on a publisher's table

On this fine morning
A Publisher has a poem on his table
He also has two of his cheques bounced
And hundreds of others left blank and due
For those failed writers.

Still he is having a happy breakfast with birds.
And with reason!
Just paid back his nine months' dues to the printer
Far away in Tamilnadu.

Looking so sharp and beautiful,
The poem on his table, an ordinary one,
never had expected the publisher to take a look at it.
But it could see through a veil of its own stiffening rhyme
The deadly investment of a mad woman's time

Suddenly the publisher brainstormed
With that romantic old poet's lines
Yes, that too with reason!
Those scholarly fathers of the country
Once had taught us those lines like scriptures and reforms, you know
He thought to reprint the virtuous old poet,
That's doing a classic job!
But that's in vain, reported those grandsons when contacted.
Their romantic grandfather had already given the sole rights
To the best available sales man at door, in his very own poetic lifetime.

Looking so sharp and beautiful,
The poem on publisher's table,
But it could smell in his briefings,
The deserted sigh of a language

The publisher these days does not talk to his wife
Or teach his son any arithmetic
But waits for a poem to fill their gap
He doesn't publish his photo
But dreams to own a newspaper to advertise him

Looking so sharp and beautiful,
Poem on his table,
But it could taste the publisher's happy meals,
illustrated with plenty of pictures
And there he sits filling all post-dated cheques
with hellish confidence in his 'exotic cookery' series.

At last with a thump in heart
the publisher touches the poem on his table.
It looks so lovely to him
He licks it with love
He bloats its poetic buds with a move
And drops his hot tears on the best of all its stanzas

Who knows?
Poetry was the woman he loved most in life.

Courier

'Ustad Bismilla Khan' sent me a courier.
It was the latest grown yam in his courtyard.

He plucked it
washed its dirt off
On a restless morning

Enclosed in hardboard boxes
One inside the other
Covered further in newspaper
Pasted all ends with cello tape,
Again
Covered in a bigger box
Addressed to my name,
Scribbled with mobile number
As if from a concert
He got up content within.

By chance,
there is an axe-mark on the yam
It watered itself in strange pink
And my wet palm here
Is so scratching with an unknown pain
Till it reaches here.

At last
On a lonely day
It reached to me.

Having washed off its dirt again,
Yes. Just out of a habit,
Kept among handsomely other yams
Tomatoes and drumsticks in my fridge

Taken out as if nothing happened
I made a delicious yam fry.
How painful was life for me, you know?

I'm fed up of this 'Ustad Bismilla Khan'.

Men with eyes and cameras

Once there was a lovely man and a girl
They met everyday on the riverside
in those lonely tunnels.

Man planted an eye on the girl each day

Man’s eyes, you know
Fell like rose apples on her nipples
What a heaven!
Each eye opened at the other end of it to her
A world so cumbersome
For her little nipples, but
Eyes fell on forehead
On nose tips
On lips and necks
On fingers and navels
On the tip of her mind so sprouting

All the time they were disturbed by men with camera
Who suspected life in the lonely tunnel
Men with camera always told stories
But they never gave the girl an eye, even for fun sake
She couldn’t wander across mountains and see
The strangely bitten moon in the sky

Men with camera informed the world
That here is a girl in unwanted shape
She simply borrowed eyes from lovely man
And she is looking back at the world and cursing

In fact men with camera didn’t know her language
From the lonely tunnels

Men with camera reported:
At last the terror is over.
The girl is blind, with a lovely man’s eyes on her nipples.