodies. Those that they sow, and Never reap.  

  Each day, each hour one lives Is a step towards nothingness, Not even memory in its most primitive form Comes along that night, When you choke your breath out as never again. The moving train and the vanishing green, One sleeps like an unsung rain Abandoned, like the shadows one leaves behind. You become the darkness outside your study, sounds of the night that scared the child in you. Or the snake trail on desert sand Like the rhythms of summer. A haunted tree, birdless and raining leaves. The white flowers, like stars in your courtyard. The loneliness of a one foot lane or the sway of the kaattaadi. But never again, Footmarks, walking home or A love, like Spring. The hues of your evenings, the agony of withdrawals or thoughts of it in some nether land    

  When people die, you travel to meet them for a last time. The road becomes a metaphor and the sky speaks of infinity. You realize the link between Time and travel, and fading distances You look up from your window seat And decode patterns of clouds in frantic collage.   Death is frozen like lifeless lips, Grey and separated, like distant lands. The disheveled curls and the wind On your face, take you to the backyards of yesteryears. Laughter, evenings, jasmines Smell of home, mother, incense The swing, the heights, your nights and the early hour designs.   A memory, now, refusing to smile Sleeps on the ground, Cross, like a child wanting toffee. A body, tied up in parts to check further flights of fancies. You join the race of withdrawal symptoms, and the assembly of crows.   The last wish remain, so do void As armchair and that spot in your living room.              

  Can you imagine the pain, the gripping face and the screeching cry of a one year old Burning alive?   What would have been the little mind frantically searching? His mother? Her hug? Or the fresh air from the fields? He would have died of exhaustion Trying to push the pain away from him Tired, he slept in peace with his little sister as life left them.   Now, he won’t know the meaning of his skin tone Or the creed, to which he belongs And he wont live to realize the betrayal of his own race. He is expelled for ever.   Cuckoos are born of such tiny souls, Who no more believe in a home, a land. They scatter like the first rain and Don’t stop to see their seeds sprout Among us, the vulgar of the species.   Next time you hear a cuckoo sing, close your eyes and listen to the cluttered rhythm of tiny steps fading.      

  My only wish is to hear, he is dead.   Dead, Like a log of wood in the rain. The decaying slip.   This won’t do justice enough to the many closures , many truths, and the many many-ies draped over me. Or may be not. Yet, for the fakeness that is, And the self-centered coldness The best denial should come from life Like a still born womb or An unburied body.  

Relations die a natural death when there is nothing in common to talk Words have abandoned me And smiles too. I stare on the walls and at my children. Sullen. On whom shall I stretch my arms? And breathe out the fatigue of the day And sit careless, facing the sea, counting birds flying west. For whom shall I rise, a full sky when the sun sets Every love is an urge for a new space, of fresh conversation. A female in love with a man is half drowned in incest. For she looks for that father she never had.

The beauty of life depends on how much you can let yourself free, from the colored glass cases. And leave others too, to the rain, to the open fields, like birds flocking high. See the earth in you Expand to hold the green See the rain on the mountains Shading hues of green on your chest Rivers, fresh tears gather polluted desire To become the unexpected swirls of the sea. Find a spot from where you can see the setting sky and the infinite city, like a distant mirage The red robe becomes your wings as you fly down. Not a kite looking for its food, but you are a seagull in search of its sea. The fall is not a metaphor, or of Icarus But the celebration of wind in your lungs, and the lightness of your fingers, across your heart.

  A word stood confused half way Like a lone traveler in a jungle looking for roads taken and not. It’s all about crossing languages, While crossing loves Kaalam in my language, has an infinite purpose Spreading beyond lands, ages and memories. The sea, the sky and silence. When it becomes time in your tongue, Don’t you think it gets too pointed like you? Shedding the fancies, infinities and that philosophical gaze of insanity? And again, minnaminni, Like the twinkle in a baby eye The throb of a new love And the beauty of the night in gold spots like constellations visiting, becomes glowworm in your tongue. Yes, just like that. As plain as you. Now try saying Pennu See how much it rhymes with mannu and vinnu , The organic female. Your tongue failed to find a word for her You say her spine sprout from your bones And limited her to a prefix. Man, she is not your woo, Not your tongue But, my language.        ...

The loves one desert With no remorse Roam the city As pockets of wind. On those nights You can’t sleep They come to you As reminders Of the devil in you. It’s much easier now To cope with your loss. Fresh and throbbing Like a fish Out of water. Don’t philosophize But laugh aloud Open your arms And embrace the rain Droplets are better lovers With no promises to stay!      

