ചെറു കഥ : ഉള്ളടക്കം

ആ വിദ്യാലയം നിറയെ മരങ്ങളായിരുന്നു. ഇലകളുടെ നിറഭേദങ്ങൾ ആ മുറ്റത്തിന് ഒത്തിരി ഭംഗി നൽകി. അവിടെ അവർ എല്ലാ ഇടവേളകളിലും ഒത്തുകൂടി. അവിടുത്തെ കൊച്ചു ആൽ മരത്തിന്റെ പുറത്തേക്കു തള്ളി നിൽക്കുന്ന വേരായിരുന്നു അവരുടെ സങ്കേതം. അവൻ അവരോടു അവൻ കണ്ട സിനിമകളുടെ കഥകൾ പറഞ്ഞു. പായുന്ന വണ്ടികളും, പുകയുന്ന പാതകളും അനേകം നായകന്മാരും ഉള്ള കഥകൾ. പ്രതി നായകന്മാരില്ലാത്ത കഥകൾ. ആ കഥകൾ അവനു ആവേശമായിരുന്നു. അവൻ കഥകൾ പറഞ്ഞു കൊണ്ടേയിരുന്നു. അവന്റെ കഥ പറച്ചിൽ പാതയോരങ്ങളിലേക്കും വഴിയിലെ അമ്പല മുറ്റത്തേക്കും നീണ്ടു. അവന്റെ വീടെത്തും വരെ.  അവന്റെ കഥയിൽ ചോദ്യങ്ങളും ഉപചോദ്യങ്ങളും ആയി അവന്റെ കൂട്ടുകാർ വന്നു. അവർക്കറിയാമായിരുന്നു അവൻ പറയുന്ന കഥകളുള്ള സിനിമകൾ ഇല്ലെന്നു. എങ്കിലും അവർ അത് പറഞ്ഞില്ല. പ്രിയപ്പെട്ട കൂട്ടുകാരന്റെ കഥകളിലെ കള്ളം അവർ ഉൾക്കൊണ്ടു. അവൻ വാചാലം ആയപ്പോൾ അവർ നിശബ്ദരായി. അവരുടെ നിശബദതയുടെ നെടുവീർപ്പുകൾ അവന്റെ കഥകളിൽ നിഴലിച്ചു. അവന്റെ വീട്ടിൽ പുതിയ കഥകൾ ജനിച്ചു കൊണ്ടേയിരുന്നു. വേരുകളില്ലാത്ത ഓർമകളും നേരുകളിലാത്ത കഥകളുമായി അവൻ കൂട്ടുകാർക്കായി കാത്തു നിന്നു. വിജനമായ വേരുകളും വീഥികളും അവന്റെ മൂകതക്ക് പുതിയ അർഥങ്ങൾ നൽകി. 

Poem: Rip Van Winkle wakes up again!

I just arrived at my office desk

Time machines everywhere

Numbers dripping blood from everywhere

It is my sweat, sweet sweet and salt salt and saltier blood

that you simply call by the name ‘sweat’

It is a socket to my nervous circuitry

It is a simple sickle in my stomach

Time is dripping away like a bloody whirlpool

You need not be a world bank economist to know

That money circulates in time

How much ever you obfuscate money

How much ever you mystify money

How much ever mask time with data

And use the equations

Time is not money alone

Knowledge is not power alone

There is a world beyond equations

World of inequalities and perturbations

World of irrational imaginations

World of exponential series

World of irregular tropes

World of truncated silhouettes

World of trapezoidal memes

World of memes and nemesis

World of numismatics and bit coins

World of plagiarisms and forgery

World is not a whirlpool alone

It is simply a whirlwind

Can you imagine what will happen?

When Rip Van Winkle wakes up

Only to see that Don Quixote is ruling the roost

And to see the affair between a pelican and an albatross

There are many stories unfolding

In the polynomial times

Time is just a tyrant, in an ocean of solitaires

A Night after the Neurosis

It is a quite Sunday morning
It was a weird outing in the evening

We saw fuming ashes
We saw failed elephants
We heard the tales of fallen petals
We saw drifting continents of love and lust

It was a quite Sunday morning after a tepid Saturday night
I saw many men sulking under the weight of their own dreams
I heard many women lustfully languishing their tongue twisters

They were all eloquent
They were all spellbound
They were castrated

A Carnival in the oddest of the hours
A Caricature of my self and many other selves

Our pulses were travelling to Venus, Mars and Pluto
We were simmering in the heat of the market mongers
We were boiler plates to the typecasted experiments in human nature

