LEADING IN THOUGHT

When somebody moves a thing across

The body of thought

The thing doesn’t remain material

But becomes a particle of thought or spirit

With which the thing thinks its own

Way across thought.

The material that pushes through

Is the matter of language

An energy, a connection or so.

Primarily, having taken recourse

To that element in thought

The material then unwinds, unthinks itself

And pronounces for itself

A verdict other than that is material.

When the machine

Prompts a thought

Leading you to the many allies

That hope travels unseen

The leading thought attempts

At word prompting, doctoring, associating, dissociating

Distancing, and so on

Driving some one hither and tither,

To panic, to fear, ill health,

To madness, to that prison house of words

Or image trap

The one which turns you around and make you travel

With your front to the past and your back towards the present

Into the unthought yet to be

Into the controversial

From which without recourse to the darkness of god

And the love for the seen and the unseen

There was no way out.

The sliding,

Mud slinging,

Fighting, jittery  world

Thrusting into the flesh and blood of man

Where love became a crime and hatred the law .

The avante garde then

Became a backyard of the already slit

A future split and opened

Away from the middle path

The leading thought attempts to plot out

The flow of wind and water

Attempting to make of the other

A slave

Unconnected, cut off, bleeding from the wound.

With the slow burgeoning connection

With which god enters you

The clitoris blooms

The clit-cheeked flower  of love

Which the wet tongue connects

And the call of falcons and peacocks

That reverberate in the night

The palm-trees dancing together in the wind,

The snakes, the machine voice of crickets

Singing the coarser lyrics of love

The slippery sliding from the sweaty zeniths

Into the sweet cuddling

The tic of the semen as it flows in abundance.

The woman from the potter’s house

Goes round in splendid circles in her dance

Breathing life into an earthen song,

A pot shard that the children throw

In their game

To hop up to hope

Could not be undone

From the thimble

A little  finger comes out

With a sweaty stalk

Playing down the fire that had stalked  and smothered kitchens

Leaving women carefree and ecstatic

And men too full to bother anymore.

Is this Sita’s kitchen, where she never was?

Or at Bali’s abode

Is there a room to spare?

The body of thought

Opening and closing

In on the matter of the word

For the pulsation

That has begun now without a gun.

THE RAGPICKER’S TUNE

To the one

Who walks about in rags

The raga doesn’t speak so much

Is it a fault that the ragtime or blues

And the smoke and passions

Of their own mind

And their pathways

To the other

The tune of which

Only they could find

Were more central to them than the correctness

Of the methods

Of the pundits

Because so unstructured it was

That method cowered and kept away

When it was up and moving about

In the street.

Neither did the ragpicker

A Khwaja Safa of the streets

Complain so loud

And fill his song with hatred

Or empty praises for a god

That he had failed to find in himself or in others

And hence could not meet elsewhere.

What would have been his tune?

The falcon’s soft cry

The tunes of Miles or Kuttappan

Or that pinnacles from which the high- browed

Exalted themselves and threw at others

The contempt in their minds?

Where would the infinite open up?

In the structures and limits set by men

Or in the making of the tune

That blends well

Into the rhapsody of the many?