Dreamy petal cocoon, stretching on the sepal. I wish you wake… Through your petal nest, into which you have veiled your pollen chest! Shine! Onto the sky of the earth, Put on the Cirrus gown. Enchant the night gazers heart. Ease your anxious frown! Don’t you remember, Once you lulled the Lotos-Eaters’ eyes? Relieved the war crushed brain of Odysseus! When he pulled his train To your island of perpetual afternoon? You are the oleander, over the cloud and the sea! Captivated the seers eye! I can keep looking at you! Forever can be a while… Spring atop you floret moon… Bloom away you intrepid lune!
Moon Bloomed
The July moon, shining full! Mystic dark, dimming light, Smiles the lantern of night… At the lotus plume! But now with your flourished crest, I see you drowsing death… Feathers falling away! Your hour bell tolls! Day is coming up, You will wane and depart! But You will come again I know, As another moon bud! I’ll see your regal bloom! With my whole heart! You will surpass my life time… Only with your half-a-day! We bloom together and wane… In the same nature-continuum.
The evening is leaning. Flux of time. It’s five thirty one. The ever-winding continuum. It certainly imparts something, My evaporating existence. An effervescence. Waning it is. But I don’t want to disappear. I just want to write something. I want to write what I bear. My sufferance and dripping tears. That what inflicts pain and happiness. I want to relieve my soul, My psychic womb from its natal pain And give birth to something new.
The evening’s serene, behold the flora, There’s a plantation behind that, A society and its cultural notions. I want to pen those notions, ‘Cause I want to write something. I want to write down those skies, rivers And those evening chandeliers, The customs that the society rears; The trees, their branches and the leaves, Those twigs and the saplings, They all have their stories to tell There’s something beyond their being! I can perceive their tales. I want to learn something from them. I want to write what I have learnt. I want to write something else…
PostScript: This poetry is inspired by Superintendent of Police, Vinay Tiwari, IPS, his poetic thoughts, “मैं कुछ लिखना चाहता हूं” (“Mein Kuch Likhna Chahta Hoon”: Hindi for ‘I want to write something’). My gratitude to him.
Eternal repose of shrouded corpse Never encumbers, Once the string’s cut by Atropose… Each of the countless peregrines Travels through traverses Since the journey begins. Like in every level It revamps or repels, The journey has no end. The apparent end Makes it blend Where it all started. And.. Starts again… From dust to dust of the urn Even chaos follows it’s given paten!
The pattern, That’s beyond apprehension, It moves forward, Seen through retrospection. It’s woven, Preempted or improvised Supersedes knowledge Emptied or sufficed. Vastly misconstrued! Lost or regained It aims to forge into Quite different From where it all started! Chaos to cosmos you turn It’s there in the Creation!
It was the time of pestilence, it was the time of vaccination, it was an era of digital awareness, it was an era of practical negligence, it was the age of scientific advancement, it was the age of global retrogression, it was a test of patience, there were unrest and impatience. It was the season of cooperation, it was the season of distancing, it was a phase of exposition, it was a phase of masking. It was the period of lockdown, it was the period of migration. It was a moment of mobility, it was a moment of immobility. It was a state of self-quarantine, arousal of sub-sunken realizations. It was a matter of time, persistence and observations amid the farrago of pandemic. It was a tale of two years, only they were not just tales.
Society expects conformity. And too much conformity engulfs one’s individuality. Being too good or too bad gives you identity or else you are ‘lost in space’, I mean into the abys of existence, perhaps.
‘You showed individuality’ said she to Princess Margaret, ‘and that made people panic. They don’t want individuality. The last person who showed “character” took almost the ship down.’(The Crown)
Hence it appears that conformity and individualism do not go hand in hand, but can’t they be allied? Where individuality and identity share their light, conformity is a gigantic shadow. Their coexistence could be a haze, a chaos but that’s what runs in the universe. Each planet, per se, is followed by its given trajectory, implies its conformity to its governing star having perfectly balanced individuality or rather say identity. So do the other unnumbered celestial entities, one goes supernova and slurped by a black hole. There comes the subtlest dots of existence, the humanity has its questionable outlook for the preservation of traditions, meaningless deference, rigid practices and crores of self-made labels to follow and unfollow. The matter of fact is that the extremities collide where cohabitation sustains harmony. But is it that easy? You may say collision is the one that creates, equilibria stands still. That’s why it’s a mosaic, an admixture of each a thing altogether.
