Poem: Ashes

Fire is the blood of thought,
Burning reason,
The warmth of non-meaning, non-being, undying death.
Ashes of dark memories,
Light, what is left over after,
Are only the ashes, memories,
Ashes to be smeared over the forehead,
Ashes to be won, and ashes to kill the fire within.
Fire is a thing of beauty, but ashes are forever, and a joy forever.
Let me clean my house, the annals of my mind crave,
But cleaning is with ashes, and the memories of others, another animal time clear my backyard,
Of the emotional baggage,
And the innocent thoughts of naked women.
As my oxidized thoughts wander,
I wonder if I must cough up,
Surrender to the fine dust in my lungs,
Ashes sometimes suppress breathing,
But sometimes the nicotine is too necessary to live.
Ashes lie strewn about in the space of time, giving time to space, and space to those who need a time, maybe just a little.
Ashes fly away, fires light, ashes alight,
In the slow motion tizzy of mirrored silence,
As the fire burns away, it leaves the shadows, after all,
Shadows come from within, and dominate without.
Sun’s ashen rays, and the golden dullness of ashes cling on the devil’s workshop,
My mind is empty but the grey matter, but the ashes.
If fire is the moment, ashes are leftovers,
Leftovers are cold, but they satisfy hunger,
Better than the memories of warm food,
but isn’t cold food the memory of warm food?
The redundancy of ashes is profound,
Ashes are a form of cinematic thought,
Of dialectic spaces, of crummy dialogues, of Kafkaesque art,
Of the screams of modern living, of the Homer of.

Poem : On Anna Hazare

India is its villages,
Will Anna make India his village?
Gandhi defeated colonialism,
Will a Gandhian defeat neo-colonialism?
Or will consumerism, corruption and commercialization crush the country, my country?
Democracy – supposedly people find a voice here,
Will this man’s voice be heard?
Or will only the scream of his death resonate?
He has only his death to offer,
The commercial media will take that too,
Legends are easy to sell, so are heroes, so are souls.
In this realm of crimson irony,
The man sits accompanied by a man who conquered the stars,
Will man ever conquer himself though?
Alone in the sun,
It is a battle of David and Goliath.
But alone in the fields,
Labourers toil on,
Corruption is an academic term to them,
It is perhaps important to only the English speaking city dwellers who must sell their country,
To sell themselves…
Tears flow like streams in his mind,
Channelling themselves in the wrinkles,
Hope they will come out of the maze,
A maze of the wrinkles of old age….