BEYOND CHANGE

It slides stealthily in you, the fear
shifting the blame, stoking to run. He said
the wolves are coming. I heard a wailing
sound across the black wall,

I hate you, I hate you. He was crying
and shouting. Why were you so good to
me, why did not you hit me? He started
throwing stones on jasmines –

and then hanged himself with a shoe
lace. Fingerprinting the DNA was inconclusive.
Senseless incarceration, a hidden paranoia,
a tormented soul arrested under the canopy.

Heights, yes heights were responsible for the
fall, for the hurt, for the pain. Could not
stay fearlessly for a long time. Perfection
was the watchword.

Death was the peace.

Satish Verma

MEDITATION

talking of fire and passion
watch a scented pistil
guiding the asteroids, did you

hear the flawless silence
after the cuckoo’s call, an interruption,
a suspended pause, then a

high pitched cascading note, moon
is still hanging out on the western sky,
it is dawn

sun is coming out from the hazel bed
violence must cease
clouds are meditating

Satish Verma

JOTTINGS

there was a tree rose
piercing me and killing me, I thought
it was cheating on me after the sunset
when moon was walking alone

you know what is love
we think different things at the same time
but we are always alone, you do not think,
I think about my god, saying a prayer

to unknow him or keep him alive
he has a debt to pay me back because
I created him what cosmologist would
say was an accident

somebody comes with a strange version
I say, a transgender was also entitled
for his or hers right to love, may be
marrying a deity one day and have free sex

what were you saying about the bait, now
a hapless buffalo will be tied with a rope
put up on a rough terrain to invite the
lion to pounce and make a kill for the benefit of visitors

I am perplexed, do not want to talk,
will watch the moon again, sailing
silently across the blue starry sky
throwing the shadow of dew on my eyes.

Satish Verma

MOVEMENTS

you bring pink roses everyday
from nowhere

with an oblique smile,
some questions have remained unanswered

when I plunge in silence
you won’t stop talking

anger is its own failure
for breaking the door

where was the need for honour
killing of flesh

I will come out of the oblivion
once you pray for the retreat

time was running out for the sky
tornado has started moving

Satish Verma

DOLPHINS

Sometimes I will meet myself
in an unlikely spot
to tie the loose ends of fugitive life.
Run, run I used to tell
my blisters,
you are caught in a bushfire.

I will say, take hold of the moon
and start wiping the stains.
The antelopes, the trees, the rocks
will keep your footmarks alive.

What a crazy idea, I will think
to pretend to be happy.
Gods are sleeping,
vault is broken
and priest has become a thief.

A jab in my back, I am bleeding.
Why not a meaningless word,
a painless wound
would play like dolphins
in my tranquil sea?

Satish Verma

DAY DREAMING

I was tired of reshuffling the stars
in silent night.
Will you come and stay with me
for a while? I will give you
my light years to reach the hurting valley.

Sit down beside me
and rest your head on my drooping shoulders.
Together we will cross the dark river
of doubts conversing with fireflies.

You are carrying my unborn children
in your deep thoughts.
Flesh, blood and bones
pain between the ribs
and arrhythmic throbs.

Small pebbles on the beach
we are dreaming an ocean in our eyes.
Waves are high and wind is strong.
We are ready to drink the blue sky.

Satish Verma

GOLDEN THRONE

There was a belief in street sense
for an extended purpose
of fire-eating.
Shadow of past was condensing
into future.
The ascending serenity had pockmarks.

Meeting your assigned killer,
in a dark alley for forgetfulness;
earth was ready to disown you
and the warriors were waiting
for an ambush.
But you wanted to enter the no man’s land of understanding.

There was a suicide
from the edge of a rock. I am.
Eyes were swelled with tears,
washing the feet which were immersed in flowing blood.
They hunted for the bones
to built a golden throne.

Satish Verma

AGONY

Let me douse this flame
with tears.
My nightingale will sing no more.

Ringed by dragons,
I decide to tie knot with a tempest.
When the birds start dying

the frightened choir becomes dumb.
I wait for the butterfly effect:
the thought was deeper than pain.

Tension arises. I see the face
of a moon. Bound but free.
My security starts a guilt. It was immoral.

The forgetful, yellow bones of
a thin father, with a gift to fathom
the flute, takes hold of the wind.

Satish Verma

WHO WAS SEEKING THE LIGHT?

Your insistence to become
something, to overstay existence
was not fair.

On a row of white shrouds –
holding innocent beings,
death was walking barefoot, crying.

Between farewell and stupidity,
staccato, shooting questions to life.
What was the need for this achievement?

Fear was turning you against me,
to abandon the peace. Truth cannot be repeated
again and again. It becomes a lie.

No body knows how to bury
the deception. It is still dark.
Who was seeking the light?

Satish Verma

FREEDOM AT LAST

The tears have washed my sins.
Taming the dead,
I start a vivisection
of myths.

I take an impromptu walk,
go inside my weaker self,
abandon the pretention
and come face to face with the fear.

No portrait, no symbol,
no map was needed.
I was going to open a locked attic
to liberate the imprisoned past.

