Hiatus

How long can I keep postponing the reality
of my senses, social standing and hunger?
How long can I keep fighting a war, lost already,
despite winning a handful of fights here and there?
   

It has been almost twelve months now I’m living on my dreams,
audacious for one from the third world middling class,
fatally foolish, I know, some would rightly say!
Perhaps my poor genes did not mutate properly,
for I know countless men and women too, who are
happy to live a rat’s life to its full extent,
living underground in fear and never too keen
to tie the bell, despite being cruelly victimized,
racing and multiplying like a fierce plague on earth,
to wipe out the planet from the face of the universe!
   

Well I can vent for all I want and call them any names
but perhaps that will only make my sin as grave as Cain’s,
for tonight a dreamer after dreaming his last,
will have to seek his way back to that despised world of rats
and only when he has nothing more to gain or has lost it all
will he return to his dreams with profuse apologies for the hiatus!

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Revolutionary Pens

  

Dedicated to Revolutionary Pens

  
What good will it bring if we only think
and never implement those thoughts
in our life, in our deeds and words?

   

Unless we have realized a dream
how to be convincing that this indeed
was what we thought and pined to see!

   

If all that you want is to lead a life,
average and too steeped in normalcy
we are not for you, nor was meant to be!

     

If the only soul you would care to save
from this mayhem crippling the human world
is you, we’ll never share a common ground!

    

If like a beast you think that only those
lucky to have your genes are
the sole heirs of the world, we are not similar!

    

If you are happy to postpone
a disaster just as long as you live,
we have vowed to be your sworn enemy!

    

But if you can see the world
in every famished eye,
if you can find God inside
the heart of every child
and if you want to make the world
a better place for everyone –
then you are truly one of us
and we are your loyal arms!

  

  

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A Moth

A moth, tiny and innocent,
a shade of yellow that is just
one wash darker than cotton white,
retires upon the drapes
along the window in my room.

Weeks ago when her life began
as a caterpillar, hideous,
the hunger for tender leaves
ruled her then until she could weave
a silken cyst around herself.

There in that hanging cell she grew
her translucent and fragile wings,
a marvel of aeronautics,
to emerge as the harmless moth
that now lies right in front of me.

Since her reemergence, days ago
laying down her fertile eggs had been
the only thing in her simple mind.
Now it seems she is done with that,
both her wings have grown too heavy,
her eggs by then have begun to hatch already
to let her genes live, now she can die in peace.

On The Edge (An Absurd Poem)

‘Up here the wind is always strong,
a notch milder than an official storm’.
The breeze had bloated his shirt like a billowing sail.
Past the safety line of sanity,
he strode towards the edge to quench
his insatiable thirst for the view from there.
Exactly hundred meters down laid the street.
A dead snake of an absurd length
it seemed from up there, with parallel rows
of glaring sodium lights. The alternate
blocks of bright yellow and murky shadows
painted the serpentine skin with an eerie glow.
Every now and then one or two human beings,
too tiny to be recognized,
emerging from one of the murky blocks,
casting their shadows for a while before
fading into the next one. Then there were the cars,
changing their colors like a chameleon
at the yellow blocks. In a lot of ways
the street reminded him of his life
with transient shadows and fleeting chameleons, through
the adjacent patches of dark sorrow
and bright joy. From the edge having
a bird’s eye view of it had given him
many precious insights into
the impossibly complex web of life.
‘Life has been a comfortable one throughout,
comfortable but never smooth as it rose and fell.’
he said aloud. Otherwise, his story
might have been a lot different,
classified under a different genre. Growing up
in this vicious and luring city as the child
of a slum-dweller could be an epic
of humility, injustice and strife
but no one even seemed to notice them these days.
As lonelier he got the richer he became,
he wished that he had let his genes grow,
‘But the world is teeming with seven billion souls!’
he surmised. There on that edge familiar,
he sat with his feet dangling in the air
and he closed his eyes before plunging down
into the dark abyss of oblivion, from there.