In the evening there was some exquisite music
That flowed smoothly on a silk-soft winter breeze
With a burning torch ahead, duly abetted by oil.

It seems there is no single integral way
Of grappling with the world , in its nights
Of darkness hiding trees after their silent
Manouevres in a day of their making stuff
Plain green stuff in leaves of yellow light.

Another leaf is my own  fragmentariness.
I am a leaf to be removed from its winter.
Like this man severed from his leafy past
Now earth and water in the sea of a sky
Fragment of event that is not whole of life
A broken life, from a  winter of the past.

My reading is fragmentary , wholly digital.
My  grasp of the wholeness of a wired life 
Is  leaves from someone else's digital diary.
My verse is  leaves fallen of a winter of age.
This life is  fragmentary, a heap of images
Like many-hued splinters in a kaleidoscope.

We  talked of Kolkata's garbage boys 
Scavenging on India's poverty in  glory
Their cheeks gone pale with knowledge 
Amid Nobel prizes lost and not found,
Their brown sugar level intact in blood 
From cigarettes puffed  in silver rings.

In  checking up, a room of night grew on me
On phone from  hot windy plains, her dream
As a  woman of daughters beyond the ocean
Talked of holiday in emerald island together 
By a mother-daughter, a son in childish glee
Tipping over a balcony, in a mind's slowness
Hunger of mother, a dark anguish of mother
A heart attacking the dark night of  lone tree
In a mix-up of  time and space,  night of day.

A checking up is poetry of pursuit, a last training  
A sunshine at the hem of a garment in retirement
As the sun diagonally pursues a woman's  walk.
Checking up on a room of night grew on my sleep 
Seeking  a  confirmation of  continued existence,
Of each other's continued existence, my own life,
In its poetry of night and a box of light in the day.

On a morning of bedewed grass
A bare walk hardly leaves notes
Only  bird notes from park trees.
The grass cowers in wet silence,
But  raises its heads once a while
Its wetness tingling the underfoot
A painful thorn peeps sometimes 
From shadows hid in its self-respect. 

A noisy nose on the green bench
Dumps a breath of fresh dirty air
But takes much more of green air.
A  broken lawn-mower lies listless 
Throwing up its hands in despair
Powerless to cut its pride to size.

Winter-cold feet barely manage to squish 
In its bleary-eyed upper submissiveness 

Between us and our philosophy there is a stream
Of people, slow-moving  towards the blue horizon
With their  hands hurled into empty space in rhythm
Their brass cuff-links glistening in the morning sun.

Ten people in a picnic do not a man make 
Only a pagoda rising from the wet grass
On a summer evening, a fresh wet  spring
The beginning of summer, a winter's end,
As a  hose on the side gurgles grass water
On soft summer shadows,  wet shadows.

Between us three there is this he, a flat piece of jelly
That defeats us daily by the night, occupying our body,
As fears spread in the belly like a jelly, these silly fears. 

He that wore a body till recently is now an idea mainly
That spread from our sleeping body, between our sheets,
In dreams, mainly, to a sky that arched over our body.
Our light shadows coalesce with his absence of body
Entering our common dreams  in our separate sleeps.

( Three women are mother, wife and daughter of a dead man)

I have sealed this here fate as spurious
A name given to a poetry of non-feeling.
Its words come from the depths of marrow.
They are semantics, sounds semantically
Linked, in an under-sea of bones and  meat.

Nakedness  shall be in dreams, of a red meat
White bones, holes to the sky, wind and rain
Hissing through sooty eye-holes, a free jaw. 
Poems come from a missing lower mandible.

I take an armful of words to the lake, in my breath
As the sky seems still and is ranged over the trees
Sonically in whispers ,with a breeze ever so gentle
To the lake, smiling from enormous blue distances.
Time to catch the world by its words, in the softness
Of a silky evening, a passing thing of this very  time
Before it vanishes in a spoof of words, in a breeze.

I  return to spit freshly wet words into the wash-basin
And look up thimble ,quotidian,high sounding words
To catch the  world in acoustic grasp, its emptiness
Collected in porous canvas bags as a few sonic words
This way I try to catch the world  by its own words
By the very sonic words that have  made the world.