1. A Timid Swelling
For choice I call myself a prowling guy or rosy kite.
I have a flair for shutting eyes and ear, prove that I lie.
My thoughts woven into a wreath of ripples clear & white
Are but a timid swelling of waves beneath a windless sky.
Her blue eyes bend upon a gloom that's born of living apart.
And needles black & grey do grope to wreck havoc on blue things.
Her lewdness weighs me down with hawsers lopped away from the heart.
A pollarded mulberry grows thin, & withers fast, yet pores upon wings.
I've toiled long years, not drawn rein of the things done & kept at bay.
Not worth thinking of, yet grief-harrowed dunes seem pale ripples.
A fury's better suited for all the passions wrecked & gone stray.
Let's see a rider-less horse tread with a bag of pruned apples.
A crash-landing of pain does seem facetiously presented
By courtesy of the limp inferno, natty as my blue shirt.
Who's crammed all these pains into my head the way they were narrated?
Oh! I'm engulfed in the pain-waves; their fabrics are in her skirt.
At times my pains seem shy, and to have shrunk from meeting joys.
They're not stolid in my stomach; given the chance to retch I can't.
I think a shuttlecock's best chosen among the spring toys.
Here come increase the tensile pressure on them, as you want.
These curly shrubs of guilty need to be culled from the human race.
At dusk I stick some waste things out of the sluice into the deaf bay.
A sense of guilt creeps over my craving for coupe de grace.
Delirious as I am, I stir the fire and plod my dull way.
All know that grief is stronger than the hard glare of the sun.
Things sag when I do knit my mutterings into the wind.
Oh! I have seen grief & joy pull against each other and turn dun.
I squat beside a lake, then think how I should soon be blind.
2. Going Upstairs
Just for a little light I've wandered off into the abyss
Of darkness, like a dinky rat gadding about in the hole.
My desire for going upstairs forecasts I'll have to either miss
The vogues of clamour in close vincity with the last dole
Of warmth or watch the ballet of my umber desolation.
Like a vigilante I'll twist my moustache artfully, then slink
Into the upstairs lounge where none holds upside-down his passion.
I know there will be bragging lights at which I'll have to blink.
I won't dispatch my smack of longing to the Padma slush,
Nor can dispel all anxiety about antipersonnel weapons of grief.
Narcotic effrontery comes from downstairs - I'll have it to flush
Out of the abyss where I have learnt every flush is brief.
I'm exculpated from what they say the way the riff-raff do
And shall wallow in the glare of the truth this going upstairs brings.
The nuisance of their nudges won't barge against what I embargo
On them who do not tremble while they do some grueling firings.
Each gallon of their sighs will leak out and the effluents go downward.
(Any crank somehow manages to crawl up to the zone of dreams.)
I'll make a clean sweep of my memories though it's much too hard.
I say - Don't meddle with how I've fogged musty pale moonbeams.
I boggle at their spreading gales of gaffes: much have I seen.
They dodder along and allude to crossing the Himalayan heights.
(But they don't beckon themselves to abide by what the light does mean.)
I must abominate their boast that only they dig up true delights.
The building jerked but I didn't pitch behind nor cut my knee.
They say - Drag down him off his perch, first pull at his red gown.
The longing for all these treacly dreams has slobbered over me.
That's why I go upstairs leaving all those grumpy scribblers down.
from IMPASSE (2003)
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem