Freedom

Looking thorough a mirror

rambling on my hair

I pluck one or two

moments of history.

Dead,

white stems and white roots,

out of my existence.

I take them in my palm

probe with curious eyes;

rummaging through my heredity,

I feel awkward

to own them,

their genes and their words.

Hoarding up courage,

wind-filled-lungs,

I blow them hard

to the direction of

my choice.

It takes a hundred million years

It takes a hundred million years

to rise from the hidden depth of the ocean

to reach above the clouds

inch by inch per year.

They say: Be a man.

Rock solid untill the water and wind

wear you out

turning into debris of something forgotten.

It will take another hundred million years

to collect your bones,

the chemicals to bind you,

hold you as a man again.

They say: Patience my child.

Have faith.

Be calm, steady and indifferent

to the angels and demons of nature.

I despise them all the time,

don't wish to play their games,

think that there must be a way out

when the rocks of mountain,

the clay of earth

and the exchange of dresses,

the whole illusion of time

will melt into perpetual nothingness.  

stones? what stones? the horizon stretches before me endlessly with not a grain of sand even... courtesy: http://pebbletrove.blogspot.in/2011/08/nothingness.html

My poems won't teach you how to swim

My poems won't teach you how to swim.

They tell you that

when you are inside that blue-green water,

you flip your hands, your legs,

you resemble a fish,

a big fish infact, a dolphin

sometimes you look like a mermaid to me.

They tell you that

the kid who used to jump into the village pond

had a name too.

And when he went for the lotus in mid-water

for the Shiva temple priest's daughter

a black chiti licked his feet.

My grandmother told me his tale

and I never set my feet inside.

My poems will tell you that

I don't know how to swim.

They will always tell you that

it must be amazing

diving into that blue-green water

coolness spreading all over

feeling the lightness of being.