Plantation escape
Wasting no time
Being a Slave for too long
Through the swamps, bayou, and rivers
Throwing plantation dog owners off
Through forbidden territories
Sea creatures of all kinds in not being their prey
Darkness falls with a continuation run
Rest only for a brief pause
Distance far and freedom to gain
Shall not surrender to be bound
Eyes from Heaven surround with their gestures
Shall being determined
The Night Stars encourage and enrich the inner soul
Tomorrow is a new day
Beaten no more
Tormented wounds heal
Anguished beyond words
If I who will
Unknown forest where danger lurks
Freedom shall rise
This Slave will no longer bend
Freedom’s end
Retreating to a Slave’s new world.
The bureaucracy of being
Can’t remember my ID
Passport data is short living
Your Police Supremacy
Choose one of the empty pages
Put your stamp and let me come
If I look disadvantageous
Kick me off to where I’m from
Passport sings your best folk song
Passport makes the man
It reveals where you belong
Who are you to them
It’s the world of nations, countries,
Guardians of the universe
I was taught to understand this
But foreseeably dispersed
It’s the world of great traditions
Sacred territories, man!
My feigned ignorance is suspicious
As their curious concern
Passport is my entropy
Passport opens gates
Or it keeps them closed for me
Cos I book no dates..
The morning sighs
with hoarse, guttural caws.
Crows twirl and cartwheel backwards,
like charred scraps of newspaper
caught in wild feral, wind eddies
above a raging bush fire.
Goosestepping gulls
enforce their feeding-ground territories
with threats and violent gestures
their beaks snapping shut
like rust-corroded, iron gates.
Looping caterpillars
form a Congo line
across the blistered bark of trees
while ants drag dismembered wings
along cracks in the pavement.
A magpie bludgeons
a snail against the stones
until the shell gives way
its pale body spilling outwards;
a molluscan sacrifice
that satisfies the hunger pangs
of a black-and-white starving bird.
Worms writhe blindly,
torn asunder
on the hot sunbaked soil
attacked by hordes of bull-ants
lake tiny matadors in torero corrida,
sparing with capes and lances
as they torment the helpless,
doomed, and dumb, succumbed prey.
The morning sun rises,
guilty as charged!
without pity or cause,
without mercy or motive,
to silent, stark applause,
as nature pleads for survival.
Atlas: "There are so many known territories everywhere in the world that start with "a," "d," "n," "w," and "s." And these are just some of the places where you can find and test your powers."
Axis : "Why these places?"
Atlas: W A N D S !
Silence is never singular,
it has dialects,
territories,
weather systems of its own.
The silence before dawn is porous,
still learning its edges,
a word in the mouth
before the tongue decides.
The silence after loss is architectural
rooms rearranged by absence,
the specific gravity of an unmade chair,
a name that hangs in the throat
like a bell no one has struck.
The silence between old lovers has its own syntax:
a glance that carries forty years of freight,
the palm resting on a wrist saying everything grammar cannot hold.
And the silence I court here
the white space between intention and word
is the most dangerous:
it asks me to trust the not-yet,
to let the poem remain water before it learns the shape of whatever vessel I am.
These silences do not speak the same language.
They share only the name the way all thresholds share the name door,
and yet each one opens onto a different dark.
I have learned the language of water
how it speaks in percussion on tin roofs,
in whispers against windowpanes,
in the slow saturation of earth.
Each drop carries a latitude,
a longitude of sky it fell from,
mapping its descent through cumulus,
through the territories of wind.
The puddles become mirrors of inversion,
where trees grow downward into depths,
and clouds lie trapped beneath our feet
like continents we'll never walk.
I stand at the boundary of wet and dry,
that shifting border where the world
divides itself between the fallen
and the falling, the soaked and soon-to-be.
And in this interstitial space,
I am neither sheltered nor exposed,
but something in between, a witness
to the patient rewriting of the land,
one syllable of water at a time,
each one a word in an endless poem
the sky has been composing
since before we learned to listen.
Leaving their land of birth
Lions, sages, tuskers go far,
There and there die in home and hearth--
Crows, cowards, herbivores as are.
____________________________
Sanskrit Translation | 18.01.2026 | birth, brave, far, home/hearth, quatrain
Note: Some quatrains called shlokas in Sanskrit are known as Subhaashhitams, words well-said. The brave and brave-hearts venture far from their place of birth and prosper. Those fearful that not, die there and there. The beasts of hunting so brave command lager territories. Those eager to learn go far and get more knowledge and wisdom (sat-purushhaah). Travel was the way in olden days.
