Creative Images

Rain in the morning

Dawn was three hours away and rain.
The birds sensed it all night along the way
From the tree of big leaves and fell silent
Sleep was transience reminder, symbols,
I and the birds slept little, a few bird winks
Interspersed with dreams and fears in sleep-
In fat shirts and funny, transience reminders-
Earthen pots of bones, that left a belly pain;
Beauty tokens emerged in luminous leaves,
Some praises of beauty, some let-me-downs.
The rain, now here, prohibiting walks, keeps me
Deliciously key-board happy at sunless six.
The train hoots did not pierce the morning
The snails walked my garden up and down
Quietly like nobody’s business and I am back
At the key-board amid faint heart-murmurs.

A photographer’s quest

The city lay crumpled in a quiet corner
The evening smelt onion-peels and roast
The sun slid below an unfinished house
The white ghosts had still time to return.
Pulse-beating hearts, thought-abhorrent,
Beat in the very depths of their rib-cages
In onrush of blood and oxygen-seekings.
At the other end of the beauty-spectrum
Several transformations worked technically
In coloured copies of quintessentialities.
A few frames mattered and horizons’ tilts
The artist looked for exactness of science
Capillary details appealed to beauty-logic.
You know how we seek ghosts in quiet time.
Our graphic eye sought the nature of things
In white balances and still phosphorescences.
Beauty eluded while pursuing pixel- perfection.

Period

At midnight as the wind howled
One remembered random things
Images which came straight
From the back alley’s darkness.
It was time to say something
Or get back to soft wet sleep.
More random images, period.
This way you break conversation
And prevent lapsing into comma.
Sleep comes creeping in the bones
In the face, in the eyes, period.

This morning

Amidst waves of undulating optimism
I reflect on this morning’s wavy lines
The jogging track’s bikini geometry,
Scraps of park conversations in waves,
A gust of wind riding on film music,
A scared rabbit’s grass-jumping white
And a lens eye short in beauty-waves.

Visit to the Brihadeeswara temple,Tanjore

These stone beauties laughed in the rain
Their skins had their luster machine-done
The shadows do not fall on them of the sun.

Inside the train

They of the uncertain sex beat the wind
Out of their joined palms in forced cadence
The floor-mopping boy under our large feet
Looked with money-wetness in his eyes
The train went spluttering for lack of puffing
While gravelly stones hit its forbidden parts.

A gust of wind

The night advanced slowly casting
Its ominous shadows on the faces
Outside her house the neem tree shook
By the gentle tug of a dreamlike wind
Rustling through its autumn leaves
The sky rumbled vaguely in the distance
Silver lined clouds dissipated in the hills
The wind fizzled down in the stillness.

Beauty-tokens

It had happened too quickly
As though it needed to happen
Experience then sat on my brow
I remember the first cataclysm
When it had fortuitously happened
In the green sea of nothingness
When there were no words
There was all-around green fluid
My breathing was slow and rhythmic
My reaching out was tentative
Now again it is spasmodic, yelling
I want to reach out, my palms
Cupped in clumsy supplication
Then I did not ask to be born
As a mere chemical experiment
I do not want now to cease to exist
Merely as another cosmic event
Leaving a trail of flourescent words
Tell me quickly what I shall do
With the luminous astral pieces
I have been garnering all these days.

The paper

That was a mere red-banded paper
Itching to reclaim original state
Of un-sweet bagasse and bamboo
With absolutely no musical possibility
As lonely as our drooping eyelids
Behind the vacuous legal scroll
Some faded white trousers reiterated
Black legal existence and bow tie
Our sleep-together of fearsome nights
Leapt out of the window cat-silent
Into the sterilized portals of wordy law
Our mummified before was not this
Our after-thoughts slowly cauterized us
As we waited for the black decision.

Angry