WITH YOU...

The rhetoric of life
Emanating out of vacuum
Rings in my ears.
The emptiness pains me.
How did I live till now,
I wonder.

With you, I learnt to think.
You shattered the spineless rhetoric,
Incenced the nascent light
Glowing within me.
Now the real truth bekons
And glory is not far.
With you I am and will be.

Yet serpentine thoughts of guilt creep in
And the light flickers.
Where is the place for guilt
In a thought so pure?
The rhetoric has to be
Vanquished yet.
The nascent light
Has to be sheltered still.

THE QUEST

The darkness envelopes me,
Overpowers me,
I think I'm going blind.
Dark shapes pass by
They grow darker still.
I feel my vision slipping away.
The stench of darkness
Is thrust painfully into me.
The pervasive cold
Chills my bones.
I soldier on...

Dont call me purposeless
Remember the devine cause.
Dont call me blasphemous
Your rules arent mine.
The purpose lurks elusively
With it, I can find my vision.
The dark shapes will wither
In context of my consciousness.

I see the light.
Not a star, its a flame
Burning away the darkness.
Not fragrant
But sucks up the stench.
Not beautiful
But purifies the sense.
Not harmful
But extinguishes the darkness
In its wake.

I was never blind
The darkness deluded me.
I was never lost
The roads confused me.
I was never purposeless
The quest the purpose.
I never expected to finish
'Cause quests never end.
They only begin
Again and again.

Beautiful Life

Love spills over,
And the fragrance awakens
Lost dreams and old memories,
New hopes and bright roads.
Laughter resounds and music plays,
The brightest star twinkles,
Fears submerge in the vastness of a smile.

Could I but hold this moment,
Preserve it forever...

Life's beauty rains over me,
I see it in a moment,
The beauty that waits to be seen
Past a million such moments,
Past a million sad thoughts.

All that can fade away
Reemerge like a waxing crescent
Cyclically, a million times.
But life's beauty
Is in this moment.

WALKING DOWN THAT STREET

I walk down the street
Kicking stones and hurting myself
Ramming into visionary beings.
The pain stings
And makes me conscious of reality.
This walk was never meant to be
I tell myself.
Like some words were never meant
To be said.
That’s the brilliance of hindsight
You can tell yourself many things
You can scream till you’re hoarse.
But the past cannot be undone.
Then why should one walk
Down that street?
Maybe the street is a retributive mechanism,
Maybe its mere penitence.
Maybe its for blinding pain.
Maybe, just maybe, it’s a lesson.

COLOUR

It’s a new day.
Begins with a little ray,
As the small yellow eyes
Of the sun blink open.

The morning light
Bathes the world beauteous white;

Sweet shower of rains
Slaps the earth, it pains,
Turns dirty brown and drains
Away.

Clouds gather, thunder-
The earth is dark as murder.

But the sun peeps in
And halos the sacred dance-
Yellow, white and dark skinned,
The dancers form a conglomeration
And merge into the rainbow
That be globlisation.

A new day indeed.

WE THE OTHER PEOPLE

[Displaced tribes in the valley of Narmada due to the construction ff the Hirakud dam.]
A moment that wrinkled history,
A moment that unwound time,
And made it stop.
The moment that caught us too happy…

Centuries of existence made us love,
The land, the plants, the animals,
The river which had recorded our silted history,
The tongue which we spoke in nature’s voice,
The culture that defined us and made us whole,
The moment that was to fossilize our lives
And bury them under the currents of development.

The moment stretched to new places,
To an unfriendly world,
To a relearning of life,
To tin huts and floods,
To poverty and destitution,
While the wooden memories, the remains of our homes
Grew sodden in the floods like ghosts.

The moment shall pass, they assured us.
We will learn, they told us.
The warped moment would plummet our country
Into a new era of modernity.
We afterall, are the other people
Meant to be lost in the tectonic wrinkle
Before the shift to greater things.
Akshaya Kamalnath.

WINDOW PANES

Through the window panes of life,
The darkness resounds
And the silence abounds.
The mist thickens, whitens......
New places arrive,
New people connive,
i look for familiar faces
But the panes get clouded.......

I pine for the past,
Itch to break open the pane
How long will I last
In the suffocating present?
Newness ought to be more pleasent...
I try to wipe the panes clean
But where is the old sheen?
Lacklusture abstractions threaten
To take over,
I struggle for one last peek.
But the panes get clouded.

Any thing round the corner can stir up memories, you know that? This one's a very old one. Retrieved it from a musty crevice of my thoughts. It concerns the kids, I think. The one's who had to slide down the hills because they were always in a hurry. They wore frocks, you know that. Plain ones though so they would'nt have to worry about the lace. Their irritant ways finally got to the slimy Nakz . So this memory has stirred another and impelled another charactar into the foray, you realise? Nakz, of course, never confessed to witnessing the death of little Rum. Why should he? The kids had broken the statue of Tycho Brahe he worshipped. Science truly has no laws. If Rum died for an experiment it would have been noble. But she died for pleasure. This is not noble its pleasurable. But this thought refuses to awaken memories of the shrieks and cries, of stories that the hills were now haunted. Some memories just fade away. They're not important enough. Like those of Nakz being hanged like a criminal. The important one's stay on. Like those of Nakz's insolece at having called the death a pleasure as it was summoned for pleasure - simple laws of logic that cannot be tampered with.
Ah, was it the straight logic of time that triggered the first memory? The one round the corner?

REALITY

Beyond the horizon, far away,
Eyes screwed up against the harsh ray.
I stare with the hope of sighting
Reality in its glowing, shining
Attire.
I know its there somewhere
Languishing in destitution.

Ah, me! Reality is all I ask-
Stark, cruel, blatent, anything
But please, discard the mask.
The sea of faces around
Means nothing,
Masked with the same mask, they abound
Like maggots upon dead flesh, they infect
The world.

Every sunset, I search
With the naïve belief that it must lurk
Somewhere beyond the horizon-
The reality that must not reek
Of this world’s fallacies.

Then I see it,
Just after sunset, one clear ray
That must stay
To show me reality,
That which I must make.
Quick, and before day break.

THE VOICES IN THE WIND

The voices in the wind
Grow louder,
Whistle past,
Circle you,
Encompass you,
Until they seem like
Voices in your own head.

They whisper at first,
Grow stronger and speak up,
And before you know it,
They’re shouting at you,
Ruling you.

Its time to awaken
And wash the noise away.
Herculean effort for those
Grown accustomed to
Playing by the rules.
Once cleansed,
The arena clears
And the game brightens.
Every move, an idea of yours
Every fall, a consequence of it
But the goal scored smells of you
Fragrance of your sweat
Shimmer of your thought.

The voices in the wind
rustle past – you’re unscathed.
Ah me, this is a real game.

Conception

Vacuum is an illusory concept. One thing gives rise to the other in perfect cyclic collusion. This realization dawned on me one sulty evening while I was trying to injest physics with the sole object of retrieving it at a later date when I had to prove my knowledge to an examiner. This is reality. Of course, writers try their best to escape it by fictionalising. But real fiction is a realm of vacuum.....ah, an illusory concept. Every fictional work steals from reality. Every writer is a kleptomaniac. We merely hide behind the armour of creativity.
The reason this blog was concieved at all was to give the teeming masses of the literate race, a chance to gaze at the chinks in that ornamented armour. These are not the glory days. Besideds glory in itself is subjective. People of my ilk glorify the chinks.