In The Light of Birds

In the light of birds the lunatic wakes from uncountable sleeps

His burning electric wires begin to glow
Birds sing in every forest of flesh and blood
The lunatic’s fingers turn into strings in the outer silence

The darkness of half-asleep awareness roars through

The lunatic’s widening arteries, it’s another kind of
Waking--- and even total sleep is a frightening fire
It’s compelled to burst out even while being awake.

The lunatic sees through his sun-paraphrasing eyes

That creates circles centred outside him
And unaccountable sleep awakens lightnings
To sing a vast lullaby in flesh and blood.

The lunatic watches a bird...half-closed like eyes...flying

And his eyes as they drown begin to chirp.

In Your Poisoned Wounds

In your poisoned wounds

Fall the shadows of burning planets
The splitting breakers of foaming oceans
Your invisible paths going through raging storms
You spread like lightning flashes through my heart
And I grew in this darkness.

My back will be of darkness when you will

Lash me with lightning
For one moment my back will turn into darkness
When you will come back in flashes
From the undulating shadows of burning planets
Into the grapes of my poisoned wounds.

Eleven Poems for Cesar Vallejo

1. The Disease of Poverty

The disease of poverty

Bursts into symptoms of poetry
As incurable lesions.
There was a time when one thought
After all is over
There remains a pure formless soul.
Now one sees
Gigantic intestines opening
And man’s
Hunger endlessly bleeding.
A bird fallen upon the soil
Lamely crossing horizons
That’d have a beak
That wouldn’t be filled with the whole Earth’s grain...
God lies supine
In the street.
One wouldn’t have recognized Him
But for His open mouth.

2.Breaking One Man’s Hunger Into Several Pieces

If the whole world were to share and eat

One man’s hunger broken into several pieces
If the pieces of one man were distributed over the world
As several broken up words
Who is going to belch out satisfied with poetry?
If the crippled body of a whole society were to take flight
Into the sky through one man’s language,
Who is going to see the nether world
In the depth of his eyes from now on?
Who, Vallejo, is going to sing from now on?

3.The Song In My Throat After My Knees Got Bruised

The song in my throat got throttled

After my knees got bruised
But I kept the sorrows of others spread around
As decorations are set around the idol of Ganesha.
The public address system in the lane blared out a song
I covered my ears then
And protected the silence inside.
I always avoided frustration and despair
For that’s what was there on either side of the street
The road on which I walked
Wasn’t my own way.
I wandered in hell as though I were a celestial singer.
And you, Vallejo, if you were of this place,
An exquisite shanty town would have spread
In the poetry here---
On the smooth complexion of the goddess Sarasvati
An itch that has no cure:
A musical glide in the lowest voice
To smash the guts.

4.The Difference Between Us Is Only This

The only difference between us is this:

When you see a piece of bread
Hungry mouths open before your eyes
While I in the prison of hunger
Try to find purity in my stomach
Thinking of a glass of wine.

You see before your eyes

Forever the day of your death:
And I stand, according to my tradition,
Still, on a brick,
Against my tradition.

5.Agonies Can Fit Perfectly

Agonies can fit perfectly

Even in fourteen lines
Like a civil sonnet.

Poets are polite

In the murderously rushing chaos
Of language.

Only a rare one of them

Gets mashed so much as to be commemorated
As, Vallejo, you.

6.We Missed Each Other In 1957

We missed each other in 1957

I had only two shirsts. Every night
I had to wash one of them. Monsoon made a worse mess.

In the morning I’d go to the Ruia College

With a damp shirt on an empty stomach. And there were
So many girls bursting with youth, but I had only
Twelve annas in my pocket for a day’s expenses.
And even in broad daylight I was a poet doing night-shifts
I smoked a joint and went to the university to look for
Poemas Humanos, they didn’t have it.
It was necessary for me to pass my exams that year.
I had to learn my notes by rote.
I had to look out for a leak of the question papers.

Not doing any of that, I went to a Muslim dhaaba to eat

Shorva-roti and wandered over the Dadar Main Road
Crossed the iron bridge and came to Vijaynagar

I walked passing the Kabutarkhana, Ranade Road,

Right up to the Chowpatty at the Dadar Crematorium,
Vallejo, even my friends have been burned.
At the corner soda is readily available, and booze in the lane.

7.Patching Up A Tattered Heaven

Patching up a tattered heaven

With melodious notes, in my youth
I used to walk barefoot at night
From King’s Circle to the Byculla Bridge

It never occured to me to write

A poem as all-embracing as poverty,
Because each one’s agony had its own thorns of private
Existence to keep history at a distance
These thorns, Vallejo, are man’s original coat
And skin, it’s his style under which lies insecure
The real impersonal pain he suffers
So supportlessly and unseen by anyone else

Somebody’s father dies at the entrance of a shop

Someone else can’t afford the treatment of his son
A third one’s wife cheats on him and runs away from home
A fourth one’s daughter is gang-raped

Year after year the morning newspapers report all this

But what about this road that’s always changing?
What about this known neighbourhood scattering away?
What about the same images coming back to our mind?

