Expressions

The mother cat lifted the kitten loosely

By the scruff to an undefined distance

The world then became upside down

The kitten raised no objections

The cat's maternal face glowed

Like radium in the pool of darkness

The kitten dissolved in mother-softness

The kitten felt  suddenly powerless

Resentful of the cat's allaround presence

Why these frequent unsettling changes

The mind-blowing illogic of movement,

Unprovoked,into strange territories 

Why this sense-benumbing abruptness

And an arrogant mother-knows-all attitude

The thinking kitten wanted to know

The logical basis of the mother's decisions

The cat did not even acknowledge in reply.

It picked up the baby by its looseness

And ran to an unspecified destination

The kitten closed its eyes and acquiesced

Into the  cat's unthinking mother-softness .

 

 

The soul craves reaching out

Fingers moving rhythmically

What did she actually look for,

Deep in her heart, touching,

Touched , experience comes in

Several glutinous colours

Colours break forth from vast silences;

Stillness reaches senses like mist

Touching the morning grass

Dripping from the hanging creeper.

 

Strikingly individualistic

Kicking up fuzzy thought

Stirring a beehive of memories

Against the rusted windows

Soft-purring, cuddlesome

The fog smothers passion-flames

And takes away the crackle

Of sun-drenched leaves

Leaving embers of once

In the crunching old bones

Striking the throbbing temple

Dramatic and pulsating

Presaging  a nasty day ahead

Breathing down vaporously

On our optimistic mornings.

 

 

 

She then lost her stark flesh

And phosphorous bones

Became uni-dimensional

She cannot move sideways

Nor look keenly skywards

She had said equivocal no to time

Persistently with bravado

When she spoke there were

No words floating in the ether

In fact they became ether

Started touching everyone

Like the icy breath of death

While her beauty streamed

In the overflow of colors.

 

This wordy struggle went on for too long
It is airy words which chased beauty-thoughts
While several filigreed images filtered light
At the back, a flung radio played on the roof
While Bukowski watched the sun shine
On the woman’s behind up in the air,
In the garden, his folded figure on the window.
A little heaving bird on the electric wires
Played high drama in shrill baritone, you see,
A real thing, not an insubstantial phenomenon.
Poetry came and went with wind and rain
Premature and dusty on fragrant creepers
Their flowers became stars on moonless nights.

(Reference here is to the poem “A radio with guts by Charles Bukowski)