Be a Buddha, in love Take long walks With the shadows of the forest Spread your hands to know the width of your heart breathe out your desires let it gather to form the winter mist and later clouds like silver fields On those lone moments When the flesh pinch Like nails, drain your body. Let love, like sweat flow down your neck. Those evenings when you sense The sea in you, stay away From the moonlit sky Or be a whirlpool and swallow deep Your love. The storm that hit the moor, Love, breaks branches like    Crushing bones And you The dark, insane wilderness. Conjure your Buddha Uproot the Bodhi Hold it high Let the birds come back Like the wind returning late night Frozen and white in love.              

  Is there anything more unpredictable than a girl carrying a suicide note? On a page torn from her school note book, wet and scrabbled. You see alphabets dripping out, like droplets of blood From a fresh vein. It may be in her closed fist, Determined in that tight-lipped grip. Or in her empty tiffin, Which, she uses to collect stones. She walked out of Broken April Ready to avenge. The bullet that she is, or the glory of the blast Wont make her a saint. But when, finally she opens her palm Her life will flow out Like a wronged river. A laugh, like scattering beads, went astray. Will the mud walls or the red pines tell her Fairy tales on holy wars when she comes back As a lone butterfly?  

  Leave you on the shore And step in to the transparent chillness of the early sea. Anklets shall break off, Taking you along the swim and the swirl Of grey waters. Float like fresh flowers on a stream Swaying to the current. Ophelia is not a single woman But the curls that drift along To become weeds of wild green And a pale white face, floating on the pitch dark waters Like moon on a starless sky. Fishes are the re-incarnations of women drowned And mermaids their half-naked truths.        

    After Aylan Kurdi You know what red is What is to be faceless and What mornings can bring you.   Sea shore is no more a theatre Where you go watch the flames of the setting sky. But a menu card, That exhibit soft flesh Cold and frozen out of her womb For the stillborn us, building castles on the sandbank.   After Aylan Kurdi, Don’t speak of mother’s love, It will drown before dreams sprout wings. And fathers too slip In to a world of hollow pits.   Don’t speak of love, Of you and me and other kinds On Starry nights, Where dreams come true. Nights are for watch towers like owls, looking for prey and wind, like waves in your lungs.   After Aylan Kurdi, Exodus is not just about borders But, the fluidities of the borderless races Floating, In ships, boats and on their backs.   ...

My dissected history won’t speak for you. Don’t write on me or on the graffiti that sing of Marley. Your lyrics are your own, that build bricks of closures. Words are polygamous Like rain is to swirls on a pond But dear, My canvas carries yellow fields Like Van Gogh did To the hill top Where birds flew in fright.      

A woman is but the land beside the river Flowing into the original sins of the fluids. Her throat, the curve over the valley, a steaming volcano from the fresh wraths of a love, lost.   The cultivable land The axe The seeds The sprout. The summers of her man As a distant canvas. No lizards cross the wall Nor do snakes, on the road Only frozen pole stars, Waiting for the womb, The red earth beneath the grave of fireflies.      

If convictions framed histories How awkward would have the world looked like Bulging here and there like ginger hunchbacks   How fast the pathway vanishes in to the dark wood Leaving no trail of the distances covered.   Each call you make to your home From hill tops of brown and white Carry the stillness of the yet to be.   Who said life is not a bed of roses? Roses are vineyards And vineyards blackouts.

is like hemlock in your veins a city, turning blue. The slash of sea a betrayed vision of withdrawal at the horizon As the city crumbles, the flowers you bring won’t be enough, to wipe out the colours love had saved.

In every love There is a point in future when you learn to unlove The day you undo the probable Neruda in you And stare back at the road Withdrawn, like a festival ground Abandoned by the kite runners And bustling girls. But then, rivers don't happen Unless it rains. Over The bamboos, the honey bees and your face You need to flow, dash through the woods And jump over cities, before the pace recedes into the swirls of the deep. Darling dear, getup And kiss the skies Let the heavens come down To conspire against you Leave your mantle for her olive To end like a morning mist be the primordial fire Of her genesis.

It's not like sparrows leaving the country side Nor the bulbuls for another tree. But like fishes on fishing boats Or the antelope before the leopard race. You leave a last time. From home From work From love The legend says of eternal sleep But it's just a case of memory loss The indifference that creeps into a frozen valley. The faceless exodus of another race.