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. 

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: 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: 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: 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: Mermaid of miseries

Vaguest of the moments
Vaulted in the veneers
A veneer of his veins
A mermaid chose to steal its soul

She ran into a coil of herself
Only morning was upside
In the mourning of a mermaid
Its progeny has overheard
The lessons of a shipwreck
The songs of a crystal moth

The mermaid was a mad cow
A miserable thing of angst
A mild sense of serenity
A mellowing season of soberness




She evolved in disdain
She revered her pale roots
She caved her breast of illness
She gazed at blind bloods
She was found among the branches
Of pale old banyan trees
That mongered the fate of deserted temples
That minced the shape of kernels

She was never a case for corals
She was found in sediments
Of age old walls and molten bricks
She pierced her beliefs in person
She punished the house in poison
Worms are left, wickedness is lost

Wish her your miseries
Weave her a silk of your dried up tears
As she shall be the mermaid of miseries ever

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