O colossus,
O my golden bird,
my sun baked grief has ripened
in ruins of desires. I am free.

Satish Verma

EVOLUTION

you took out the kidneys, lungs
and stomach, from slain truth’s
body. My bête noire, the lies.

Do you smell the stink? You make
yourself, you are not your id.
The urge to take a flight was very strong.
Groins aching for the heroic jump.

Legs amputated, the tragedy, swims
like a fossil truth in the sea, under
the layers of centuries.
Man has not changed, cheated of the death.

Satish Verma

LAKESCAPE

After the rain wets the ground,
a damp, naked silence,
floats in air
on the wrong side of the moon.

A strange mist, like a post coital whiff
envelops you savagely.
The testa breaks.
A forest heaves beneath your nails.

History moves through the layers
of family. You become a forgotten saint,
an archaic reminder of half-solid
truth. Green mirrors reflect a fading sun.

Wasps are climbing on a presence,
for a kill. A lake drifts in the yes
to stun the departure. You breathe
death dreaming a blue flower.

Satish Verma

BROODING

Me and my pride,
me and my hurts.
Who are you, which you are not,
a verbless statement of nirvana?

No pain
no asking, narcissism.
A stream of unbecoming.
Eyes wide open
jaws tightly shut,
sitting in a corner, brooding,
brooding.
Now what?

A stunning duplicity,
a surrogate god
was running an empire.
Precisely polygamous
on the name of a latter saint
annihilating the third image.

The future demands its past,
its mode of becoming endosperm
in a sleeping leaf.

Satish Verma

SICK TIMES

And how shall we trace the
trajectory of a lungless scream
coming out of a slit throat?
Time was overrun by gnostic
resentment in absolute mind.

The fury of a gathering food riot:
do you hear the memorial rising,
rising –
on bones of hunger, swollen eyelids?
Soon they will meet on the bellies.

The fumigation starts, of lies
a bactericidal, to wipe out the germs
in dumb minds. The prognosis failed,
life moves in a tunnel, absent
and present!

Satish Verma

PACEMAKER

Hunger comes back like a dagger
on face. With iris and fingerprints.
Live, fluttering butterflies, stuck
on lampshades. Wrecked, frozen, the ending
of seeming. Men in cages.

They were diluting the culture.
Chlorophyll siphoned off. No color,
no sprouts. The roads were dirty
with the ultimate truth, quarreling with the
water, insanity and vertebrae.

The creamy stuff, shouts and pants,
shunting the definitions. People come
and go from the paintings. There is no age bar.
Spring will be released from the impulses
of flesh in naked zones.

Ideas become pacemaker, for the ailing
heart of polity.

Satish Verma

AN ACID RAIN

This is it, I want to say.
An acid rain falling each evening
and you, reading a poem
surrounded by flame – attendants.

Nothing moves farther than activism.
Conversation centers around the flares
on the surface of an orange sun,
a big hole coming up in the ozone layer.

You are an ocean, needs penetration
of inquiry. Running a relay race in
a big cage to keep the torch
burning. Clouds in the sky

objecting to full moon, coming up,
nonchalantly. Landscape rips – off
the ideas from the thorn
in the heart.

Satish Verma

INWARD JOURNEY

And the lineage of existence
does not fade.

I try to wipe off, the heavy showers of
death, daily.

The pains were rising, in every word,
in every talk.

As part of nothingness, I was trying to find
happiness.

Put the shadows down, touch the questions
again.

The mentor wants blood, truth was in body,
small seeds of life.

Wrapped up, dry, cryptic, to suck at the
fears of birth.

You are becoming a tree, roots, branches, leaves
against a serial killer.

Satish Verma

BREAD OF A MOON

For little grains of truth,
listening to intuition
he disrobed – and walked into river
to die.

In the footsteps of silence
to eat bread of a moon
facing the onslaughts of life.

Death walks in stealthily,
pays the price of hunger
to the ruins of a fortress.

Satish Verma

OF PERSONAL GOD

Ready to dismember the red geraniums
rains had no mercy.
Thunder did not show any preference
and hails had felled the pride
of tall grass.

Denuded, the hungry man
walked towards liberty.
Moral tapestry in scape after scape
cried,
the mystery endured the cradle –

Of personal god.
But I bled my truth in wilderness
to impose the religion,
of a non-believer,
for obedience to natural laws.

Talking to divine
brings relief. The direct, face to face
confrontation, for a twig of faith.
I pick up the seeds
for the sake of eternity.

Satish Verma

BABY GOD

Carrying my words in a small jewel box
I was listening to silence
of falling rain,
to heal my truth.

A blueberry moon
was peeking from behind the hills.
Crazy clouds
started a celebration.

Sometimes you want to stop
in your tracks and look back
with doleful eyes. Was it important to collect red roses,
suicide notes, purple robes for seeking liberation?

The baby god I wanted to laugh with,
does not smile anymore.
His tinkles lie buried in heap of dust
in your skinny heart.

Satish Verma

CROWD AT THE MORGUE

A new planet was taking birth.
Stem cells were coming out of
obedience to carnality.
For resuscitation from kiss of death
faith was at its best in its witchcraft.

