On the Defense of Resistance

This resistance of temptation, by all means,
Makes sense: it is the resort
To preserve the sensation of that soft tingle,
To prolong that wow reaction of your flirt on the crotch
And to linger what we leave speculation
As we watch. This resistance

Is all that requires to be unnerved
For what – months and perhaps even
Many months from now – you would debate on
And call the Indelible Complexity. Those who sanitize
Simple pelvic truth – crude monsters of dull mediocrity –

Consistently corrode within those walls of flesh,
The subtle shakes and forget-me-not eyes,
Layered locks, -cured nails and blazing toes in colours
Even the Permoglaze dog defies. Resistance, then, is to
Prolong your wet world; and its arty suspender in mine.

2013-05-22

Department Clerk, Friend

My friend
Who — from immemorial time —
Of lechery, leering and of cat-calling men complained,
Men, of all ages bearing various diversity,
Who would rub on her assets, hiss to her under their breath
What made her shudder deep down; or so she said.

Lean on her in the public transport,
Stare at her dreamily, till she turned around; asked “why?”.
Objectified her and drained her of half an hour’s sanity
— If it was an half an hour ride — Or, made her fume,
Stare back, but her discomfiture still (she tells me)
Titillated more, that lumpen will.

Made her paranoid young, added a stud and a star
To an already aloof spirit and personality
That wouldn’t trust the male eye and its ways
(Lest there would be prying between the line at the boobs,
Lest the well meaning glance would metamorphose to a gaze):
Keep a man on a mission at your manicured edge.

My friend — the Microcosm –
Sweet icon of Fate; There
To oblige the three-piece lechery of old, rumpled men
With roses at their coat pockets, power belching from their anus,
As they barter you half a star for a quick fall of those lashes curved
And the obligation of a caress, while the nation’s being served.

Those places where you resisted
The common swarthy sweat pit; his hissing calls,
Like torsos and decapitated carcasses
— In your fevered imagination’s eye —
They accumulate, all those that ever accosted you
Would have starved a night and a day to fuck you

Or, driven his weight — for a moment’s lust —
Into what like a sacristy to the world you hold.
Yes — you don’t say that to me, but I know —
That even what you guarded against — because you meant it good, serene –
Doesn’t matter anymore. Your regret is not what you’ve come to become;
It regrets more where you haven’t been.

With roses at their coat pocket, a state-of-the-art gloat
And you on one side, on the other an anecdote:
He walks the red carpet, which bleeds under his heel
And as on the flatscreen your downcast face is cast
I try to feel as you may feel. Then, you look up the camera
With a furtive glance and — self-conscious — back on the chair I reel.

2013-05-10

The Train Over the Hills

Balana, April 2013

Overwhelming — these gregarious green covered mountains
Overlook as the train, snail-like trudges on laid tracks.
As passengers and awed foreigners balance doorways for snaps
All is still in paced silence, interfering no gaps

As if to render that all’s futile,
That time heeds not the insignificance
Of the negritude of the passengers some half-dead,
Others clownish in their own day-end sweat
Being pulled to — being pulled from
Town to village; from village to town.
As they return home, work-worn, half asleep; a frown.

The efforts of amateur photographers
Who balance their weight with the expectant moment
Sneered at — as if — in an uproar mocked
By the thunderous bellowing echo the mountain issues to
Fellow tree-topped mountain rock.

Afar, throwing all over the
Eternal light of the day that longs its rest
The rocky wilderness above — Balana’s ancient vantage —
Disregards in its hugeness
The set of combined cars and the collective arrogance.

slowed down, reduced to a humble rock-a-bye rhythm
Its most immediate concern being the weakness of sleepers
The train passes on, moves through the unmoving tomb
In mechanical gratitude, a hiccup at a time, a steeper.

2013-04-19

By the River I Sat

The most loved one at a given moment, perhaps –
One final cup, now; after years of what we were about.
Among us, where we sit, gaps on gaping gaps.
It is one of the saddest days — no doubt.

The hurtful sorrow I welled in skin-deep
When, years before, on an unsuspecting morn
You went (even as I’d, confounded, weep)
Compares to nothing; since now, you’re gone.

Not that we would meet, years between then
And now, with ticket in hand you smile, you tell
To one who — at a given moment — of all other men
Rejoiced all times; and loved you well.

There’s no need for emotion, there’s no need to stay
Back on denied long hours where memory’s strong
And from here on there is but one hauled way
And a path to tread that won’t do you wrong.

When it’s over we walk, and then where paths split
We split and walk on, as paths carry on
As an unlikely design on a wafer-bed knit
Is, with a neat soft hand, along the margins torn.

