A bazaar of loneliness

A  bazaar of loneliness


1
the mother tongue of the poet is
living alone

alone like the woods
of a distant village on a night
when the rain doesn’t stop

alone like a monastery
on the mountains

the  mother tongue of the poet is
living alone

living alone like the woods
absorbing the loneliness
of  a dead metropolis

2
what kind of poet are you
if your poems are not on Facebook?
ain’t you a naked shaman
for the ghosts of the virtual world
on which books are the faces found?



3
i have mastered the art
the act of vision
Every time I look at earth
when my eyes are blurred with tears
i see
a river and the bodies crumbling to ashes, an age-old tree, jungles of concrete
and a lunatic woman running on the streets

4
every Friday i go out with them
in the evening
Nandan, Star Theatre -in the engulfing darkness of worlds
i watch Rashomon, Pather Panchali
the monsters unnerve the darkness
Durga embraces the dark -tears soak me
Hands clap with one another
two hands, two hearts

5
in the morning
there is no friend of mine
they have flown away
i am the tortoise who
corners itself  in the zoo
i am not dying
ages have passed

6
we buy perfumes, sophisticated and rich
we are becoming bottled perfumes
did you hear me?
look around, the glasses stare at you
snaking around their hands wrapped in smell
around your limbs
are you a bottled perfume
stinking sophistication?
silence stares at you,at them
in the temple of Matryoshka Doll
offer those limbs of yours
to the blizzards of Himalayas

7
not a flea-market or a bazaar
in the shopping mall one day
I see
a cold wave spreading over my face
a staircase moving down
a solitary noon
and a couple moving down
quarreling, moving down
“I know about your affair with her”
a resounding smack across his face
the sounds rippling through the mall
through the cold waves
ripping worlds
the boy thunderstruck moves down
dauntless, indifferent the girl moves down
I see them both moving down, descending
spiraling
the dark abyss is not far

 8
“the bird’s mother tongue is staring”
have you seen this bird?
it only perches on the poet’s shoulder
silent, without noise
the bird’s eye stares with a silence of ages

9
Buddha says
“ during the meditative hours in the woods
if i saw a woodcutter or a hunter i would run
run  away
so i could not see him, he could not see me”
this is where worship realizes pain

10
a poem, impregnable
an aura of enlightenment  like the mystic
naked, lucid satisfaction
a worship of nature
a worship of humans
enveloping the havoc wreck of the heart
for the creation of a loneliness
satisfying as a mystic’s

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