Here are some of the poems I've written over the past few years. For some reason once I write a poem, I stop liking it after a while. Hence, I don't write poetry very often. It's one of the reasons I don't consider myself a poet. I think I'm better at poetic prose than poetry itself per se. But anyway…

I've been inspired by so many great authors and poets that I feel that any attempt on my part to write poetry or prose will be an insult to the written word. The language of Gabrial Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie or the poetry of Chillian Poet Pablo Neruda or Octavio Paz….if any written word or imagery can come close to the mystery of heaven, these are the people to follow. Reach out to them and their language, words, poetry and imagery, if you can. Nothing else is as beautiful, nothing else is worth living for or worth dying for in the world.

A Tree Within (by Octavio Paz)

A tree grew within my head.

A tree grew in.

Its roots are veins,

Its branches nerves,

Thoughts its tangled foliage.

Your glance sets it on fire,

And its fruits of shade

Are blood oranges

And pomegranates of the flame.

Day breaks

In the body’s night.

There, within, inside my head,

The tree speaks,

Come closer – can you hear it?

-------- Octavio Paz

All my life, I worshipped her.

Her golden voice,

her beauty's beat.

How she made made us feel,

how she made me real,

And now I can't be sure of anything,

black is white,

and cold is heat;

for what I worshipped stole my love away,

it was the ground beneath her feet.

She was my ground,

my favorite sound,

my country road,

my city street,

my sky above,

my only love,

and the ground beneath my feet.

Go lightly down your darkened way,

go lightly underground,

I'll be down there in another day,

I won't rest until you're found.

Let me love you true,

let me rescue you,

let me lead you to where two roads meet.

O come back above,

where there's only love,

and the ground beneath your feet.

--------(From Salman Rushdie's "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" set to music by U-2. Never thought such beauty can be conveyed in such simple words !)

* * * * * * * * * * *

Death - thou art a poem

I have been promised a poem

You will give it to me.

In the drowning pulse,

When pain goes to sleep,

With a somber face,

the moon reaches the other side.

The day is within water,

the night near the bank

Neither dark nor dawn

Mid-night, nor day

When the body dies,

And the soul begins to breathe

I have been promised a poem

You will give it to me.

---- (Fall 1994)

* * * * * * * * * * *

Do you remember that evening by Lake Michigan?

When we dreamed our dreams and vowed to climb Mt. Fuji in the year 2003.

Yes, you were there and nowhere else

And I was there and nowhere else

When we were walking on the ledge, wanting to fly over the water

Our shadows mingled and became one

My shadow did not come back to me.

Could you please mail it back at your earliest convenience?

Last time when I had a cupful of sleep,

You arrived unannounced

And asked if I’ll love you a lot.

Yes, I said.

On a bed of tender flames.

Always. . . .

(You smelt of cinnamon and cloves!)

And as I began to write my name with my finger tips on your body

And whispered into your eye-lashes,

You walked away, promising to come back.

What should I tell you, how I’ve been without you?

Why don’t you tell me how You’ve done without me?

The last messenger left by the morning train.

They never come back,

And they never reach you.

What else could I do? The pigeons refuse to fly in this weather.

Before I close the letter, I apologize for any inconvenience and delays.

And by the way, Mt. Fuji might be up for auction next week at Sotheby’s.

-------- (Winter 1997)

* * * * * * * * * * *

Parched are thy lips and thirsty your eyes

Come O’ beloved, let me love you

Let me take you in my celestial embrace.

I’ll make you forget the fire of the deserts and the silence of the mountains.

I’m waiting on the shores of time, counting my last breaths.

In the dead of the night, when you hear the song of the river,

Know that I’m calling.

When you hear the whisper of the winds,

Mistake it not, it’s me, my dear, only me.

When the echo of silence calls your name,

Know that I’m still waiting for you

In the valley of love for a million eternities

Waiting neither for God nor death,

But only you, only you.

----- (Winter of 1991)

Lead me from the real to the Unreal

From light to darkness

From life to death immortal!

Seductive beloved! Endow me,

today, with the unreason that is love,

An object of adoration to the,

Unwise and the naive

------- (Fall 1996)

* * * * * * * * * * *

Was my heart a desert of darkness?