2013-04-24

Choosing Poetry of Obscure

Tishani Doshi

Choosing poetry -
Of obscure, aspirant Indian poets -
Bookshop – comparing. Adding to the crisis:
Checking covers, flipping pages. Curves. Prices.
Tishani Doshi — Rs. 700,

Her body all over the cover
Makes — even before the opening
Lines are met — Mani
From Swami And Friends a self-declared
Poetry lover.
Mani sets aside his club
To inhale sweet Doshi-meter.

Daljit Nagare

Daljit Nagare — Again, 700:
Carelessly worn out looking face
Into a thumbnail inserted:
Like a souvenir shot of a German pub
From a street corner, deserted –
Not that that image by itself is that unromantic.

Flip pages — premeditated,
Not undull, dettol-scented poetry.
Sanitized, a daub pretentious
That that face itself now
Looks as if it’s about to yawn.

Nagare? Tishani Doshi?
Or — Jeet Thayil (married to
Shakti Bhatt)?
Old Lawrence the Bookman
To a walking sausage
(On the side) in crisp whispers
Promotes a Bawa Vintage she’s unsure to buy.

The Sausage

Sausage has a decided opinion
And that opinion hangs, but — her
Head held taut — she doesn’t see.
She’s been there before, and she has read all the more
Of what has been told of natives like me:
To disregard, to take as glass, to distance
And of all the smug diseases I carry.

She’s decided not to purchase that Bawa — too bad.
The bookman explains and explains
In his aging bookman’s bookish rhetoric; tongue.
Sausage — you desirable granny — nor are you that young.

Advantage Doshi

Tishani Doshi — there’s a second edition
Published a year later. There, too,
Her thick unforgiving lips and
Ballast-like eyes
Look out at the fucking Hades in you
(Wonder who took Tishani’s photos for her?
Was it her natural irresistible charm, then,
Or an effect triggered by the photographer?
Or — like I do — did Tishani go press the self-timer?)

Doshi and Nagare?

She’s got a poem on the
Kandy Museum, too — Wow! impressive.
So, Tishani’s surely in, do I get
Daljit, too? 700+700 = comes to thousand four.
An equally dote, but ugly Welsh woman poet
Forgotten in a corner could have certainly cost me more.
There’s a bitch of a bard selling for 2000 clean.
Seriously — In Sri Lanka, in 2013.

Deus Ex Machina

Spots the eye, then, from a corner
Stamped away, by poets and sundry:
A Neruda — the hand picks up
In tandem with the good eye.
The cover — not that bad, the
Poetry? Nerudite as always, perhaps?
600 — smooth scent bound; and held as a promise
By the covers and
A still of two far away distant, eternal lovers.

2013-04-18

Reid Avenue Pavements

By the unfenced, unbounded
Evenly paved walkways of
A Reid Avenue, Colombo 07, now paved,
Bounces the evening joggers
As on cement benches under ancient trees
Voyeurs enjoy the i-pod clinging women who
– Fully self-conscious of watching eyes of guys –
Melt away that gaze in the velvet music
And dribble their boobs as they bounce; run.

In the imposed solitary i-pod world
And under the trees, relaxed, stretched back,
Two classes — two groups — of
Walkway consumers engage in harmony,
Their masturbatory dreams — though worlds apart –
Closer than ever in strangers’ hearts,
In this fast developing Gota’s Unreal City reality:
A win-win situation is a bargain too good.

Malls out of dilapidated structures of yore
With cutting edge beams wrought out of military masonry.
Leisure strips of jogging ground thronged by
Fat-walkers in a Pettah of another world,
Slowing down to make room, or impatiently budging by,
As the dusk sets down on a dustless frame
Blurring personality. Murky colours on slime.

2013-04-12

One Remembers It It

One remembers it
— It: which with a flimsy restoration of
The receiver we ended on a click;
After years — worlds and destinations apart –
After many and many to whom we had given our heart
And after resolutions to stay away and to deal with the distance
Of cold, decorated smiles for old times’ sake —
One remembers it, after all,
For the fragility with which it was made.

Preparing yourself
From previous night through all morning;
The tension of waiting — anxious — under
A never forgiving sun; being pulled
And continually sucked by that
Whirlpool of impatience, insistence,
Doubt and the fear of missing you
Among the people that pass —
I most certainly pity those insensitive that dismiss young love as a farce.

And when that was all over —
There was more life and then much more:
Life, hope, revival every time a hardcover
Commitment broke; and every time you had no more
To offer the periodical agent who envelops you with words
Every time over and over through other mouths you had heard.

But this — you remember as
An unreal-real memory
That curls in some hidden locker in its
Magical coat of dust. And here
I suspend the burden of poetry.
Talk tonight we must.

2013-03-17