‘Out of reach of the noisy world—some quaint-perched eyrie on the cliff of Time, from whence the surging waves of the nineteenth century would sound far-off and faint’
I don’t understand that when things go smooth, success is assured, time moves relatively fast or it seems fast because it is over?
Now time is stale, or is it? The progression of life is slow, or is it? It actually is my career which is steering slow or may be I’m on the making. Questions, perplexities are having their busiest time with me. Procrastination has always been there. I would often question myself about my choices, become dubious about the decisions I have made earlier and blame myself for it could be better but I am wavering in the fringes where I am not sure whether to stick around or take a plunge. May be I did not even understand myself or recognize what I actually want. Thus the dart is still levitating before the red spot. Am I beating around the bush or standing by the right track? I know it is meaningless to analyze one’s own position and philosophizing it rather than making any attempt to improve it. But mind takes up the hallway leading toward compartments of possibilities.
Everything is possible in imagination, semi-possible in a reverie and dream would be the weird mixture of the two.
There, sometimes I am teaching a bunch of students in a college. The college would probably be made up of those walls and facades planted somewhere in my residual memory, a miscellany of the intitutions I have come across. I am confused. The faces of the students seem pleasant. The reverie, then, would take me to an unknown ground that might have been emanated from some places I’d read about or my thoughts have culminated such a rare construction! Well so I am a trainee there, I suppose. This is ridiculous! I would rehearse those things that would ever happen. I would have bouts of conversations with those whom I wanted to meet. Some seemed as expected, some not.
I am no oneiromancer!
Yes, you may say that I am in a tug of war where career options are heavy, hence these reveries. The Covid period is working like a blackhole, near which time is getting dilated. But I am waiting. I am clueless. Wish I could reinstate the harmony, I’d move forward with it! Whatsoever, that trance gets passed I’m still in the place where I was, still struggling with plethora of complex feelings, lying in that juncture where the exit of this labyrinth might be just some steps away but I am unaware of the algorithm…
Original could be faked, Uniqueness can not. Real becomes unreal, Fact does not. Lies parade the hall of fame, Truth takes her walk of shame. Power hoists Its rigorous chest. Time turns malleable, Conscience behests. Inanimate witnesses Numb and still Woes its deprivation When life springs Those who can speak, The living beings. Be it fear or greed, Cloisters this breed. They tether their tongue. Reasons meander, Let silence be sung.
Human mind is inquisitive. But who said that minds of other species are not? Do organisms have mind(s)? Is it feminine to express emotion? Is tolerance masculine then? Why then masculinity has to make treatise with dominance? Why femininity is odd when it admixes masculinity or the vise versa? Zillions of such elementary questions had been broiled in old skulls or have been broiling up in that of newbies. Not picking that hive ad nauseam. But isn’t the basic problem sprung in the process of generalization(or overgeneralization, so to speak)? Why something has to be only that thing? Why something can not be anything? Who demarcates all these? (Oh! That question is also one of those primevals! Many a time knocked.) Is every human mind inquisitive? Has anyone penetrated the mind of an other? Who shows to be inquisitive is s/he indeed inquisitive? Gender roles are already under scanner, it has been perpetually. Why denigrate? Is the human race a hive of nimrods? No, of course not, if they were, why would they rerun the big bang? Why would they deplete the primordial resources and brood over its replenishment? Why would they skulk behind war machines, hoard them and sing slogans of global peace? It is individual. Hold back the clusters and classifications. Ideologies, ethnicities, religions, genders, races et al are there but above all it is a single reaction that incites a chain of it. One entity holds caskets of ideals and perceptions. Like a genome it technically has no match of a cent percent with another. Each of us is unique, individual. Classifications are manipulated manifestations. Chaos and imperfections form the core of creation even which holds its (manipulative) name called, cosmos. Nomenclature leaves loose ends to its conception(s).
All are foolish questions before the concrete. ‘quem quaerere?‘ Or whom do you seek(to give answers)? No, this is not a complaint.
The perception of reality appears to be concrete. But the actual reality is in ‘disappearence’. It is like the residual self image at its vanishing point, one can see but can hardly etch its real form. Eyes can barely catch the process but see the outcome. It is a causal nexus, or an enigma. Reality separates dream from itself but the irony is that both of them are amorphus. Reality hovers, but one can feel its presence in every breath. It reinforces or it purges. Before the ultimate exaltation it may rip apart into lees of sheer possibilities. Dream, on the other hand is a simulation of reality. It surrenders only one time when it renders and it never happens because it never happened. The seer is perplexed enough with her/his exit from the simulated reality and entrance to the enigmatic reality. The truth grins wide…
Words, Meaning and the Nothing 