Yes, perhaps.

Long ago ----I don’t know when,

I lay in the desert of darkness.

It was a dark and breezy night (as it always is in such scenes!)

I lay there, near the cactus bushes,

Under the leafless brown tree, with my head resting in her lap (and you still haven’t guessed that it’s one of those romantic poem?)

The distant palms swayed in the drunkenness of the night

The moon shone with its pale-white light of gloom.

Yes, it was a breezy night,

In the distant gloom, danced a dark, shadowy, ghost-like palace where nobody lived.

The sky, the sea of darkness above, was filled with the fragments of my shattered dreams.

Blue bits of a shattered crystal (but I didn’t count how many!).

Then her somber face, reflecting the shallow moonlight bends over mine

And I can almost feel her fragrant, fiery breath striking my pale n’ cold cheeks,

Then her soft, honey lips touches mine (and you thought I'd forget the kissing scene!)

And she urges my soul to rise,

To rise once again and swallow her being into my arms for the rest of the eternity.

But my courage fails me,

O’ my lord, you fail me once again (as you always have),

As I fall for the final time and dissolve into non-existence.

(Never mind, this poem tried its best!)

-------- (Winter 1989)

* * * * * * * * * * *

Loneliness is a slimy dark snake, awakening from midnight sleep

Unwinding its way angrily from the deepest bowels of time

Trampling everything sacred, all hopes, all myths -- false and sublime

Nothing survives but a steely emptiness, emptiness far and deep

Leaping curving tongues of time, swallow all your secret desires

Guarding your naked corpse, shrieking, ugly shadows laugh at you

Laughing, whining, they unleash their poisons, poisons red and blue

A helpless tree, you bow before the raging forest fires

Dispossessed you stand in a rubble of shattered, lifeless dreams

Waiting for the distant dawn with eyes veiled in tears

You scream, you laugh, hoping it is only a nightmare

While arrows of nothingness slash across you in continuous beams

The inner demons have come alive, parading your deepest fears

* * * * * * * * * * *

Me and my loneliness frequently speak to each other

If you were here, what would’ve happened?

You would have said this and you’d have said that.

You’d have been amazed by this

How much you might have laughed on that

If you were there, this would’ve happened

And that would’ve happened

Me and my loneliness frequently talk about you.

Is this a night or your hair riding on the wind?

Is this the moonlight or the glow of your eyes?

Is this the moon or your bracelet?

Are these the stars or your celestial embrace?

Is this a whiff of the wind or the fragrance of your body?

Is this the rustle of the leaves, as if you’ve whispered something?

I think about you, Alone as ever

Whereas I know that you are not there

You are nowhere

But this heart says that you are somewhere here.

--------- (Late Fall 1995)

It is not important whether you ever liked me or not,

For it is time for dissolution.

But before we part, having never met each other,

Let me say a few things and ask a few questions.

Why is that the real must remain hidden behind the veil of our conceptions?

You, for example, why is it that I always saw in you what I wanted to see in you?

Was I so blind or was it just the seduction of your mere presence?

Perhaps you’ll think me an arrogant romantic.

If you were not a person but just an idea and I, a painter,

I would conceive you as a primal tribal goddess.

Dark (darkness which nevertheless has light in it) and naked,

The presiding deity of an ephemeral world, emerging from the womb of chaos.

But neither are you an idea, nor am I a painter.

We are just condemned to be ordinary strangers,

Incomplete and lost behind our own shadows.

But before we part, having never met each other,

Let me hope that seven years from now,

Or perhaps ten,

You become the women I always imagined you to be.

-------- (Fall 1997)

First love revisited on a wintry night on a desolate American campus….

I am sitting by the side of my window trying to concentrate on May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude. The sun has disappeared beyond the river of twilight. Very soon the games will begin and shadows will chase shadows in a race to embrace the world in darkness. My multiple selves will come alive to fight that spurious battle between form and spirit. The Steppenwolf inside me will wake up confused and restless and urge me on. Where? I do not know. The nightly decay will resume. I am beginning to feel an upsurge of emptiness inside me. There are tiny demonic machines attached against the walls of my insides, which get turned on during these lonely weekend evenings. These machines work furiously, producing ferociously, vacuum and emptiness inside me. Yes, the sense of emptiness is so indescribably intense that it actually acquires a physical presence inside me. At times, it threatens to explode through the roof of my head. The walls of my self continue to crumble like the ruins of an ancient fortress. I decide to go for a walk to silence the fury of the demons. It’s a dark and beautiful evening. Silence is erotic; the air is cold and crisp.

