Poems | Prashant Priyadarshi

Credits: Amrit Ghosal

(1)

The evening just passed. My legs warm inside the quilt
and hands cold, heart not content but also not unhappy.
All of a sudden, it came to me like a revelation:
that love is not water, or not even air,
 one can live without it; I am.
Now that I do not feel the need to please anyone
and do not have to go out for anyone’s pleasure,
the trees are shadows, the air flake.
I walk around in shabby clothes, bearded face, crimpled,
dreaminess with a sense of freedom but one always wishes
A few things, something that is like water,
Like air.

(2)

Visible Cruelties

My dreams are made of foreign things.
Burning trees, each leaf a familiar face.
They drop on molten lava of silver, vanish with a wisp.
The roots have penetrated deep into the earth.
Branches scattered with cosmic magnificence.
I solemnly stand and look at the moon, a lion
Roaring over the sky. My familiar faces
Now silver. Everything I had is now
Being given away to this river with the invisible Charon.

(3)
A Woman with Spells

It is very hard to recollect
when I saw her first.
she always had a shabby
packet; her legs stilted
in a V shape.
unhindered spells
on her lips
moving as indifferently as people
around her.
Always with someone, I never
had the chance to stop and observe
or talk to
the woman with spells,
beside the MMV
or outside Malviya Bhawan,
just inside the Singh-dwar.
She meditates on the road and vehicles,
sometimes on people.
One can never know.

(4)

Today’s Schedule:
Wake up early. Eat.
Look at the birds. Think of yesterday.
Nausea. Plan the same future-
Which must be different from the imagined.
Read. Replace your void with exhaustion.
Write. Drink Tea. Daily chores. People.
The day passes in your room. Eat some more.
Read some more. Write even if you do not like it.
Think of metaphysical things-
For example why are you here? And other clichéd sentiments.
If possible, die,
Rethink of dying

(5)

It so happened that whatever this man I am talking about thought, turned into reality. It was hard for him to control his hallucinations turning into reality and in the right sense, he never learnt to control it.
Once, while walking through the pavement, he thought of a small molecule and the world inside it, the next moment he could see the outer lining of his molecule of imagination covering his cosmos. There was a fatal demerit to his imagination, once he created something, it couldn’t be destroyed, only managed and that too if you have that will within you.
So the world around him was now confined to a molecule and everything existed inside a molecule, a molecule which could be dried away by a single blow of the wind, the moment he thought of the wind, a gust of wind passed, he could see the drying of half of his molecule of imagination.

(6)

The Black Isle of Innisfree
I am here, here now, in the isle of Innisfree,
Locked in a cabin built here, know not of what things made;
Illusions of freedom I have here, a dive to the will not free,
And live lone in the free-loud dread.

And hope of peace is not here, for peace doesn’t come, fast or slow,
Dripping from the veils of dreams to where the dreary silence rings;
Here midnight’s all a bummer, and noon a scrupled blow,
And evening full of the lamenting streams.

I am here, here now, for always night and day
I hear mundane water of time with conscience-bound by the shore;
While I sit inside the cabin, or by the river turned so grey,
I hear the futility here, in my heart’s core.

(7)

The noon shatters
A yellow gloom rises,
Collapses to rise again.

You are more river, more boat, more of silence.

The curtain of blue lulls you in a palanquin.

Dream of delusions, bit of fire and bit of fields

Filtered and fermented through honeyed rays

Rising like the evening gulls, lost in time

You become more of a desert with hope of water.

The picture of a static ship with a hopeless sailor.

Always suns and moons and the guises of stars
Always flowers and laughter and songs
Nocturnal breeze places you in silhouettes of stillness
As if you are absent, as if you do not exist.

Your languishing winter body fructifies golden strands.

An old man sits, reading the newspaper.

A six year old girl draws a palm tree

And you sputter in thin air, with a thousand kisses.

The green kisses of Peepal, and the kisses of no colour in the air.

The kisses of dreams on my body, almost touching me

With more miracles, more villages and endless grass.

The evening coffee, the blotting sun staining me
With more of you, which I wash the whole night,
Without any success, I hide it under the clothes,
Almost visible, like the sighs of night
Beside the pond, and something crackles
Unrestrained, echoing you, in ancestral minstrelsy.

(8)

I can go from loving to not loving in a single second.
I am as treacherous as my city which changes each moment.
I have awakened to a field covered with hedges and slept with buildings covering it.
I am insolent and ignorant about the past, the past is facing the shadow of a tree and the future sun.
I rise to a silence, tumble into a turmoil, dance with choirs, and dream at night of another day’s toils.
I have only one poem left in me- the act of brushing my teeth- upward, downward and sideways.
I am standing at a cliff, looking at life, the acts, touching nothing, sensing everything.
I have at last understood, I am of no one and everyone in my own way.