Of God and Grammar

This is a poem (to use the word loosely,
as it is in the nature of words to be used) 

about a God I don't know
but whose name I capitalise
i am not sure what kind of noun
God is. Proper and yet common.
Collective. Mostly abstract.
The pronouns are as confused. He.
She. It. Singular. Plural.
Adjectives have varied over time
and circumstances. Benevolent. Wrathful.
but always Just.
Articles have caused other kinds of conflict
- a god or the?
Middle school language classrooms rarely
address God's grammatical inconsistencies.
Wren & Martin may give you platitudes.
Much later, surrounded by fire and blood and
limbs and fear, you will question them.
Wren, Martin and their platitudes.
Middle age will calm your nerves,
acceptance and cynicism will leave space
for neither God nor Grammar.
God tends to be rediscovered in old age.
When language fades,
you find yourself clinging to the idea of God.
You are told, and you believe that God is the
grammar of life, understanding, perception.
or maybe that of chaos, who is to say.

meanwhile in a Middle school language class,
the teacher is telling her bewildered kids
for the nth time that Grammar is God.

loneliness

Loneliness is socially awkward.
Even among its own.
when two or more lonelinesses meet
(often in a nightly spell)
they deepen and darken one another
without a hint of malice though.
There is the barest acknowledgment
of an absence of light,common to all.
a necessarily uncomfortable quiet.
There is no scratching of surfaces,
corrugated as they are, nor softening
of edges. they become whetstones,
sharpening themselves on each other,
ready to stab their renewed selves back
into restful hearts hopeful of
dawn's companionship.

sometimes though,
a loneliness tests its limits,
questions itself without fear,
or pity, or affectation. Not even
love.unfazed it fades.an implosion
swallowed by watchful but silent
skies. As dawn breaks, a restless
heart wakes up to a poem.

a letter

I want to write
I want to write a letter
I want to write you a letter
I want to write you a letter so
I can tell you how much i miss you.
A phone call could do that.
And if i wait.just a little bit longer
and let it fester, then allmymissing
can become a poem. But that would depend.
on whether i dust the memories everyday
or let time accumulate over it. Either way,
there is no guarantee. Of remembering you.
or finding that poem.
a letter seems practical.and romantic.
though ours is the romance of
dry rivers and empty skies.

But then the letter would stir up expectations.
A poem can be content in its disappointments.
given the rich harvests of our lonelinesses,
the latter seems better suited to us.

What would you like -
Should i pander to your fancies?
We were strangely one in our
whimsicalities, come to think of it.
(Everything else clashed.)
You would find the idea
of recording absences ridiculous.
i wish i could disagree.
What about this conversation then?
That was us too. All of our time
a contemplation of fashionable trivialities
(in distinct idioms of silence,
less definite when we are apart and
time lags into a language of longing
necessitating this interlude.)

Let us go then.
As it turns out, true to our natures,
we are too passé for a letter.
too impatient for a poem.
It will be a note. A story without words.
An asoka leaf. buried in the heaviest book
on the topmost shelf of the public library
that we used to visit.

camping

You speak of things that I
can hardly put together in
the contours of my mind
as we build a camp in this
fertile delta formed from our
disparate consciousnesses
that needs must be but streams
pouring out into one sea.
We will get there. I know.

Meanwhile, tell me, where do you
find images of pianos and silences
cohabiting as if meant to be?

How are monsoonal mangoes
your friends on lonely evenings
covered in blankets of snow?

Who whips up dreams in the
middle of scorching afternoons
of back breaking work, ours not
the world of siestas.

Why can I not reach you except
in your words and even then
only through the prisms of
my paltry understanding?

What chasms lie between the
many yous, invisible in your own
stories, peeping through curtains
of deliciously desolate pasts, squatting
in narrow alleys of squalid presents,
wincing at impossible futures where
you lose your balance, and fall into
my pedestrian imagination for an
unlikely fairy tale.

I wonder. in the uncertain refuge of
this camp.where much is displaced.
But for now. Let it be,
your words and me.

insomnia

What keeps you up at night?

Sometime a little before midnight
usually within the hour when
all is quiet and the window streams in
a 90s movies honeymoon crimson,
you wonder.

how is death recorded
in the registers of the mind
(or love, even life for that matter)
where memory and imagination
fraternise, get entangled, lose themselves
in fluid boundaries that
your sense of self is made of,
create un-create re-create
a version, a reality (the reality?)
that can find no validation
outside of itself.

Mornings will bring squirrels
and mynahs and the comfort of
attested narratives.
in the familiar lull of insta lives,
metallic rages, unremembered promises,
moral subjectivities and other day noises,
you can rest and sleep until dusk
nudges you to expected wakefulness
and thoughts of certain uncertainties.

sleep

How do you read
the body in shadows
(beset by suspicions of
depth perceptions being but
desultory illusions)?

the head tilts, limbs move
and figures grow and shrink
like your sense of effacing time
fill you with fear as much as delight,
like the taste of your memories.

but thats not right.
no.take the strings away
from your mind's manacled clasp,
and focus on the body.
follow each movement. closely.
and let the universe
in all its big bang-ness
bring you to this.
moment.place.
(if they are indeed separate.)
a stage of lights where

caliginous lives play out
to the music of atoms
once suspended in mandated
orbital loops of order and
now crashing into one another.

don't get distracted.
watch the body.read the shadow.
read the body.watch the shadow.
see if you can weigh in
on the 21 grams.