Poem : A Bridge to Buddha

Synonyms of life

Semblances of life

They lived through his name

They lived through his fame

He was nothing but a voyage

Void and visceral

Vestige and vibrant

He was a ray through riddles

Light was unfolding upon

He was a tide through turbulence

Ocean was spreading its waves

He carried the burdens of a myth

Unto his last days and lost ways

When he mirrored the mankind

Beyond the name, there is a substrate

Beyond the fame, there is a facade

Beneath the self, he echoes an ensemble

Lost in swarms and swamps

ചെറു കഥ : അഗ്നിപുഷ്പങ്ങളുടെ ദ്വീപ്

കണ്ണുനീർ ചാലുകളിൽ നിന്നും അരുവികളുണ്ടാവാം, പക്ഷെ ഇവിടെ ഉണ്ടായതു അഗ്നിപുഷ്പങ്ങളുടെ ഒരു ദ്വീപാണ്. അവിടെ കണ്ണീർ ഒഴുകിയത് ഒരു ഗുഹാ മുഖത്തേക്കായിരുന്നു. അനന്തരം അവിടെ  താഴുന്ന ഒരു ശിഥിലമായ ദ്വീപ്. അവിടുത്തെ തീരങ്ങളിൽ നെരിപ്പോടുകൾ പുകഞ്ഞു കൊണ്ടേയിരുന്നു. അവിടുത്തെ പക്ഷികളുടെ ചിറകുകളും ധൂമ സമ്മിശ്രങ്ങൾ ആയിരുന്നു. അവർ പൂമ്പാറ്റകളെ പോലെ പരാഗണം ചെയ്തു കൊണ്ടിരുന്നു. അവരുടെ ദേശാടനങ്ങൾ ധൂമ രഥങ്ങൾ ആയിരുന്നു. അവിടെ വീണ്ടും കണ്ണീർ വാതകങ്ങൾ വലയങ്ങൾ തീർത്തു. അവിടുത്തെ അശാന്തി അവരുടെ വിഷയം ആയിരുന്നില്ല. കാഴ്ചയുടെ സീമകൾ മാത്രമായിരുന്നു അവിടുത്തെ പ്രഹേളിക. 

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: 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: 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 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: 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