Social Networking

I don’t love you because you like it on facebook

I love you beyond my update status

You can’t log in to my network

You can’t google my love

Or find me just a click away

You can’t define me

With your copied brainy quotes

My love has its own Wikipedia

Neither will you find me in your chats

Or see a glimpse of me on youtube

My love has its own eyes

Its own landscape

I don’t love you

Because you can poke me

Or tweet me day and night

I might not be always linkedin

But I have myspace

In your lovely heart

Which is tagged

To my heart, forever.

Childhood

I remember my childhood

When I used to be my playground

When I used to be my game

When nothing bored me

And happiness was never to be sought

It was.

"Tumhe ab bhi pyaar hai mujhse?"

Mai ghar pohancha to

Ghar ki saari cheezain

Khamoosh thi

Sivai aek kurse key

Jiss pe tumne aakhri baar

Baith kar

Apni nam ankhon aur

Umeed se pur aawaaz mai

Mujhse poocha tha

Tumhe ab bhi pyaar hai mujhse?

I have been cheating sadness long enough

I have been cheating sadness long enough
With all the tricks and manipulations
That life taught me
On the sharp edges of immanent experiences
Now I am done
Exhausted of all my cleverness, my love
Do come back
To cheat sadness forever.

“Mad: Needs guidance at home.”

Fill in the blanks
Was the only line I could read
Written on the paper
In the last exam I wrote
All my blanks filled by you
I filled in all the blanks
With your name, my love
That was the only word
I could remember
Later, I wasn’t surprised
When my progress report card said,
“Mad: Needs guidance at home.”

What clock read is not time.

The clock on my empty wall
Is as restless and anxious
As I am
It keeps meticulous records
Of all the moments
Of all the minutes
Of all the hours
That you spend away from me
I wish it stops someday soon, forever!

Gandhi Jayanti

Bapu, you are no more real
You used to walk real
With blood and flesh
On this kind earth
Your name was real
Your words were real
But now we have come
Far away from you
You are a real illusion
In the deserts of democracy
This country has grown
Bigger than you
It is shining
Better than the coins
Where your image is engraved
By a destitute
Who lost his mind
Because of choiceless starvation
And not because of satyagarh
Your country has produced
Innumerable Gandhis
Whose fast of poverty
Never ends
And whose charkha of enforced starvation
Never stops.
Long back we handed you over
To the silent resonating eternity
Your echoes are still haunting
This country of poor
And only poor
In their endless pains.
I hope you finally learned
The lessons from your monkeys
You don’t listen
You don’t see
Your don’t say
I hope you live
In the bliss of ignorance
Of the country you dedicated yourself to
Bapu, I wish you Happy Birthday!

“You have enforced me to disappear”

They say you have disappeared
An enforced one

But why do I find you everywhere?
I find you every morning
When I open my eyes
In the intense smell
Of that pungent oil
Which you always wore
With rural arrogance

I find you in your cold room
Near your desk
In your hasty scribbled notes
You used to make
While staring at the black and white picture
Of my mother when she was in prime

I find you in the lawn
Among the whispering flowers
You used to tender
And stubborn weeds
You used to gently weed out

I find you in my mother’s eyes
When she tries to hide
Her real tears
With the tears coiling down her dry cheeks
While cutting onions for our dinner
Which doesn’t taste same
As it used to when you were here

I find you in that ancient field
Where a Chinar stands even now
Like a testimony of your presence
Under whose shade
You and your friends
Used to smoke
The smoke is still entangled
Between its labyrinth branches

I find you in those folklores
Which you used to narrate to me
Every night
In which moon was my personal football
And the enormous vastness of space
My playground
You gifted to me

I find you in the long pauses
And ominous sighs of my sister
When your disappeared name echoes
Suddenly, in the ancient tales
Of my grandmother

I find you ominously omnipresent
Everywhere
I don’t believe that you have disappeared
In fact, they should look for me
I am lost somewhere, everywhere
With your presence everywhere
I am enforced to disappear.

ODE TO THE MASS GRAVES

Why do you mourn us
Don’t you see
We are united now
Unlike you.

I, for one, in life
Could never unite with my father
Whose kindness meant freedom to me
Or with my brother
With whom I had shared
All my games and playgrounds
Or my neighbor
With whom smile was my only exchange
Or that strangely odd looking boy
Who shared same feeling as mine
For my beloved.

I could never imagine unity
When I was alive.
But we are united now
In our death and in a grave
On one side
I am merging into my brother
Ribs crushing into ribs
On the other side
The strangely odd looking boy
Is fusing into my heart
And my skull is snuggled
Into my father’s hollow rib cage
My feet are though
Somewhere lost in the ground
For if find them
I would come out of my grave
To tell you
You should mourn yourselves
Not us anymore.

You live in the living grave of your world
Of disunity
We live our life in death
Of unity
In body and in spirit.