Saadhu

The devotees sat glim eyed and awashed in the flow of his intellect.His smile bore the grace of a bright winter sky yet the power of a mountain falling over to the wind.There were thousands who ascended the mountains with their wives and children to catch a glimpse of the sadhu every day .It was believed that the Sadhu was one of nature.His body merely canvassed what was believed was a unison of the elements of nature and the energy stored within him.On a clear sky he seemed to have a plastered smile garnishing his face and on a cloudy day his eyes would leak water.During the winter as leaves would fall so would all the hair on his body.In summers when the valleys would run dry his ribs would jut out like a cage being pushed through a wall of clay and his eyes would remain red for months.




He considered it not as an affliction but a gift.He felt pain but he felt pure too.That,he claimed was a small price to pay to be one of nature's own children and to be under the hands of god himself.He seldom talked to anyone but still thousands would come from far and away to witness this conspicuous man and the many variations of his inborn diction that they would lay bare at the best of their personal judgments.It was the greatest thrill of all.The nakedness of someone else's body was as artistic as people were willing to get with their imaginations.Many thought of him as a God and many cried fould to his antics and declared it theatrical for the simple minded.Medical journalists crowned him as alien and a possible medical phenomenon wheareas the law makers of the valley declared him a fraud and a baffoon for trying such tricks and the impotence of them to affect anyone else but him.


On a grey winter day an army of tall,heavily built men in brown overcoats and huge assemblies of machinery moved into the valley.It was declared that the hills bordering the underbelly of the territory on the other side had to be paved clear for a trade route to be layed which would serve as a transport route between the territories.People were dazed at how such a feat would be accomplished in what the men claimed would take just a couple of days.Rumours spread all over that there were to be orchestrated an explosion,a celestially inhuman feat,a blast of proportions that would swallow the hills and reduce them to dust in a matter of moments.Awe struck by the idea the people demanded to be audience for a show that promised such grandness.



So it came to be.The people of the valley lined up like goats against the blades of the Ganga near the foot of the hills about to be brought down to their own.On the other side of the valley the mountain now deserted and abreast its flat summit inside his hut the sadhu sat staring at the thatched roof muttering to himself "May man's will be blessed by another's".



The Liutenant of the army raised his hand signalling the advent of something majestic.The levers were pushed,the wires ignited and with a thunderous explosion all that remained of the hills and the sadhu were mere dust.He vanished as if eaten by the earth or scalloped by the sky into figments of air.The people of the valley stood stunned,gaping at the blue sky that slowly began to emerge from behind the clouds of dust.Back at the Sadhu's hut a couple of devotees found the place devoid of any human presence which sent them running down to the valley screaming "He ran away,He ran away".The valley exuded with rapturous applause as the men of the army took their bows.

The Good Samaritan's eye

They hid behind the trees
we thought we would leave standing
in our streets,
Watched us spend our days
digging into the ground to get into space
and the nights,wandering lost in it
We walked around barely ever smiling,
Our tragedies so slow we grew old knowing them
We made love and washed off
our tortured sensibilities in it
We lost love and rubbed shoulders
with the executioners..
On the road going up the hill
we were the white horse questioning his faith
On the road going down
we never thought twice,and ran
like they ran away from us

Sleeping in the sock

Uneven steps have left me holes to fill
with light that will only peek into from above,
it is warm all around but the darkness breaks it asunder
into a biting envelope that has cold muscle on all sides
It is like sharing a dog's hunger for a piece of meat,
the assurance is calming and the fight coming
Every now and then i find myself sinking through the hole,in still water
and there in that separation of the clod and my last beating sinew
i wish for the heaven's to be aflame
and down,by the places they were raised
as i surrender my eyes and breathe into this final temptation

In vacuum,and still

The world,now has silicon galaxies
hidden under their desks,
The drugs have become too slow
and the guns too quick to run away from
No longer can you walk into a room
and look into someone's heart,
They list you bit by bit
like dissecting you alive ,
Everyone gets numbers,you get a number
a code you wish to write down but never have,
Their screens blink and billboards are the only memory
they take home,to feed their children
Children who are stuck at one end of a clipboard
with nothing being written upon,
their brains tossed into a meaty bowl
of confetti some might find themselves fall under,
They would ask their mother,eventually
if sex was generally dangerous,
there was talk at school,at tutoring class
and even in cartoons that suddenly had breasts and penises
pixelated to neat indexes that confused their heads
but aroused their otherwise weak senses,
The mother would blush,look at her husband
who by now would have heard none of it,never will
his obesity sunk into a chair
and his shoes still hanging by the toes,
"I wonder why...I wonder why"
she would whisper to herself..

9 pm

I see teenage girls run to the curb
in transparent shirts,
A man slowly crosses the road
fending off the burning lights
struggling to breathe in their heat,
Our tongues dry,maybe the throat too
There are unformed breasts waiting to jump out
and there are confrontations we avoid
As slippery as the tongue might be
No word is smooth enough to be true
when whispered to a man who knows his way,
It is 9 o clock in the evening and
most people know where they are going..

Lonesome traveler..for jack kerouac

I have no consolations to offer,
To far away places i do not come
to lubricate your life,
missing from the last winter i was here
and the day you no longer will be

You sit there with a questioning face
staring at my shoes,
with years of clay and colors of earth
pouring out,
And their age showing on your face

Man in the brown jacket

There are razor blades in his pockets,i'm sure
For he needs to shave the brightness off
of the circular glow
above the lamposts at night,
It has been years and that jacket has not had
enough pockets to shed
as the man has had years climbing his spine
There are ways in which i miscalculate
his presence in my life,and then there are the ways
he lives by

It is discomforting to walk around in the evening
without him flanking the alleys
with that brown ghost like visage

just as it would be, to have
gravestones with no bodies to put under them,
but that is just another miscalculation