Epitaph of "The Poet Gone Cuckoo"

He lives now behind the sun, beyond the skies
The loudest supernovas explode his surreal cries
His heart, long dead, is a now a black hole
Flowers and tears graviate towards his unseen whole
He loved. He dreamt. He conjured quixotic illusions
And then one day, disappeared into his own confusions.

I return to this forgotten, forlorn space after a gap of four years. The Poet Gone Cuckoo, my novel in verse was completed in the summer of 2000. Now I think that it was an immature attempt at capturing emotions and life, both because my literary skills were limited and because I had not acquired the requisite depth that comes with age and experience. Maybe someday I will sit and edit over a hundred poems that I once wove into a story. But in more ways than one, The Poet is dead, is no more Cuckoo, or believes so, and his literary ambitions have sidestepped so that he may progress in my pursuit of science and knowledge.

Much has changed in these years. My old friends are now voices on phone, or are short, terse messages typed at odd hours and have moved to new worlds. My new friends see me as another person; they know not that I was once a roaming bard, who wrote furiously, continuously, who believed that passion and pain are the keys to existence of a writer, and worked hard to stay sensitively engrossed in emotion. That Poet is now a gone era, as is the time when I started working on research with equal passion, and deservedly met with equal pain. It seems to me that I have lost my fiery passion over time, but I have gained in perspective, weight, experience and maybe in vocabulary. My new friends who I prize as much as my old ones are found in this country where I am now eight thousand miles away from home. I miss you India, Delhi: IIT, Ansal Plaza, South Ex, Green Park, Priya, PVR Anupam, Dilli Haat; I miss Mandi, Kasauli, Chandigarh, Himachal, and I miss the morning fog, the monsoon rain, the rickshaw rides, the chaos and the clutter, butter chicken, roadside dhabas and chai, chaat, Thumbs Up, gannay ka juice, golguppay and the list goes on. I also miss the strangers that I would meet at most random of places and have long conversations with. I guess I have stopped writing poetry, but the emotional beast in me still lives on. Maybe in hibernation!

Still the whole blog of The Poet Gone Cuckoo must now recede into a forgotten past. The Epitaph is already placed here. So I will begin afresh, with another blog, and hopefully this time I will be returning with an update sooner. Or so I think!

MEMORIES ARE LIKE MOTION PICTURES

Memories are like motion pictures
Meters of negatives stored
Which relive past moments
On a two dimensional screen;

Memories are like motion pictures
Edited shots from yore
Montage, deep focus, close ups
Selected by some momentary instinct:

Memories are like motion pictures
Visions of virtual space
Where you are a mute spectator
To what silver bromide can retrace.

Come Twilight

He rose before sunrise
And ambled towards a distant hillock
Walked five miles and found
Sunrise and the favored clay
Which he carried back
Holding it close and tight
Like one holds one's child.

His wife wiped his sweat
Noticed his wrinkles with shock
He was ageing fast
With each failing crop

He hurriedly swallowed
Two potatoes baked
Beneath the ash and ambers
Of burnt out wood and grass

The wheel started to rotate,
Faster than eyes can roll
The sun too gathered some pace
He held in his hand
The clay she had knead
The ground beneath their feet
The soursce of their bread

A form began to shape
His hand became the mould
And before him were ready
Four matkas, wheatish, wet.

Meanwhile wife had placed
Wood and grass in position
And when sun reached the zenith
Four matkas entered the fire
And for hours of heat
Will harden them together
Finished, glossy, neat.

Come twilight and they will see
One has strained its neck
Second is fine, but for weak bottom,
The third managed to stand
But fourth is razed by heat
Three can be repaired
But one is fatally impaired

The fourth in fallen bits and shards,
Was painfully swept in parts
As twilight falls on his debris
The others sell in marts.

Walking Whispers
Whispers walk from dust to dawn,
In the empty pulmonary spaces,
Restless and relentless insomniacs,
Seeking sense in the cells of life.