Have you heard about Pavlov
Who embarked on an experiment to create machines in human mindset

Have you learned about Vygotsky
Who smiled at the smiling babies and loved their zones of evolution

Have you wept when Maykovsky shot dead himself
His poetry must have been boiling faster than his heart impulses

When I end up embracing the dichotomies of Mikhail Bakhtin
I know I have become a scoundrel, polyglot, a hedonist, pagan beast

When this hetroglossia unfolds and scarlet fevers engulf the nations
Fear of languages, life and all sort of glass house effects will prevail

Do you know the fissures in your palace
Do you know if it is made of marble, mosaic, or even a piece of pitch blend?

Now I know only about primordial stones and shadows
Who build pyramids and prisons in the middle of stone hinged and laggard society
Who are in multitudes, nameless, nation-less, necro-manic living echoes

I live their turquoise blue rings, silver palms, their mythical fear of tortoises
I dig a grave to heal their zest for anarchy, and to unwound their zeitgeist

Poem: Zen's Paradox

A Zen gazed at his mind
That looked at the glaciers
Umpteen levels deep

Zero, Zero by Zero, Zero raised to Zero
Questions surfaced above the volcanic erections

Language of the lost
In the lucky facades and gambling chariots

Neutrino by Neutrino, they neutralized every pinch of salt
Before they were salted and halted in the ionosphere

Curves and cubes, hyper cubes and hyper markets
Zen’s continued to gaze, at the pandemonium of choices
Chance, choice, will, illness, plea, randomness, chaos

You name it and graph it and store it in archives, if not dens
You love bearing fruits of fissures in the veins of my earth

And zen fell asleep wondering the warmth of the worms
In the deepest of the shallow slow time dilation of his heart to eye reveleations

Poem: Flood of leaves and a lonely lotus flower

Fury of the soils
Fierce burns on the fingers
Fermenting blood in the foils
I fell down sleeping by the farm fields

It was summer and a sinking season
Fissures in the petals, a lotus is awakened
Only to see the plenitude of leaves
And a depth full of beings, veins of my earth

They are the leaves of a lotus
Born in a mud of dirt and wet sands
Floating so dear to the eyes

Beauty of the fathoms was fuming in the surface

Far from the heart of the clay filaments
The lineage of the airy cells

They carried the silence so long
This time the land is so loving

I am so closed and hibernated
When the whole world of leaves are soiled in happiness