8.A Garden of Poisons In The Eyes

A garden of poisons in the eyes

Squashed by everybody in a frenzy
The cobra’s stare is fixed

A little while ago this hood was raised

In self-defence, ready to bite,
And now all the venom is gone to waste
I am out of my hole, on the flat ground,
Pulped and crippled by hitting sticks
Separated from my underground brothers

These eyes are gems of death’s intensity

Our native poisons stand tall out of them
Their corrosive water dissolves all your reflections

There is no pain in my last hiss

There is no hatred, no recognition of friend or foe,
My battered body doesn’t bear my crawling signature

Vallejo, even Shesha gets slaughtered here

These preachers of non-violence are turning against nature now

Every morning in the grocer’s shop

The meaning of society is amassed
In a wooden box, coin by coin

They pay by a kilo for a gram

I look out my window
The growing traffic outside the shanties

Last night, in a fight over a girl,

There was bloodshed here. Five skulls cracked,
One guy’s guts were spilled. The cops came.

I shut the window and listened to raga Bihag.

Drank whiskey. And again there was pandemonium below
A drunk from the speakeasy had come out into the street

Fucking the whole world’s mother, and those controlling him

Were swearing in the name of his sister’s cunt,
When it quietened a bit, I drank a little more.

I neither desire nor dare to mingle among these people.

One is distanced from them, being different.
Although one shares with them mosquitoes, flies, rats,
and roaches. The grocer, the paanwala, the women selling vegetables,
the fisherwomen.

We use in common the street, the railway station, the bus

We share foot paths. From now on I better pay
Two rupees to the collective Satyanarayan Mahapooja
Get a receipt for the payment and not write poems any more.
9.Like A Whole Family Gathering In A Window

Like a whole family gathering in a window to watch

A procession passing by in the street below
All wounds gather in the eyes

Democracy has proved victorious once more

As though since long ago in this country
It was used to being triumphant

There’s the man who locks in his young wife

To work the night-shift and by the time he signs for his daily wages and
returns home, he’s too tired

There’s the thick-spectaled one on a bench in the bar

As the orange-coloured benches shine
And roasted chick-peas lie in a heap in a dish

As soon as the machine grinds to a halt they feel like running wild
Enemies of the worker on the machine are waiting at the gate, round
the corner, with a steel rod

In the city, skulls are smashed, guts carved out,

If an innocent person tries to cross the street---
What does one find but a truck full of bananas and a corpse under its
tyres!

10.The Teacher Who Teaches Us Poetry

The teacher who teaches us poetry

Hasn’t seen the room in which we live

When the teacher is teaching us poetry

His elder daughter who’s a nympho is at a matinee

When our teacher is explaining prosody to us

Trains of the Central Railway are running four hours late

His younger son is standing at the street corner

Our teacher contemplates borrowing forty rupees

Meanwhile, the poet Keshavsut’s imagination touches the stars

The poet Balakavi blissfully rolls in green pastures

The poet Tambe makes a pass at yet another lady

Whose pot is not yet filled at the common tap of water

The poet Mardhekar, travelling first class,

Murmurs something in English

Collecting the egg-plants of class-war at the Lal Bag corner

The poet Narayan Surve turns towards Chinchpokli

Namdeo Dhasal is gathering stones

Tired of teaching poetry our teacher is drinking tea

What kind of nectar does his cup of tea contain

That our teacher is pepped up to teach poetry?

The indescribable pleasure extracted from all the rapes

In Brooke Bond’s tea gardens poured in his cup

Sugar procecessed by the bones of untouchable labourers

Of South Maharashtra has made its crystals clear

The whole city of Mumbai is learning

To stuff knowledge in the gunny bags of dutiful labour

Poets from all over the world have arrived on the sidewalks of Flora
Fountain
Swarms of tourists wearking dark glasses are moving around

Our teacher reads Navakal, Sakal,

Lokasatta and doesn’t leave out Maharashtra Times

Our teacher can quote the poet Borkar and Kusumagraj

Our teacher’s wife is now to undergo surgery

He’s gone to the Tata Memorial Cancer Hospital

With a note of introduction from a physician he knows

There’s no poem on uterine cancer

Unless Tukaram has written one

Our teacher fills the form in English, signs it,

He’s still to recover his tuition fees from private students

11.Sparrows Twittering All Over The Tree

Sparrows twittering all over the tree

Awareness thorned and integrated as pain
It breaks the solid as grief rock we’ve become
To lactate and nurse in orphaned tenderness

Before the time and the place

Of the morning into which we’ve woken is deetermined
We’re being slain here

We made boisterous many-coloured love

With separate bodies caressing each other
In the shadows of the trees in this garden of anguish

We’ve become empty of desire, we’ve gone to sleep,

After sweating profusely
---And suddenly now these spasms twittering all over the tree.