SAVE ME DR. LAMB
This oxygen tube often fails and
my fingers start to become maggots
wriggling in and out to connect the grave
face that waits with an enticing smile
of desire, my sweat pores
sprout the same wriggles
with more of them towards
that same old smile, and
my krait-egged eyeballs
slowly crack to
fight the light but
Dr Lamb, kindly attend on me,
amputate the culture of
this Earth's terminal infection
save me and let me transcend,
though with this temporal blindness
and the amputations, but
let that small tongue of flame
still flickering in me secretly
for your sake, reveal
the secrets of the truth
beyond and, declare freedom
to my brothers caught in
the spider web that tirelessly
chips us, with its
encyclopaedic domains of
artificial intelligence and
dangerous contentment, against you.
Sharpen me
with brandished edges
of love to sever the roots of
that forbidden Braintree.
MEANINGS
are often fleeting clouds of sly abstractions
themselves, alluring beyond words, awry
scary in tremors of our pursuit
bleary with our pulsating grief
often beckon the deer of our thirst
through the woods of perpetual exile
lest we be meanings ourselves driving ideas home
cycling and recycling hard only for the sands of time.
These wait for a canvass drenched in the needles
of time’s rain with scarlet trickles, down to the earth:
a teen-bride waits for an unborn Godot
to undo the tatters of her aging motherhood
to peel off the skin of her wasted tears and
years that raised another from her womb,
a distraught youth offers his dead body on a cell tower with
a note to the chief minister for the state’s “special status”,
a son waits for a bed in an award-winning government hospital
for his dying mother, for he doesn’t have any “gifts” for the staff,
a zealot of enraged devotees raze down a masjid
and another of a different faith, burn a train of priests
and when a convent is molested to conception
a blind faith compels the fruit of motherhood
all is fair in war against justice
silence against the wanton uproar .
but the smile on seasons’ faces is
artless with their natural dynamics
united in elemental harmony – beatitudes
in unison, dressed in enigmatic nakedness
but with the fury of sudden calamities –
poetic truths against our crisp paper truths –
the ubiquitous meanings that we the leaves
of the earth, rustle about and fall as meanings.
MY MOTHER IS MAD AFTER MY FATHER
died in her passion for the Life that left
us a while in the spasm of night’s breath
that held her as she was to pay off his debt
so, under its heaviness she laughs off a prayer
or a guest or when a mobile rings but cries, off
a feast, a casual greeting or a noisy crow call,
silences us to alert when a calendar flickers on
the wall but not when the gas leaks in kitchen
nor when a faucet isn’t closed in the toilet, but
counters frivolities with Telugu proverbs and
monologues in a dangerous solitude. While the
best hospital gives all negative reports, our fears
still pursue our Father’s promises with faith like
a mustard seed, but we still wait for that mother
we know who, on the knees of her faith, bore
the weight of my father’s wilderness where our
cries echo now. We search for our mother in this
unknown woman, while our cries only recede into
the midnight’s darkest pit, and her empty
stares widen further the distance between
the naked truth and one that’s painted with her.
PS: Written before the days of sorrow (will come) came to end.
Flights, Issue Thirteen, August 2024
Flight of the dragonfly 