The lotus stood closer to the leaves

Waving smiles at their happening lives

Poem: Chipmakers

They are soiled people 

They are oiled souls 

They are boiled shells 

They are coiled coals 

They make living out of soils 

Most of us carry it on head 

Some of us know it is inside and outside 

Few of us agree that we are from soil 

But this group is proud of their foil 

They call it by names 

Silicon, Carbon, Graphene, Lava and so forth 

When we till our earth 

When we tilt our head 

When we mince our mold 

The chip we make steal our earth 

It rains heavy on the soaked blood of many others 

May chip makers know that theirs is soil too

Poem: Torn Papers

Velvet drums 

They were ripped of silence 

Veils of a green turf 

Enchanted eyes 

They were plucked out well 

Cupid lenses 

They wanted more 

Thirsty fists 

They juiced out skulls 

Rigid metaphors 

They cursed my mind 

The pitch blend silks 

They ironed out a weather 

People and their pupil 

It was all soaked in charcoal 

Written in summer solitude 

This song is lost in the middle

Poem: Two lives laughing together

I was in a hurdled state of mind 

As I hurled myself into this passenger bus 

Paused for a while, perplexed for a while 

A little moment of relax and gaze 

When I saw them laughing together 

A little boy and his uncle 

The boy was listening and chirping 

His uncle was bubbling like a child 

They had no life missed in between 

No age difference for sure 

Sitting at the corner seats 

Both of them thin and lean 

Leaning on to one another 

Eyes thrown outward 

Body shrunken by nature 

They could spell a world of laughter 

On all possible topics 

Shouting at the stupid crows 

Speaking about the stupid death 

Speechless about our flashy lifestyles 

Spamming about so much more 

As they vanished shouting aloud 

My thoughtful moments were all but gone 

Though nothing much I could share with'em

Poem: Gradients of light

Gradients of light 

You may name them by colors 

Or by the shady love of the rouge beams 

I see them from heavens to hell 

Across their desire to feel 

The patterns of melting earth 

The tangents of galactic winds 

Languishing a destiny of tolerance 

They curled up towards poisoned lives 

Their unbound energy and infinite kindness 

Enough to skim through the treacherous ether 

They fail to reach the promised eternity 

Afraid to question the will of the masters 

As they are many and cobbled up 

They wander in crowded horizons 

As predictions make fuzzy end to all journeys 

Like the epics of the east and the proverbial holy lands 

With the hasty spikes they would weave a wrinkled leaf 

Naming as we see it now 

You may call it a sky of miseries

Infinite as it seem to eyes 

It is meager to the variations 

Myths of mountains, they always hid the sword 

Yet lightnings could burn the past 

Memoirs were etched in clouds 

As they floated in shapes so vivid 

Envious to the gods and demons alike

Poem: A Canine self

A wolf like he is 

Weaving heaviness on the dream hours

A night like grim he is

Wandering in the most manly hours

A beast like feverish he is
Feasting on the dust of us

A brown self with a red heart
Skin open and bleeding
Hair spinning over his pain
Misery like his eternal bones
Hissing streets where he belongs
Have a vein of blood and lust

Distant gaze and loving eyes

Wood like flesh he is
Wishing for a better life
For his canine self and others
He walked across his shadow and others too

Loving the dust of the dirty canals

Seldom he barks
Rarely he eats
Never he sleeps
Comes in my dreams and strange meetings

Still I wonder if he is a benign or a brute self
When I walk past his withering shades

Poem: The love of synonyms

Tiring as it may be
They gazed at this moment all along

The river of many bay
The blood of many vessels
The beam of many costs
The nest of many wings
The last of many firsts
The sheen of many rays
The reptile of many snakes
The magic of many prophets

They marched in continuum

The synonyms and their greed for meanings

Meanings, oh meanings!
As you cannot love your past
All the memoirs shrink to this question
What shall be the next moment before future

Poem: Morning spells of a Worker bee

Around three AM, he is awake
Uphill, upon a solitaire game
Loving the heat of his sweat
The distance whispers of his honey queen
The nearness of the morning howls
The mistakes and lazy gaze at the paining finger
The smiling mirror in his fuming eyes
The smiling lips in his coupled mirrors
The worker bee is dividing his blood
One for his sweat and other for the sweet love

Poem: Three lessons of an ancient dissident

Lesson one: Origin of dissidence

While you are born a dissident, you miss the love of conformity 

While you love being a dissident, you lose the opportunity to decide

Lesson two: Stalkers and dissidence 

While you stalk other dissidents, you follow your primal fears

While you gaze at fears, their dissidence becomes pale evenings

 

Lesson three: Past primes of dissidence

While you are living in dissident memoirs, you find pain around

While you sleep with dissident whispers, you carve a wound around

While you decide to leave the dissidence for others, you become one

Poem: My black rosary with red cross and daily bread

A gaze at uncertainty in your meal time
A wave of poverty in your surroundings
Which one will spoil your hunger?
What will kill your taste buds?

Nothing for sure can eat you
Unless you have eaten something else

A pinch of salt in your sweat
It refuses to give up its taste

A pale edge of your empty plate
It refuses to smile at your disposal

A moment when mind forgets to remember
A moment when mind remembers to forget

Matters of convenience and coincidence
All this happens in our daily life

We keep a bread for the day
Shrinks by the evening, rots by the fifth day
Filth by a weeks time, frozen in your next working day
Weeks after, you meet them all in your wounds

Your despair, your inertia, your pathos and vanity
All is known to submit to the season of red black winters
Same applies to my black rosary with red cross in my chest

Poem: People live in the Streets

People come from streets
After the office hours
Before the morning walks
When they are desperate for home
Eyes closed, Lids wiped off
Ears shut down, mouth dry and dim
Are we afraid of noise
Noise is just that we don’t understand
Do we fear what we don’t understand?

Poem: My land is not lost!

A simple and humble land
With nimble and neighbouring clouds

We claim living by caves and valleys
We claim a hand of steel and clay beneath
We made Gods in love and puppets with life

Schooling through the dancing rice fields
I had its mist on my palm and past
Full of frogs and fiery green ponds
I loved its longing for water and wisdom

Little by little, my land is in shades
Larger by larger, my land is in smokes

We wear mask, inside and outside
We tear skies, by heights and might

Love and life, they keep my land alive
We are making life again, not in puppets or pets
This time in the name of our future lights!
We the children, know the love of the land

Poem: How to dine in a dizzy street

This season of idols and icons

When rains are random and revered

When I know evening is never even to all

When my wife went to hometown

I went for a passive dinner a little afar

A photo by giancarlo de luca: under non-commercial license.