Complete blood count failed,
to diagnose the strange madness.
It was a whirling chemistry.
The transmitters merely took in
the sin, the insanity.

A huge crowd collected at the morgue
to collect the severed limbs,
after the death of a sun.
Picking the scars of dark
and slaughtered tomorrow.

The rage of sunrise will come back.
One day the clouds will burst open. Yes
the death will come as a bride.

Satish Verma

BONES OF WINDS

Inside, the battle wages.
One step down,
I drown myself in the frowns
of a thought. Night sucks at my fear.

The rhyme of the fading moon
intends to fix me up.
I refuse to smell the breath
of the catch.

I bloom on the pain,
sweetened kill of the day. An empty jump
in void of a portrait;
shaking wall.

Watercolors were ruined
by smudging the reasons.
Clutching the bones of winds, falling
from the sky.

Satish Verma

ACOUSTICS ARE NOT WORKING

Maimed, tortured for love of resistance
this night appears to be
without an end.
There was nothing to lose,
it was looking for some reason
to die on the side of a cloud
when the sickle moon was sailing.

Tomorrow a new lie will be born.
Even a suicide bomber
will be tossed around,
like a new coin.
Weaving a dress of skin and bones
in the little sky of so many
purple birds.

Acoustics are not working
walls have no doors.
By night only a torch will be moving.

Satish Verma

ONE HUNDRED MOONS

On the battle turfs of a vernacular
hunger, the hikes were killing
the uncertain values. Committing suicide
was a regular feature.

To pay off the debts of a flag.
By using pesticides on unsuspecting
guests of tomorrow.
The clocks were set one century back.

What could be done of an anonymous
terror bomb placed in a lunchbox?
Do we wait for an accident?
Who will open it?

All summer, one hundred moons
I will wash your face
to read the command.
Who had put the stiletto in your hand?

Satish Verma

BLACK HOLE

Will you walk with me
on the banks of a silent and invisible river?
Not paleowater eating the earth
but a collider, flowing in conscience.

One more dip with epidural
to stay away from awakening,
to start climbing on the burning tower
of truth.

Planting lethal swords in the hands
of earthlings. The essence of memory,
throws counter-questions. Strange happenings.
I am afraid of a black hole.

Satish Verma

FROM THE CHERRY BLOSSOMS

Not asking, was most difficult, from
the magma, to send a hot spring. It was
a classical translation of the pain in winter
of human spell, in a temple festival.

The space widens between us, between
our thighs and absences, while studing
the red roof of the landscape, where blood
had dripped from the cherry blossoms.

I say to mother earth, where the border
begins between your breasts and foeticide.
Warriors were becoming monks or priests
were learning the art to kill.

This road is not going anywhere.
The interval between matter and time
links to movement of grief. The ahead
is tomorrow under siege. Sun is refusing
to melt the snow on mountains.

Satish Verma

ARCHIVES

Fear of a mound,
tumbling down
on the half-buried, half dead
archives of desires, comes
like a stampede of hoops on my chest.
I lie alone in a desert of insanity.

From the sea of agony
one dropp of salted tear,
the title of a wasted life, brings
the blood stained truth.
I want to wash my eyes again.

To watch the autumn leaves falling
on impeccable stones
for forgiveness.
We were not the fruits.

A song of blind water
enters the earth
to kiss the roots,
foo giving liberation from
sun leaked night.

Satish Verma

WINDS

Trapped in your body
a city starts
screaming.

The master has broken off
a huge iceberg.

An Antarctica is burning
like hermitage
from the spark of a red robe.

Lips are riddled
with lies.
No face is left
to smile.

Ruthless with the words
and meanings,
they have manipulated the winds.

The puppets
have come to stop
in complete silence.

Satish Verma

SUICIDE NOTE

One day you will arrive.
Night will enter in your pores,
in your bones,
like a baby trapped in a borewell,
crying, striking,
thumping.

On each table, salt moaned
for a classical taste.
A pink moon was smothered
in a virgin bed.
Death walked in a sensual style.

A black discharge continued
from the areolae.
Botox failed to uplift
the sagging breasts.
A thallium capsule broke on tongue.

There was no suicide note.

Satish Verma

ANAPHYLACTIC SHOCK

Night was descending
on the tonsured heads,
terracotta robes,
clasping the palms, hiding the seeds
of earth.

Against a ban on lips
for belonging truly.
Blissful. The squids settle in the weeds
of overbrimming sea of arms.

Blood was red, brown and pale.
oozing from the slit eyes,
soaking the green voices, herbs and sad kisses.
In the death, your name will be engraved on your shoes.

The steps were small
but shadows were very long on the ice.
The stings unflawed, did their job.
Suddenly you go
in anaphylactic shock.

Satish Verma

A VERY HURT POEM

Last night
moon was following me
discreetly,
skirting behind the trees.

A white splendor
drips,
like a dropped coin
on poor’s hand.

Did you see the blood
on roses?
The petals were wounded
in rain.

Casual violence
spreads in the streets.
I write a very hurt
poem.

Satish Verma