Deshan utsrjya gacchanti
sinhaah sat-purushaah gajaah |
Tatra eva nidhanam yaanti
kaakaah kaa-purushaah mrgaah || Subhaashhitam ||
Inside The Music
Symphonies takes hold
Orchestra explodes in waves
Music of this vibration exudes sweetness
Purest of the souls
The glory of the Glorious
A dance into bliss
Drifting to the highest frequencies
Into magnificent territories
Hearing joyous melodies
Feeling massive euphoria
Inside The Music
Where one glides so elegantly
Lovingly becoming the music
Inside The Music
I am..
*Today I am,
The one I never wished,
the one I never treasured,
the territories I never chose to dwell in.
Today I am—nothing much but a selfish one,
Who never thinks of anything that could hurt,
and protects my soul with unwavering guts.
Today I am,
Shaped by endless wars,
yet still walking on my path,
With no regrets,
But unforgettable scars.
I never regret who I am,
But sometimes the laughter of the past echoes in my mind—
Endless chats, never-ending jokes,
Admiring the moon, hugging blankets,
Revealing secrets in the quiet night. **
Yes I have balanced upon this rock
for 75, 85 years causing
negligible quantities
of soil to shift
Daily I wait patiently
on said surface at these familiar
co-ordinates, yet in my time
I visited 75, 85 territories of
the artificially boundaried surfaces
There was some growing, some striving
scant praying, scarce slaying
and my best claim my final
claim is to have left
no trace #pfft#
I stepped on someone's gum
Now I'm part of a nation
I slipped on a paving slab
Now I'm part of another nation
Not that it’s up to my liking
To change nations every day
But I can't argue if there are
So many nations that I don't have time to learn
Which one I'm a part of
At every moment of the day
Whose territories I appear on
And disappear without a care
I don't mean to disturb all that
Importance of power, those dour faces
That we are doomed to notice everyday
I don't mind if anyone is converted
To their familiar religions with those
Cruel gods created by state-minded prophets
In my view all this tormenting world
Was invented on purpose to spoil life
To intimidate us for no other reason
Than power of the immortal troublemakers
Evolution is impossible
Consolations are rubbish
This species is hopeless
Not the first, not the last to become extinct
I’m already gone fishing forever
Once I saw my eternal love’s face in the sky
I wish to become a weed
Growing on by a waterlogged stream.
newspaper business has brought us far
to these territories where desert rivers
descend from huge clouds cultivated
but we live on twisted lips to build
something for those coming in
oh you who love this place
by the tourist book is a man
who loves a woman by
a guidebook of sex positions now
Though you're oblivious to the outside,
You reside somewhere on the inside.
You're a part of me,
I become a turbulent sea.
You arise from the unknown,
You shoot your arrows,
And I bear the sorrows—
These are not seeds I have sown.
You hide in the stygian night,
You carry out your bidding even while I'm in the light.
I fight the unseen,
They remain invisible on the screen.
I journey across borders and into new territories,
I wander through meadows,
Which fall into various categories.
You sometimes emerge from the shadows.
You're my inky self,
Dwelling in depths beyond the pages of a book on the shelf.
I'm a mirror of the strange—
Through the continuum of time, there hasn't been any change.
August 6, 2025.
USPS
A stamp, bought and paid for, is like a receipt
And if stuck on an envelope makes it complete
To start its journey, with the recipient to meet
But never quite a passport, if sent international
Accepted only in USA territories, as is rational
So many designs, as a picture or even a symbol
It will be processed by hand, and also machine
Unless it’s dropped in a puddle, it is kept clean
And it is Washington’s head that once was seen
But now, in many dollar values available to buy
To work out the logic, perhaps just give it a try
But as a form of communication, it is so simple
"Magdalenes and Eves"
Pin the tale on the donkey
there’s something in the way She moves
a harlot by any other name, pages of
Magdalenes and Eves
the ruin of every good world of righteous man
opened doors and gates to new universal territories
before and always will
and freedom was still kept tight
before the flood birthed doves and peace
She stood for what She was worth
bartered, maligned and misunderstood
but a vessel just the same as a floating ark
the screams of newborns doused in innocence
quiet all the senseless noise and call forth
the reason for Her thorny existence -
without the harlot there is no life at all;
a rose by any other name
except that;
all Gods are birthed
from a Woman
and that God is found
within the runes
Candide Diderot. ‘25
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