Misunderstand Me Correctly ...

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Misunderstand me correctly…

Misunderstand me correctly…

Music begins where words cease.

When music ceases, silence!

When all arts aspire to

the condition of music;

What does music aspire to?

Silence.

The logic of music leads

eventually to silence!

Music must come from silence.

Come from it and return to it.

Perhaps everything will end in fire.

Fire, then silence.

That is how everything ends, after all.

But, misunderstand me correctly.

I do not choose silence,

silence chooses me.

Anyway, I’m not taking any chances.

For a moment I savour the silence.

I listened until my ears could hear no more,

and silence resumed.

and I wrote this.

*****

This is a kind of a ‘magpie’ poem…my recent visit to the Best Books’ second hand books exhibition at YMCA Secunderabad yielded two (only…unfortunately…) good books…one of them was Granta 76: Music…I picked it up as soon as I saw it, being a music nut and all that…anyway, it contained a good collection of fiction and non-fiction…I started reading Julian Barnes’ ‘The Silence’ and the sentences and words from the piece and the idea of silence re-arranged themselves into this piece…I am only the arranger…

Another poem...

I would like to call myself an occasional poet, who writes poems sporadically… at one point of time, I used to write poems regularly…general amateur poems…but as time went by, I was fascinated by the process of writing poems itself and tried to write ‘poems about writing a poem’… and I go back and edit or change or add a phrase…and so there are different versions of the same poem… I have already posted two poems in this blog…here is one more…

it is a tale…told by

Once upon a time

long long ago,

I felt

a tingle in my loins;

snakes slithering in my heart;

monkeys marauding the silence

of my mind.

Today, as I remember these,

the mind struggles to go back.

The tingle has left behind a searing pain

and an ugly scar.

scattered blood.

Snakes have vanished leaving behind

their venom.

Monkeys have abandoned the inert

mind to its frozen silence.

Exhausted, unable to think,

blood, venom, and thawing silence

coagulate and meander along

my veins;

laboriously metamorphose and

flow into this page.

an interim poem

Please find below a 'letting off steam' poem...

morning blues

trundling along with the uneven pulse

of dated buses on moonscape roads;

half sleepy head nodding in counter pulses;

half wake eyes trying to gauge the gaps

left to reach the impending destination.

dreading the mass of

sleepy heads suppressing yawns;

stunned looks and bus-lagged eyes.

shunned dreams or dreams shunted

of lives engineered to perfection;

and a teacher trying to teach

accent and rhythm and intonation and stress.

stress accentuated.

finished...

I was once a poet...

I was once a poet...sounds surprising to me too...but then at some point of time in our growing up years most of us try writing poems...I used to write a lot of poems... in Kannada and in English...I prided myself on being able to write poems in two languages...those were heady times...sigh!

My BA years were especially fruitful in terms of poetry...love, heartbreak, again love...and so on..and sometimes idealism...a couple of poems got published in the Fergusson College student magazine and I was ecastatic...then the muse stopped visiting...

Then in early 1995, when I was in CIEFL, Hyderabad, my friend and fellow participant there, Srinivas Prasad (now Princiopal of a Government College in Kakinada), out of the blue asked me write a poem and give him...I told him I had stopped writing poems...he persisted and told me that I could and forced me to write one...I didn't know what to write...I thought for a whole week...the muse eluded me...then I sat down to write and managed 2 stanzas and gave it to Srinivas Prasad...I then asked him the reason for his asking me to pen a poem...he said it was a surprise...after a while, I forgot about it...then suddenly one day there was this small impromptu gathering that was arranged in the hostel mess and Srinivas Prasad, along with three other participants - John Varghese, K. Jayashree and Rita Ghosh, announced the launch of the Participants' Newsletter...managed and written wholly by the participants for the participants...we were all surprised and happy... then the copies of the newsletter were distributed to all present...it was an 8-page newelstter and I opened the pages and was stunned to see my poem printed in page 5 of the newsletter...I thought Prasad had asked me to write this poem only to egg me on to re-start my 'literary passion'...I was happy and embarassed at the same time... I definitely did not intend my poem to become public property...now it was before my fellow participants...

I was going through my old files and was happy to see the old issues of the newsletter (it ran for 2 years continuously and thereafter intermittently and closed down after 3 years)...I thought, why not put this poem in my blog and whoever my readers are can 'enjoy' it...I haven't written any poem after this...this is my last poem...so, all you readers...enjoy...

Smoky Thoughts

The whirring fan stirring up stale cigarette smoke
re-igniting the desire for the half-cigarette,
now lying brutally mutilated.
Now, again pining for it, and chiding myself
for being so thoughtless in disgust.

Does the muse come riding so, on smoky thoughts?
Why doesn't sleep come similarly?
Oh, it has already gone to sleep, tired.
Use the muse as a ruse.
Write poetry and lure sleep.
But poetry must be made of sterner stuff, no?
_______________________________________________________________________

So friends...