Pitter Patter Poetry - Reflective Essay

" Click click. Tick tock. Words drop. Tongues suture. Time flows. You try to leash it. You try to box it. You try to restrain it. You try to reverse it. You try to hold it dear, deep within the recesses of your phone’s gallery. Filled with screenshots of unfinished conversations. Vistas from untouched lands. Fragments of incomplete rants. You scroll up, and down. But the pictures never change. The conversations remain half-said, and full dead. The vistas remain immobile. And the rants still make you self-conscious. I have been in this city for nearly nine months now. Each day the city shrinks in its capacity to contain or offer. And I sit here, writing about the mundane experience there is to know. About living in a third world country. Having boys barely out of school, come and deliver drinking water to me. Other boys offering to pick up my garbage every morning. Other boys preparing tea by the sutta shop. Other boys beeping their rickshaw at me. And I sit here, soaked up in my privilege. Cocooned. Insulated. Isolated. Cordoned off. In a world of make-believe threats. A world of major digressions. A world of microaggressions. A world of inequality. A world without humour. A world without light. A world without adventures. A world with just enough to keep you alive. I sit here, pretending that I philosophise, I call myself a writer. I am deeply self-reflective, but just reflecting on the hollowness that exists is only making me hear the echoes better. Echoes of not conforming. Echoes of not living a life deeply. Echoes of the past; echoes betrayed by my memories. Memories which smoothen out the creases. Recollections which straighten up the clutter. Reminiscences of catastrophic lethargy and indifference swept out. Harking back to instances of humiliation - the first slap, the first rejection, the first inquisition - promptly expunged. Poetry brings these memories back. In fragments. In metaphors, images and epithets. Like summoning half-forgotten dreams. Distilling experiences. I attended a political meeting recently where a professor just before reading his poetry said, “Poetry is a luxury where action is necessary.” Poem implicates like news reports explicate. To survive in a world where educated children are human resources. Where wind and water are natural resources. Where all modes of kinship with objects both inanimate and animate are reduced to their material value. We need poetry. To name the nameless so it can be thought. Think the thoughtless so that one can act. Act impossible to know the constraints of possibility. To subjectify the world around us. Not to colonise."

response poetry

Pencil…

In the context of a sketching artist

Since the beginning of that sharply beautiful art

It made many masterpieces to comes alive

It doesn’t belong to eternity itself

But on the contrary, whatever drawn by a me

I can make that piece of art eternal

response poetry

Scissors…

When I cut, I do cut

When someone runs me in vacuum

I don’t cut at all

But the latter process is prohibited

People say this would start a fight in their family

And my whole existence is confused

Since they have this credence

Am I a scissor or a hoodoo?

political poetry

In my dreams - political poetry

Lustres of dream

Kept wide open for you to enter

Remember when I said, we started out so nice?

When I wake up each morning and open my eyes

And the world is again opened in front of me

For me to search for in it

Me

I see it as a murder scene

With blood spatters everywhere

I don’t know which one to clean first

I see a building then, in the distance

Half done

With hollow concrete walls that are so dark

You can’t stop looking at them

Your dark eyes pierce right through the hollows

Into myself, into nothingness

I don’t mind the break

I don’t mind the fragility of my mind

I don’t mind the craziness

After a long night

I don’t want the empty lanes

The disillusionment with caught feelings

To live in the luxury of feeling your presence all the time

For every tune and every melodious word

And every noise to

Remind me of you

The lustres of my dream

I want them to speak of you

Every thread, every smell.

independent

poetry- ek khoj

मैं तो बस तुम्हें खोज रहा हूँ

तुम हो के उसे खोज रहे होl

वो भी जानता है वो किसे खोज रहा है

प्रत्येक उत्तर से परिपूर्ण है हृदयl

लेकिन जिस्म पर केवल प्रश्न टंगे हैं

मिट्टी की देह में कहाँ छुपी बैठी है आत्माl

उस आत्मा में कहाँ विद्यमान है परमात्मा

और यहाँ कौन है जो उसे खोज रहा है?

independent poetry

नज़्म- कोरे कागज़ पर  

रात के वक़्त रखा था कोरे कागज़ पर

ख़यालों का एक बीज,

खिड़की के करीब रख दिया उसको

वहीं रखी है तुम्हारी तस्वीरl

रात में बारिश ने बूंदें गिराई

सुबह खिड़की से धूप आई

ख़यालों के बीज में गज़ल छुपी थी

कोरे कागज़ पर गज़ल उग आईl

तुम्हें गज़ल भेज रहा हूँ

उसको पढ़कर मुझे बताना तुम,

गज़ल कैसी है? तुम कैसी हो?

If I am slippers, you are hands for me

If I am slippers, you are hands for me.
If I am a nose-pin, you are like feet.
You're wrong my darling, we aren't meant to be.

If I am ketchup, you'd be khichdi.
If I turn vegetarian, you'd be the meat
If I am slippers, you are hands for me.

If you be a broom, I'd be a clean dormitory.
You're the last person in an empty room I'd greet.
You're wrong my darling, we aren't meant to be.

You might be honey, I ain't your honeybee.
I am a red mark and you're a clean white sheet.
If I am slippers, you are hands for me.

If I am fire, you're definitely not ghee.
If I'm a sweater, you're the scorching summer heat.
You're wrong my darling, we aren't meant to be.

I now suggest, you let this matter be.
I hate it when I have to repeat.
If I am slippers you are hands for me.
You're wrong my darling, we aren't meant to be.