Poetry From Airport

It’s huge

There’s a long corridor leading to the escalators and there are people of plastic and steel sitting liptight on chairs of plastic and steel, with electricity – also of plastic and steel burning the whole place up in its cold fire.

It all seems strange now.

And even the huge glass doors seem to be frozen for a long long time

And how on earth can so many people not talk?

If it ever wakes up, this entire place

And goes roaring and charging on towards the sea

Won’t it just be too damn great?

But there’s only so much greatness one can imagine.

I just hope that this demon, now asleep

Rises up soon. That would be the only form of greatness which is greater than hatred and yet conceivable.

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However lonely and silent and still might i become among the multitudes that kick their way through the sidewalks right upto the dead-end – be it home, office or whorehouse or shithouse or stations or just plain fucking nowhere,

However deathlike and pale might i become among the little signs of light and mascara and wilderness gone astray and concrete monsters and buses that seem like ill-sculpted rhinoceroses lost and aimless in the forests of plainly lost passion in bedsheets and curtains and tears and trains that can perhaps heave their sadness up and way beyond the chimney-fumes and the sea,

However cold and eternal might i become in the statutes standing through the haze and eyeing the wisdom of the day and the lemon-tinted mayhems that dot the borderlines of sanity and wisdom with contemplative bitterness and candour of a lost grandfather by the fireplace –

I will never be a mannequin – because my gaze can never ever be as fixed and as theirs are, and my cheek can never be as cold as theirs and, ah well

What the fuck am i even talking about?

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My haiku

was burning

for whatever it was worth.

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Yes, it’s that hour of the tiger again

A shapeless form, a formless shape, whatever

Nothing concrete, just an hour –

Lost in caves, lost in the ancient wilderness

Lost in eyes that burn the dark.

And nothing else.

And this too, shall pass.

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Finally, some sound – but it’s shit

Some guy playing some trash on his laptop and is listening to the same crap again and again

What’s he thinking? May i call him Plebeian? May i call him anything? Does he have a woman waiting for him?

Does he have anyone waiting for him at all?

Or is he the only one doing all the waiting?

All of that is besides the point

The point is that the night was dead till he opened his laptop-lid

And i think nights like these are better dead than alive if this is the only choice of life it has got.

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Violin Partita 3 in E

JS Bach

I’m listening to it now

The whole of the airport and the city and the entire big black night is listening to it now.

And little fairies with fires on their wings are circling the music.

Things seem smooth and easy for a few seconds – like a soothing ride through the first rains

And then, like a sudden jolt, the pain makes its presence felt.

And music can be so cruel at times. The fire-fairies have blood and murder in their eyes now.

The night seems like a hungry wolf, the city seems to be drowning in its own sewery guts

And the airport is but an icy knife making its way deep inside everything – starting from the skull and spines and moving on till the endless ends.

And then, yet another jolt. The music stops. The ride is over. Go home, kid.

Go home to the void now.

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Wish there was a space where i could let it out – let everything out

And yet not be accountable for it. So much accounts and accountancy eats the brain up.

I just wish i could spit fire and poison from my eyes and mouth and everything else and i could burn everything and get burned.

And i could sleep for a few thousand years after that. And wake up like i woke up when my mother poured me down.

Honestly, how much can we eat without taking a crap? And if we check too much, won’t the farts be too damn unbearable?

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Seventeen brutal waves opened me up

They stabbed me all night long

And there’s blood all over my chest and belly and over everything else

And with each stab i felt a bit of flesh leaving me

A bit of whisper knocking the woods though the oldest chimes and other open spaces

And every wave had a crown of empty bitterness, and nothing more

And i sought to survive.

And maybe, just maybe,

I sought the pain as well.

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Strange places these are.

Strange people, all as dead as the next one and a bit less dead than me but strange nevertheless

One’s coughing is lungs out right now, and the other one, he smells like a rotten fish and yet smiles at times – wish i knew who taught him how to smile.

And all of us are doing what we do best.

We are waiting, all of us!

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The greatest genius of god, if one exists

Lies in nakedness.

Nothing, no cities or countries or civilizations or spring’s blossoms or treachery of the hours or phantasmagoria or whore’s tits can ever possibly match up to it.

The truest glory lies in nakedness.

Naked people, naked streets, naked houses, naked euphoria, naked solitude, naked gamblers, naked roses, naked everything – stark, divine and naked.

This is where real beauty lies.

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A touch of eyes, an occasional smile of familiarity, an oeuvre, an outraged hour, a slight shade for the butterfly wings –

All you require to prim the void up.

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Animals in sunlight –

All jostling for security

All mourning the tides

At war and at peace – all

Animals in sunlight, all,

Praying for things to get easier.

For a high chair,

For some light to seep in from beneath the desks.

Animals in moonlight –

Strange voices, strange tongues

Children and their playthings

Dropped from the Chariot of Fire

All paying their dues to the enchantment

To the bittersweet, to the flesh

And to the confluence of all hateful endearment.

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Sitting at the smoking zone with burnt out lungs and parched lips

My laptop and my world spread out before me

Occasional nods at passersby

Occasional catching of glimpses and bits of conversation

Each and every conversation meanders like a smokey ageless snake

Which begins and ends in the same void, like everything else.

Forms, both human and humanoid, moving all around.

They are talking about safety now. And they were talking about equality sometime back

A glass door between us and the rest of the world,

Outside, there’s a huge piece of flesh dangling down the great roof of the world.

And the people inside, myself included,

Once we go out, we’ll make a mad dash for a piece of that piece

And we’ll kick and punch and stab each other, we will raze and gun each our down, and we will bomb the guts out of one another as we race for that piece. We will burn the world out and we will leave ugly scars behind when we go – all for a dig at that one piece.

Until then, it’s just us inside, all smiles and nods and smokerings and bits of the aimless chain of words that bind strangers down when at peace.

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I opened the newspaper

On the front page it was all about how everything is going down like a limp dick

On the mid page it was about how a baby got his skull ripped out in some war for oil or land or whatever

And on the last page it was about how some gamers gamed their game and about an actress getting married to a hotelier’s son.

Honestly, we all knew that these were happening much before reading all these

At times i wonder, the question of utility notwithstanding,

Why don’t newspapers burn down in their own wrath and leave bits and pieces of their bile and entrails for us to pick up and create our own stories and histories?

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Machine place,

Smooth edges, smooth walls, smooth floors, smooth people,

Everything’s perfect, and everything’s as lifeless as perfection can possibly be.

What the fuck am i doing here?

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I’m a mammoth in the twilight now

I am looking down at my children far below

I have seen the world when it was young

And i have heard the first sound and i have seen the first light

I have walked through all the roads and across all the horizons

And soon, all will be put out, whiffed away with one stroke of a hand

Just the bit of the wick that remains

And in the flickering twilight – i see my children below,

I see the earth, it smells of mother now. It shall rot away, like mother, like flesh. Like everything that is there and everything that is here.

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All dazed and sleepless

Dirty clothes, dirty mind, dirty hands, dirty intellect

Everything’s just too damn fucking dirty for pleasure or convenience

I was off and away, far far away from where my home is

And life was tough in the farawayness

Just a few hours to my own bed.

Private propriety seems comforting at times

And i want to sleep for the rest of the eternity that’s left in me.

Yeah, that is all.

That will be all

Curtains,

curtains please.

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