A Noun?
A Verb?
An Adjective?
Human value?
Emotion?
Attachment?
Attraction?
Respect ?
Friendship?
Kinship?
Dopamine?
Oxytocin?
Validation?
Affection?
Admiration?
Desire?
Conditional?
Unconditional?
Affection?
Romance?
Platonic?
Narcissism ?
Passion?
Adoration?
Devotion?
Compassion?
Sympathy?
Obsession?
Lust?
Greed?
Love encompasses all, takes various forms… yet no one understands it…
PS: Have I missed something? Do add..
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
As the whole world holds its breath
As the threat of annihilation looms large
As brave people brace themselves
For the final showdown with death itself
Bunch of men proclaim
“Ceasefire!!!”
Such an easy convenient word
Why did it take so long?
One just has to cease
And step back
No one needs to call off the war
This game is paused for the next level
After all it increases views, stocks and profits
And weapons industry sells quite well
The biggest reality show of current times
Boom!! Just after ceasefire
There was much fire elsewhere
While the negotiations were still being read
There has to be a twist in the war drama
Well, the whole bloody drama is twisted!!
No one knows who is winning or losing
I guess it doesn’t matter anymore
Let the game go on…
While the desolate moon, sun
And a bunch of astronauts
Behold the beautiful Earth
Blue and white…pristine marble
Moving in the dark empty space
Silently miles miles away
Human life does seem a miracle
Till it turns itself into a curse!!
Intriguing migratory birds
With tiny magnetic compasses
In their tiny little being
Navigating with perfection
They travel miles and miles
Across from Siberia and elsewhere
To find their little green oasis
Their islets, wetlands
To stay and nest
Till the fledglings are strong enough
They are so faithful to
Their geography and biology
Tuned perfectly
To the Nature of their very being
I wonder how they perceive
The climate change
And the erratic weather
Also the flying drones
And fighter planes
All set forth by humans
To take over land and resources
That doesn’t even belong to them
Migratory birds
Are quite enviable
They don’t need papers
To prove they nationalites
They fly high above
Man made borders
Who knows maybe
They will be
Saviours of life on earth
When humans go extinct
Every Peace treaty
Every marriage
Every relationship
Every dysfunctional family
That fails
Has a history
Of Unkept promises
Promises which did not
Pass the test of time
There should be
A proper closure
For unkept promises
Or else they turn into deep wounds
They grow like cancer
Occupying spaces
Leaving no breathing room
They are like unseen
Elephants in the room
Which are never addressed
The room where
Where adults play
The game of pretend
Lies and amnesia
While teaching their youngs
Lessons of morals, values
And promises…
That promises are meant to be kept!!
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!
It is a good way of beginning
The ‘Cruelest Month’ of the year
A poem a day!
How else would one survive?
The daily calamities, killings
And mournings
The sense of worse times ahead
For Entropy always wins
The beautiful flower of yesterday
Is wilted, fallen and forgotten
Just realised I did see the Halley’s Comet
And then came the afterthought
I won’t ever be seeing it again!
It will come irrespective of everything
As sun beckons it every 75 years
Plants thrive on sunlight
Maybe they bloom flowers
For the Sun!!
A return gift maybe
For all the free glorious light
Plants know gratitude
While we seem to thrive
On regret, hate and revenge!
#GloPoWriMo
If poetry were a luxury
Afforded by only few
The world wouldn’t have known
Realities of poverty, hunger and war
That lament of loss and grief
Poetry ain’t luxury
Thankfully
A little girl hiding in an attic
With just a paper and pen
Multitudes of thoughts and emotions
Finds an alternative realm
Realm of words and emotions
Those damn slaves, those blues singers
Poetry freed them from slavery
Songs and poetry of protests
Gave language, words and idioms
To the oppression and violence they endured
Poetry gave the moon and stars
Silver linings another meaning
Metaphors for hopes, love and loss
There wouldn’t be lullabys
There won’t be haikus
Long and short
Lyrical and free verse
Had poetry been a luxury
It belongs to those who own it
A craft they are willing to hone it
It says much even in its pauses
Brevity is its expanse
Poetry is a friend
Who walks along
Encouraging one to face life
It is like those fallen and trampled flowers
A true evidence of life lived and unlived.
Though there is ample evidence
That we were the harvesters, gatherers
While men went hunting and gaming
Maybe we were cave artists too
Though there is an ample evidence
That we did the ground calculations
For ambitious space missions
Carried out fatal experiments
To figure out x rays, radioactivity and
Even the DNA structure
Though there is evidence
That most anonymous writers
Too were women
They were also those wives, sisters, sister in laws and whores
Which gave the world stupendous art
Yet women have been historically ignored
Cast aside, taken for granted
Treated as a doormat
While men ran their victory laps
As they stood on the podium
The tray bearers were the women too
There is ample overpowering evidence
That we birthed the entire humanity
Every evil soul who masquerades as saviour
Started life in a mother’s womb
The very female sex whom he ended up
Exploiting, killing and silencing
How did we end up here?
Are we truly the weaker kind?
Or just too kind? Or too conditioned?
Passing on the intergenerational trauma
And patriarchy in equal measures
No wonder we end up being hated a lot
For trading freedom for freedom
That’s the only real deal for us
Be unfree, free, unfree, free
To be or not to be
We truly can’t distinguish between choices
There isn’t any escape route
From this foul role-play
We regale it in and we ace it too!!
After all we just have to call it day
And decide not to give birth
And watch homes and government scramble
With incentives and perks
We can pull off a demographic shift
Yet these imbecile fools
Disrespect and disrobe us
Rape and kill as per their will
There seems to be no end in sight
We are still in the recognition stage
Recognising the inequality
Still debating that patriarchy
Is the ultimate design
No wonder Joan of Arc
Was called a witch and burnt at stake
Only to be venerated later
As a patron saint and saviour
This game is too old
Can we move to the next level?
We refuse to be recognised in retrospect
We dare you to practice equality
Take those baby steps
Remember we women are good at it
To teach those baby steps
Watch you falter
Give us a chance to make you
A better human or maybe at least a human!!
Photo courtesy: My son, Anuran. This was clicked at Orleans where Joan of Arc led the war to save France.
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?
Mad Decadence 