Love for noise

Love for gaze

Love for traffic

Love for crowd

Random thoughts guided me in bumpy road

It welcomed my grumpy stumpy thoughts

I am silenced by fading shades of faces

I am stoned to the fuming walls

On every second eateries

People gazed away their dinner

Chewing them like muted cows of unknowns

On the other side walks

I found them swallowing like snakes too

I found them dumping their stomach 

They were jerks and ill in my terms

The first group was silent and detached

Food was a passage of their thoughts

The second was vocal and enchanted

Food was a just a passage for blood and flesh

Both the groups were so muted

Their shadows were more vocal and hungry

Everywhere I saw crowd and chaos

But all of them were silent and tied to an order

An order so invisible and invincible

At least by this stagnant moments of night

By the time I finished my dinner

I was hurrying home

To cook my brain once again

To feed some crows waiting somewhere

Poem: Story Of a Fortune Cookie

How to write a poem
On the walls of a fortune cookie

When you know you have a sea at heart
It equals sleeping on a blast furnace
Or perhaps like on the shore of an oil spill
That kills many stomach bleeding food
That wipes out many more organs of desire
That wraps up untold stories of misery
That never weeps to the worrying seaweeds

It weaves a lovely edible lattice
It leads me to a meadow of meshes and circuits
It holds myriads of nice words and weaves

In its crystalline lovely lattice
That shines beneath an iron sheath
I saw a purple pupil that I love lost
It was like a night even where stars lose sheen

In the dried up moments
I went for a chase in my hometown
I went in a summer equinox
Running away from blanket of nightmares
Like a hunter for shades and shadows

I know not any art of spiders
To cave all the emoticons and laugh
Every inch and pinch of salt
It is a fortune cookie

Every pine and pillars
It is a magic lamp
It landed on a sea
And spill over like a magic cube
It went up to a highway hill
Stood up like a lightening love
It knows not any oil spills
That has blindfolded its breathing wishes

I know this will not stand as a poem for any
I know this is not versified in any senses
I know this has lost its rhythm for many songs
I know this is a broken chain of words

Now I know where all these fortune cookies are meant to be
Now I need to buy a market to trade their lovely lattice and labor lost
Now I never will sing a song for ring roads of their mermaids and heavens
Now I dare to call upon the stars that stare at this son of black magic

When the story meets its creator
Every fortune cookie will have its meat
And then it will drink from its own vine yards

+Gokul Alex 

Poem: Land of Commoners

Commoners, we commoners
Coiners, we coiners
Our eyes, feverish eyes, they were fond of slit and slings
Our peaks, senile peaks, they found solace in sewage

Our eyes, their roller coaster rides
In the streets with uncommon winds
Stranger to self, those eyes were glittering cold
Blood of sheen, Bath of Beams
We found a street full of mesh and mistakes

Pity our eyes, Pity their lens
For they never reflect the truth of the nerves

Eyes: born are they mirrors to be
Eyes: bound are they lies to be
Eyes: burned are they bound to be
Eyes: beamed are they babies to be

All around the body we adored them
commoners, we commoners
coiners, we coiners

We charmed the other darkness
Where eyes could hide from walls and walls

Flies like a fish market, Filth like a rodent canals
Fumes like a failed chimney,

Eyes, they counted the uncountable
Eyes, they coined the clutter and clusters
Eyes, they cursed the silence and the silenced
Eyes, they creature the calmness and callous

Commoners, we commoners
Cohorts, we cohorts
Cosmos in coins, they coined the world
Eyes of them, Ever circling the uncommon winds

+Gokul Alex 

Poem: A Lizard in a Garden

A Lizard in a Garden

Fresh of life
Is not lost in wild
It comes near and dear
And a lizard is born in a garden

It turned coats and spells
It skinned by instincts
Aimed the walls
But never surmounted them
Born as a reptile
Brave as a snake
Primitive of the forms

And now it bridged my silence
And now it spaces my mist

Lizard in the greens
Lizard with black dotted skin
It just was a passer by
On my way to a Tuesday morning

Neither of us where bothered of each other
Like other humans too
We crossed each other, lest nor stared and frowned
We mean each other, least by life of our own
We make space for each other, in verticals of time

Lizard in a plastic garden
It was just as amused as I am
Seeing the lusty winds
Lure of money, Lost smiles

Lizard was a wizard, I know for sure
Time was his slave, Space was his circuit