future – Mad Decadence

Waiting Time

We will certainly wait

But for how long?

Can you hear the collective gasp?

Can you see the crimson pyres?

Sorry, there is no waiting time

In this game of death!!

How long do we wait?

For better sense to prevail

For wars to end

For children to get a chance

To live their life

How long do we wait?

For the Time that never arrives

Time of peace

Time of love

Time of kinship

How long do we wait?

For the rains

For the barren land

To become green again

For the earth to heal

How long do we need to wait?

For the stars to be visible again

To be able to breathe again

Perhaps sing again

How long do we wait?

For a day without news of abuse

A day with no school shootings

No war or no killings

No rapes or acid attacks

Just how long?

Just how long before we value

Humanity and living

How long before we value

Equality and love

We have been waiting

Far too long

Too too long

To find ourselves

To love ourselves

The Night Sky

Once upon a time

I would lie under the starry night

In utter darkness

To do a Messier marathon

I knew those magnificent

Beauties of the night sky

By their first name

Out of nowhere

They would appear

Once sun disappeared

We would behold them

In the field of view

Of our small and big

Telescopes facing the night sky

Just like the sun

Constellations would dip too

Below the horizon

While new ones appeared

Nothing compares to the

Silence and darkness

Of the dark night sky

Which has inspired

Countless artists and poets

I trust the night

It removes the blinding lights

Both sun and moon are absent

We can peer much deeper

And beyond

Going back in time

14 billion years is the age of the Universe

Along the way multitude of stars

In the billions of galaxies

Are burning away

Fusing atoms together

Forming newer elements

Elements that make you and me

And every being on this planet

We are after all atoms

Trying to figure out atoms

A scientist famously said

Annihilation preludes creation

And vice versa

Creation of new particles

And elements go on

Till the stable ones are born

Nature loves stability

But then entropy is a reality too

In the great cosmic churning

Life indeed is a miracle

But then…

One day after millions of years

The sun will die…

It will engulf the earth

Growing into a red giant

Till then we will play perhaps

This game of war and fear

While sending missions into the space

Such contradicting realities of our existence

We needn’t end it all here and now

We are self similar beings

Made of same cosmic dust

It would be such a pity

To cut this fabulous story short!!

PS: Inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s book – Poems to Night

Courage

Tonight I want to talk

About the courage

Courage of those who are

Facing imminent fatal threats

As fear looms large

No one is talking about leaving

Or fleeing the war

It has been a pattern

Among all the nations under attack

No one is leaving to make conquest easy

Tonight we need to talk about this courage

Courage of common people

Who take the batterings

Who are easy civilian targets

Yet they refuse to leave or flee

They bury their children and kin

They live in refugee camps

They return back to the rubbles

To rebuild again and again

As long as the ceasefire lasts

They stand up to

The truth and power

While every powerful nation chooses silence

They don’t leave or flee

Their ancestral land and home

Despite all indignity and threats

They keep showing up as human chains

They keep recording

And collecting evidence

In the hope that civility and peace

Will return again

And one day wars

Will become redundant

Tonight let’s talk about the courage

The courage of four astronauts

Who flew furthest from the earth

To the dark side of the moon

To watch unseen craters and an eclipse

Perhaps knowing well

Their mission will be eclipsed

By the war and fear mongering

They saw our beautiful blue planet

Knowing very well how bad the things are

Yet they speak of One Earth

Tonight let’s talk about the courage

Courage in the face of the fear and death

Tonight I don’t want to

Write the saddest or angry lines

I want to stand in solidarity with those

Who are being relentlessly attacked

If they have the courage to hope

To bear it all and fight back

And have guts to die

What we think or do is inconsequential

Their land, river and mountains

Will remember them

As a resilient civilization

I will just hope

Hoping against hope

This exemplary courage will win

It has to win against the evil

Fear is not even a choice

Fear was never a choice!!

A Fall

All it takes is a fall

To rise again

We haven’t reached

The tipping point yet

Where words

Will eventually give up

Their meanings

All languages will fail

To express the pain and gratitude

All the love will be a foregone conclusion

And death?

It is now a kids play

Their playmate doll dies

Just like their friends did

They know the rituals

They know the burials

Death seems so routine

Mourning has turned

Into a celebration

What else can we do?

Except for changing

Our perspectives

We are running out of

Perspectives and paradigms too

There are no masks

Emperors take pride

In their nakedness

That brave little boy

Has been buried

They don’t care even if

They are called out

It will take big fall

For the humanity

To rise again

We haven’t fallen

Enough yet!!

Irony

I became you

And you became them

All boundaries blurred

Between predators and preys

Every role flipped

In a role reversal

Victims turned into proud bullies

Preying upon helpless victims

Me, you, us and them

We keep changing our roles

Going in circles

Irony itself has become ironical

Like never before

I has been replaced by AI

Human by machines

Humans have turned into

Well dressed mannequins

Frozen like zombies

Doom scrolling away

Devouring themselves

Life has turned into monstrous death

In the finest of all role reversal

They feel most alive

When they kill

A movie showing severed flying head

Gets all the screens

While life affirming Space film

Finds hardly a space

Addiction to violence!

Ironically life always wins

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Didn’t change anything

Cherry blossoms do bloom

And paper cranes are still a craze

Ironically the victim nation

Never built the bomb

It ended the cycles

Of trauma and violence

But the bully nation

That built and used it

Is back with the same flex

Ironically bullies often

Call themselves victims

What scares them?