There are a few dispossessed stars visible in a not yet dark sky, frozen in time like shattered crystals of a broken heart. My undirected steps bring me to the most dead and somber part of the town. I can see the cemetery a little distance away. Let the old dead make way for the young dead (or was it the living dead?)!The ground is littered with dry leaves, which crackle under my feet. I like the sound of dry leaves being crushed. There’s something very reassuring and complete about that sound. These leaves are like my old dreams and memories that I’m trying to crush but they are so many. I zigzag my way across the densest piles of dry leaves for some time until I stop dead in front of a massive tree. The tree stands erect against the boundaries of the imploding space, with dignified, brooding fall splendor ornamented with golden-brown leaves and bare branches. The tree is surrounded by darkness that nevertheless has light in it. There is something about the Tree in fall, which brings back a flood of memories from the past.

Life! What have you been like so far? Time, that familiar stranger plays its games again. I suddenly remember Shuchita.. I wonder what part of the world she is in right now and what she is like. Would I be able to recognize her if I ran across her?

What a strange emotion first love is ! I was in grade seven then, not old enough to be a man and not young enough to be a boy. She was my only prayer in that no mans land. Whenever I stole a glance at her now and then in the midst of classes, my heart would start pulsating, my whole being would be filled with warmth and longing. Her face was a new face every time I looked at it. Every time, I gazed into those intense, distant eyes, my heart would be filled with the warm fragrance of the roses. I never dared to convey the intensity of my feelings to her. Sometimes I would miss school so that I could go to her home in the evening to ask about homework. Her mere presence in the space of my life was enough. I asked for nothing more.

About a year later, she left the city for good with her family. I watched her car glide away from the corner of her street. After that day, whenever I felt lonely or missed her, I went to her street in the evenings just to watch her empty house and relive the few moments I had spent there. Unable to control myself, I wrote a long letter to her and explained everything. Months passed by but the reply did not come. Every time, I closed my eyes, I dreamt of bagful of letters. Innumerable times, I woke up in the middle of the night confused about where I had kept her letter. The letter never came. I was amazed at the unreasonableness of my emotions and could not understand my overwhelming sense of loss.

Even today when I look back, the immense scale of those emotions does not cease to surprise me. Perhaps that was the first realization of my sense of Being. A young and delicate life was sending out SOS calls to the stars . I Feel, therefore I Am ! I love, therefore I am ! I knew the stars were listening to me but their whispers got lost in the inter-stellar emptiness. That young life had neither the language to define those emotions nor the comfort of escape into the realm of fairy tales.

Nine years have passed. How many Shuchita’s have departed from this life since then? How many times has love been denied to me ? How long do I have to continue dying in my filthy hell of lovelessness and self-contempt? How many times have I experienced the profound sadness of witnessing my own death and then following my own corpse in the funeral procession. Perhaps, I am a dying and decaying city, a city so sad that it has forgotten its own name.

Am I this tree? Where is that boundless, youthful life energy I possessed ? Where is that celebrated youth the poets promised me ? Where is my innocence ? Suddenly I remember the words of William Somerset Maugham: "I did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous must be crossed before the traveler through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know that they are wretched, for they are full of truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life."

I feel a strange sense of kinship with the tree . As warm tears trickle down my cold cheeks, I am overcome by a sudden urge to embrace the tree...

I still talk to the stars and wait for their whispers until my ears grow numb with the noise of silence. My life is like a weak thread of what is remembered stretched over an ocean of what has been forgotten. I’ve been exiled for fifteen years.

Deep within, I know that the winter will end one day and the spring will come. The tree will be alive again.

Alive with green and yellow. Alive with youth and life. Alive with the twitter of birds and the song of the

nightingale. Perhaps, some day, along the road of life, someone will find me and free me. I will wait for the spring...

---------- (Late Fall 1996)