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Best Poems Written by Ashok Niyogi

Below are the all-time best Ashok Niyogi poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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Ennui

Disenchanted with ennui,
I want to my earth
To meet the sky,
To catch a falling star
Outside a ‘Monday thru Friday’
‘Nine to Five’ job,
But traffic on the eight eighty
Enshackles me in the tapestries of my mind.

Amnesia walks me through corridors of lice
Armed with coffee cups, the stock market on the radio,
I have lost all with my nasdaq fall
Into bars and brothels of dubious repute,
All is carnal after all.

Entrapment with Chopin on the alarm clock,
Donuts oozing with cream, wiped away with a napkin,
How do I get away from Tchaikovsky at night?
As the older whores at last snore,
I light a cigarette and lean out my window
To wail a poem, catch a falling star.

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Blond Hair With Auburn Roots

Life, in the cruelty of morning light,
Is a strand of copper blond hair
With auburn roots, asleep on a pillow.

Are you waiting for the snail mail
To bring you the implant
That will explode in your head?

Or will you dedicate your life
To multiplication of garbage that oozed
Into ancestral rivers, lakes and skies?
Will you let blood bubble on the Tigris
Or become a collector of limbs in Grozny,
While I inaugurate a thousand Darfurs?
Will we terrorize freedom in freedom’s name?

Goliath, let us fortify, let us amend, 
Or one day David will pelt us with a catapult,
Blood will copiously flow
From our forehead into our eyes,
We will be blinded, unless we already are.

Deep cleansing milk has to be sold by the gallon,
And, of course, Listerine.

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Baby Pine

this baby pine
had two young branches 
growing entwined
I untwined the branches
set them free
now each will find 
his own sun

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Mr. Eliot Are You Listening ?

Madame Sosostris, the leaves are running away
With the springtime wind, into the University café,
Mr. Scogan, what prophesy of apocalypse do you bring?
The grass smells oh! so fresh and green
Budded with cupidity and sin,
In shadow behind the lamp,
Tent pitched beneath a Portabello mushroom,
On your ear lobe is that an earring?

These mushrooms grow in the air from Hamadan,
While you examine a cemented palm print
On the footwalk of Stars embedded in archaic senility,
What, after all, is your Machiavellian plan?
Eye huge behind the magnifying glass,
Sinister, these fates of March, 
‘Perhaps there is something in it after all’

Otherwise, why have the cacti mutated so?
We cannot help but oversimplify,
Decimation follows the metric system,
Is uniform, total and immediate,
Decimation does in turn itself mutate.
Ashes radiate ashes to create a wasteland 
Shrunken ovaries, ululating uterus
As rheumy eyes keep shrewd watch for the Holy Grail
On a spec of dust in the universe.

Details | Ashok Niyogi Poem

Laguna Street

A back dated copy of US News
Stained by roasted garlic flavored
Extra virgin olive oil,
The neighbors have moved away,
In this silence, I miss their children’s noise
I resent the refrigerator rumbling so.

On Laguna Street the cars come and go,
Geese squawk by
On their way to Ellis Lake,
Branches are pencil drawings against a gray sky,
Works of art that never sold.

Autumn leaves seasoned by winter rain 
Are sequestered in the patio,
A pair of bicycles with flat tires
Is chained to a tree trunk.

We live outdoors in almond groves,
Row after row in camping huts,
And plan to walk through tulip meadows,
Mind numb with color,
Counting tulips to go to sleep.

Is there a lesson in this to learn?
Write me a five hundred-word story,
Call it ‘ The clouds will go,
there will be sun’.

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Good Morning

I have never 
Actually seen all this,
I just fantasize 
In theme parks and pubs,
During an Alumni picnic,
Or while exiting bookshops.

Dreamland concoctions,
Warehoused in letters 
After mundane names
Inherited from 
A not so erudite father,
I would have the blood pumped in,
What goes out
Must, after all be replaced.

Lines and phrases
Twisted through history
This way or that,
Like autumn leaves
In a tornado of dust,
Isolated
On a sunny day.

Sounds tell me
That life has woken up,
Time for cotton wool
In kidney trays,
Time for squirrels 
To gather nuts.

They will open
This sarcophagus
After me, beyond me,
Let the wisp escape the willow,

They will gather dust.

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Daddy

My Daddy scuttles across the ocean floor,
Let tons of seawaters flow past him,
Over him,
As he makes subsonic noises
Protesting my sins.

The waters listen,
As do fish and sharks
And other predators of the sea,
The sea horse dances its traditional dance.
Seaweed’s weave and sway,
As if in chorus.

The villainous dragon from Monsters Inc.,
Changes color and does his disappearing,
Shrek awaits luncheon in his swamp,
Daddy is late, he has ‘diver’s’ cramp.

I patiently explain to him
The phraseology of Rap,
The mechanics of whoring 
Just outside the Kremlin,
But with magnifying glass,
He still looks for gray in Lenin’s beard.

A thousand Pol Pots were David Copperfield, 
No less, spinning agrarian dreams for Daddies like
him,
And other Daddies like Uncle Ho,
Paddy growing from the barrel of a gun.
Gorbachov had the world on his head,
But ultimately, the Drunk pointed cannon at the Duma,
And won.

‘Daddy, understand the dialectics 
Of the spinning wheel in Atlantic City,
Otherwise as Donald Trump would say,
You’re fired!’

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Nice

I

to remain sane
to help evolve

hare- brained
and who says
the hare has an inferior brain

for the snow
that fell on trees we did not know
then
idols march
while we watch
people tie laces

she had braces
I gave her vanilla
while stars exploded
into brazen quilts

I touched them
with my malignant wand
and now the chrysanthemums wilt
in the heat that melts windshields
while we hold
mountains in our encrusted hands

II

and then the dusting
of yesterday’s socks
flocks of cloud run away
even as I honk

funny music falls
into a gas station
tea shop
terrace of rice

even here there is vice
look at the moon
eaten away with disease
look at the wars that stars

fight in headlight

look at your fingers
inch into the withered ice
just so they can be wise

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Alone

This is as philosophical
As keeping the count, 
Binoculars trained
For a whale 
That will never spout,
This is not the season,
Hamlet knew.

The Pilgrim knew,
As did the Wife of Bath,
This is discovery,
A poem on the Underground
By Sylvia Plath.

This is the season of butchery,
Bullfights without rules,
Lions shot with a precision rifle,
Selective breeding
On Noah’s ark.

This is as dark as it gets
In a daylight forest,
As stark
As one isolated note 
From an aria,
As lonesome as one straggler goose,
Squawking, ‘take me along’.

Details | Ashok Niyogi Poem

Hospital In the Himalayas

Morning has come
To this hamlet in the hills,
They have an internationally funded hospital
(Net of ‘inflation’ artistry in contractors’ bills).

Lady Macbeth, rinse your hands,
You will nurse in the hospital now.
The Companies have this experimental drug
For schizophrenics.
They want guinea pigs--
So go out on a marketing campaign,
Harvest schizophrenics.
Its like picking mushrooms from grassy slopes,
The poison ones to be sifted and chosen,
Only the poison ones.

Where better than this unmapped here?
Document the dementia,
(They were demented with hunger anyway),
Along with your Indian expert trained in Austria,
(Who is incidentally doctoring your bills
Eminent doctor that he is).

Frontiers of medicine will be tamed,
Do not count the dead
In this charge of the Light Brigade,
Suburban America does not want to know.