Addicted to violence and power

They refuse to give up

Their carnal desires

While Artemis II is on its way

To the darker side of the moon

Humanity has plunged

The planet Earth

Into one of its darkest phase

How diabolical

And Ironical!

Unheard Screams

She was out on the streets

Screaming about horrors

That went on inside a mansion

No one believed her

Women are always

Hysteric they thought

Before her there was another

A super model

Who tried to tell the truth

She was packed off

To the psychiatric ward

A filmmaker tried too

He died before

The world saw his edited film

Which felt like his perverse imagination

All this while

For decades men and women

Of power and influence

Kept mum even when they knew

They all partied, built a horrific reality

That the world thought was

Just a perverse imagination

They maimed, harmed and killed

In the name of fun and longevity

It took a whole generation

Of abused and trafficked kids to grow up

To call it all out, fight endless legal battles

Die mysteriously in the process

To bring it all to the light

With all evidence for everyone to see

Yet the world is numb

The perverse spy network

That controlled the world

Still thrives in money and power

Telling people to move on

Screaming only stocks and race

Money and influence matters

A handful few perverts

Reminding us that torture chambers

Continue to exist, cruelty never dies

In war between good and evil

Evil always has the ugliest loud laugh

While goodness stands shackled

Maimed, trafficked and brutally abused

No one believes the goodness anymore

What good does it serve to be good?

What kind of a rot is this?

Where screams of vulnerable

Women and children

Often go unheard

While men continue to flaunt

Their naked positions and power

Through utter cruel perversity

Shame on this selective

Deaf, dumb and blind world

Was it all like this forever?

Was free world, an illusion

That was sold to us?

Just like puppets we dance

While the screams go unheard

We scroll past all the horrors

To pause at delicate flowers

Or wellness reels

How many steps did you walk today?

Light and Dark

Light and darkness
Both fill my home
I have made peace
With both
For, I dwell in the greys

I never had a life plan
But life did have a design
Without a choice
I went along

I chose life or
Life chose me
Here we are
Conversing daily

I don’t know
What happens tomorrow
Or day after
Or years later

I am fatigued
I am just arriving
At my present
Made of nows

Don’t ask me
About my future
Or the path that
Hasn’t yet appeared

Perhaps, I will forever
Dwell in the greys and greens
To soak in the blue hour
Seeking stars, comets and the moon

Unpredictable Life

Nothing succeeds like success

And nothing fails like a failure

Life remains a gamble

Whose cards we neither own

And not do we hold

It’s a probability game they say

Chances of one being born

Chances of one dying

Who decides the starting lineup?

Who makes it

To the finishing line?

Your guess is as good as mine

It’s a bad script

A very sad one too

Life – remains a long sigh

We will never know

If the cries of those children

Will become our worse nightmare

How does one settle upon a grave?

Or build mansions

On trampled dreams

Merchants will sell you anything

Ketto diet, protein diet, botox

A whole new you

Like a Ship of Theseus

Nothing authentic or original

But yet we ace at being an odd

Superposition of the both

Forgetting lines

Of an erasing script

We keep babbling

Nothing makes sense

None of the pieces

Of this puzzle fit

If only we could feel

The emptiness of space

Earth’s solo cosmic dance

Rarest of rare life on it

Sustained by the sun

Maybe we would learn

To value this one chance

The one shot

We actually have

To live a life

To love a life

Stranger

A stranger stares at me

Whenever I look at the mirror

A school girl with two pigtails

A college goer

A trekker

A writer

Stranger takes many forms

All forms seem

Like a figment of imagination

The mirror itself has gone missing

The images are stuck in my head

My self tries to time travel

I climb the hills

But I go out of breath

The pigtails are gone too

A writer perhaps still thrives

Who will keep record

Of all these strangers?

They grew up with me

And then abandoned me

Or maybe I abandoned them

It’s not just them or me

The world has become a stranger too

Victims have turned perpetrators

Little children no longer grow old

To stare at the mirror

To remember their many strange selves

As we go further to discover

Ever expanding edges of the Universe

We seem to be collapsing

Just like those stars running out of hydrogen

We are made of star dust after all

Stars taught us to go nuclear perhaps

Just like a habitat with prey and predators

We continue to live in a concrete jungle

Though roles get reversed in every epoch

Predators become prey

Hunted turn into hunters

How long will it take for us

To be humans?

Mirror has no answers

My many selves and versions

Collapse into one too

The one that is trapped

Behind the mirror or screen perhaps

A virtual self…a stranger

Stares back at me!!

Killings

Senseless violent killings

Never make sense

More so

Killing of young children

They don’t deserve

To be targets

In a failed world

With failed morals

They don’t

Need to die

During morning prayers

For our failings

To build a safe world

Senseless violent killings

Of young children anywhere

Doesn’t make sense

Far too many children

In far too many countries

Are laying their lives

For humanity’s moral decadence

Be it in Gaza, Ukraine or US itself

The more weapons you build

The more innocents will die

Why do you wish to rule

Over corpses and graves?

What will grow there?

Your riches are scarred

And tainted with bloodbaths

We have scarred children

Who grow up as adults

To kill more children

Vicious cycles of deaths

They are on you

Though you have

Traded your conscience

To guns and drones lobby

And your religion too

How many more small graves

Need to be dug?

Don’t you realise

You are ending your line

The line of inheritance

Riches and homes

Build over little graves

Will never last

Should not last