Gray Poetry

I don not want to go home

I don't want to belong

I don't need to be rooted

I don't like to own.

I wish to go there

where there's no plumbing or fixing the bulb

I need not worry about the peeling off

It's not mine.

I can let the vine tree grow and 

creep out from the crevices

I need not cement it up

The gray painted walls will not echo any familiar story

The ceiling can't tempt for death 

The mysterious cobweb below the staircase 

can stay with the bluish spider 

The pale ugly square mark on the wall

of that old painting may keep murmuring old history

I can keep making love signs with my finger

on the dust layer of the writing table

Nothing needs to be familiar

No one needs be known

I don't want to go home

I don't want to belong.

There's an uncanny freedom, a 'Mukti' 

in 

uprootedness

in

being unsettled.

Green poetry

A few years ago I became a tree.
I suckled mother Earth
my roots growing firm and strong
spreading
nourishing
I grew into branches, my hands became leaves
dancing in freedom
blooming
reaching up to the sky.
The cloud peeped into my brown eyes
And fell in love.

  Since yesterday
the soil is loosening around my roots.
The vine that clasped my waist
has fungus.
It’s spreading on to me.
The silence of the soil is bone chilling.
They said, trees have lives, but
No one could hear me when I shouted!
Those conifers or the moss on the wall
No one heard!

 Maybe, if I close my eyes and count till ten
It will all prove to be a bad dream.

Just hoping, you know…

Aayush

Birds are no longer in harmony
in my sky.
Of course the morning is nice; yet
of course the morning is without sunlight.
I wait
with eyes pinned to the mobile screen
with waiting.
The warm wrap of your hand around my shoulder,
your thoughts in my shadow,
your eyes hatched wings beat on my breasts.
I think of you in a most direct way.
There is an urge to be your daughter in the next birth.
To depend on your warmth.

the tree had stored my words for ages
the sound of my words were lost in those green borders

today I could hear them clearly
those words
whom I lost
those words
they are back
I could hear them clearly

they are all around me like fallen orange leaves

now the trees are lonely
without my words
they are murmuring black stories

collecting my words
I shall escape from the garden
your roots have settled in deep
you can't follow me anymore...

I don't remember since when or why I have stopped coming here! Is it because I stopped being sad? Have I eventually learnt to be happy? 

And, the fact that I am here again, is making me wonder! 

Sadness is coming back. 

Sadness is a white hibiscus growing on my roof. It lures me to colour outside the boundaries. It makes me pour gray smudges all over the sketches. 

The letters I write to you, turn me into a new ghost. 

I make you my new lie.

A longing to smell like the warm rain, all over again ... 

Shared nook

As I cross forty

 I stealthily grow into my mother’s body.

I wear her saree, her grey hair,

her osteo-arthritic knee.

We have supported different political parties,

lusted for different types of men,

I the mellowed one, 

whose softness she often rebukes,

she the sterner stuff, a stronger one

who wipes away tear drops in secret.

Her Ramakrishna and my Buddha 

nestled together among our cup of coffees.

I share her dreams, blood group and

those ugly patches of varicose vein.

Her rebel mind to exist 

without her husband’s last name

percolated in my extra marital relation,

my horoscope of uncombed desires

her insomnia...There’s much more that connect us.

 she will never need me as I need her.

And this unequal sharing 

indeed is Comforting!

The funny shape ...

These trees have an aura of innocence in them;

they are like the pregnancy between 

the earth and the heaven,

standing tall and silent

in anticipation

promising birth.

We played around those trees,

my childhood friend and I;

innocent giggles resonated along the slight breeze

and then our tiny hands firm and strong 

around the shovel

we lifted it high and brought it down firm

on the tiny blue head of a snake

that had slithered out of a nearby hole.

The dull thud sound resonated as well.

Its head, smashed and artistically pasted midst the tree roots,

made a funny shape.

We giggled even more.