birthday

mist clings to tree-tops, to thatched roofs of shops,

a manful sea winds clear of tired coasts of yester-years

but what have i known of feelings, even my own

that i should hope to hear bells presaging something else?

Indeed no love of next May shall yet stay

as no flower of last April has lingered still

can there be truth in store if i have always missed it before

can a birth adorn the bed before what’s dying is dead?

©Krishnamurti Ganesh

jewel

i see a child fling a jewel gleaming in the light before it sinks in the river,

an air-tight sun; i make a fine curving dive into an ocean, i am the flung jewel

among the sea-weed;

why i live so blithe as the twinkling pupil of a third-eye or die into the wailing

of the empty shell in your ear, i seek not to know;

helpless as a light-freighted jewel pulled by the deep, vast sands below

and as enthralling, beyond threnody and tumult, being all of myself

and of falling whole, not less if no more.

©Krishnamurti Ganesh

All I ask is paltry

All I ask is paltry, a clean underground sewage,

A scooter throbbing under me with a life of its own,

And lunches amidst strangers at home and

I will look for health, live for it, find it at midnight in the casualty ward.

Then dance escapist dances on an uneven floor with Martians.

Then of course brief hellish feelings, some brutal hours alone

And at last an uninhibited performance, a curtain-lowering.

©Krishnamurti Ganesh

Theme

How the old bone crumbles yet the limbs once more stretch with life,

From the carcass of a crow an ice-blue lark’s trilling ascent

A wee smudge on a black wall explodes into a score of hues

And overspreads and obscures the dull, discerning wall;

When we start to write life off, pigeon-hole it as a sad shadow

Here angelic joy bounds in un-ironic and comprehensive

Altogether rendering quite impossible any consistency in our believing

Devastating our slow-raised structure of notions and goals;

In this alternating screen of woe and whimsicality

Our only coherent prayer can be that God grant that we may die

When the theme that’s on is bliss.

©Krishnamurti Ganesh

not only the big sea

not only the big sea but a little river should flow in our lives, my darling

another word glittering in our learning it would be and croon like the wind in our ears

a river hemmed in by big trees, by harvests, by simple living and red-hot pyres

with the fish rushing swift like horizontal rain and the river, nearing the edge of our village,

transporting itself into the terminus of our big, blue sea.

©Krishnamurti Ganesh

ice in summer

ice in summer in all places,

tinkling in glasses,

benumbing the gums,

cubical in the fridge,

in a stall under a wooden hammer

on a table brutally spanked

in its rubber-tube dress,

in the ice-box melting

like the small hand in the wrist-watch moves

glacially placid amongst soft drink bottles,

its cold, cold heart beating.

it’s summer, season for ice, of surprise

at something at once requisite and rare

being there.

©Krishnamurti Ganesh

Tin Dawn

There’s the hustle and horn of the automobiles

Before the Sun has projected his crimson palm to grab the sky

Packed buses are already on a spree, screaming morning hymns

And scurrying, gleaming tin dawn and the quiet people peer out of the buses

Peer out at a landscape of sarees and skirts and sigh.

At night the buses are still in a bustle, some speed to late factories

And some nestle in the sheds or shades, to wake again hours before early-rising Sun

And await him. All their speed is blessed, all their smoke and scream

And serves so many gently moving ivory lives all around.

©Krishnamurti Ganesh

writing

so many write from what they read or hear.

inspired by great poetry, nevertheless, they write small poetry.

they are entranced by their own poetical tall-talk

that isn’t written from direct experience but from mind-walks.

there is a reason we must go far enough back, when what was seen

is what was reproduced and to the Upanishads which state

what is, not what has been or can be, from the direct experience

of the one that says it, what is experienceable by anyone,

not just a writer, writing or not. True physics, in short.

to those that want to impart to us their inspired echo,

will they please up and leave, with all convenient speed

as our Bertie Wooster once said, for the space they occupy

is required for other purposes, like for silence, for instance?

©Krishnamurti Ganesh

Letting me want to go

Letting me want to go, a fact of thought unpreventable,

A step from letting each other go and a step into a dangerous chasm

A strange freedom sanctioned by hurt, then ignored by indifference,

A cooled-over volcano; thus i hear you say:

i shall let you want to go. go then where you may to a film,

to a game, to a book or to any other being;

Pardon the tendencies that were under arrest; be a forgotten outpost

With a dreamy, broken post-box trusted with no real mail.

©Krishnamurti Ganesh