The jungle ever green destroyed
Killing all the inhabiting elephants
Very sharpe the bull hook
The old Mahout
She doesn’t like the garden on the wall,
where the flowers are without fragrance.
You hammer the alphabet nails into her
brain. Her little thumb and index finger
waver on a hard pencil.
She can’t install her mind in the classroom
as her Barbie lies uncared at home. Your
refrains die in her ears. Her mom’s lullaby
lives in her soul.
A naughty classmate pinches her. She wants
to play, ‘elephant-and-mahout’ with her
dad.
Your tale has a head and tail, but no soul.
An impulse-trimmer your dopey ‘don’t’ is.
She wants to sleep in the valley beneath
the breast.
Ten to three’s an inhuman schedule.
Tension termites eat each twitchy day.
Only the skeleton of infancy remains.
Published in Poetry Nook Anthology
There’s peril in the signage,
yet visitors
enjoy the turbulent black sea.
A benign lust
grows malignant in chains.
The elephant
thrusts at the ground with
its tusks, as
though saving itself from the
violent voltage
current. It hurls its trunk up
the sky amidst
a thunder as the loudest
slogan of
protest in the universe.
It doesn’t
need a calendar. A mahout
can never
conceal its honeymoon season.
A lunatic liquid
flows down the side of its
head like
the lava of suppressed love.
Hormones of
creation are wasted in the void.
First appeared in The Literary Hatchet
She doesn’t like the garden on the wall,
where the flowers are without fragrance.
You hammer the alphabet nails into her
brain. Her little thumb and index finger
waver on a hard pencil.
She can’t install her mind in the classroom
as her Barbie lies uncared at home. Your
refrains die in her ears. Her mom’s lullaby
lives in her soul.
A naughty classmate pinches her. She wants
to play, ‘elephant – and – mahout’ with her
dad.
Your tale has a head and tail, but no soul.
An impulse-trimmer your dopey ‘don’t’ is.
She wants to sleep in the valley beneath
the breast.
Ten to three’s an inhuman schedule.
Tension termites eat each twitchy day.
Only the skeleton of infancy remains.
First published in The Literary Hatchet by Pear Tree Press, US.
If I were an elephant
I would marry my mahout man
Would fly very high
Up in the blue sky
Then fall down in a skeleton
_______________________________
12/12/2016
The Indian princess that I am
The stars for my earrings
My warm gaze melts the snow
on the Himalayas,
From the water in the ganges
I seek the path of my love
Draped in silk my broken heart
Clutching to my bosom the
Pink Cashmere shawl
I seek from the mahout
The prince’s path
I open my palms seeking
Alms of love, they said to me
“look in your heart of gold”
My heart is not mine
Since the prince passed by,
By the palace of love,
His back turned to me
He left me alone with
His heart of gold
the dust from the sandalwood
i smeared on my forehead
i looked for his name in the
Oranges of the mehandhi
in my hands, from the yellow
of the turmeric on my cheek
I seek his warmth.
with the black of my kajal
i wrote my songs
my prince when he returns
from the seven seas
with the Persian dancers
at his feet
the warmth of Africa he
will bring for me and
love from his heart
heart of gold
and the love that he brings
and the love that i give
so pure like a child
only for him, truest of true
only for him
27 August 2015