THE WAIT

No more venom for me. My throat is full
and sore is spurting.
King cobra, take rest. You must be tired
after going for so many bouts.
Sleep well. I have to wake till eternity.
The time is running out and I am ready
for judgement.
A miracle has happened in the hungry eyes.
God helped them to hang with folded hands.
Nobody cried for dead.
Spates of suicides told it verbatim..
Names of victims were engraved
on painted boards.
Souls were covered with innocent songs.

A brutal wind blows. Everything
looks normal and serene.
Dirty lanes are again full of trembling
legs in wait for the handouts.

Satish Verma

SUDDENLY SO!

Your truth always happened at wrong time
You were guilty of telling lies to death.
Swimming all over the life’s ports,
jumping up and down in a stinky swamp,
one day you were caught behind the epigram
encysted in perversity.

Let us talk about the frosty relations
breaking the norms.
Who is afraid of impromptu love?
We do not want to speak about the wasted
years thrown on garbage.
Every book was tossed out of the window,
mind became hollow.

We lit the candles with tears,
the mist enveloped us in intimacy.
Some of the days burned like dry wood
and some days grave-diggers arrived.

Satish Verma

AHAM ASMI... *

Night melts into tears,
day sums up the pain.
A fear stalks the flute,
and darkness falls on the drapes.
I was lake,
and I was sun.

I held you on to my breast.
give me your fangs,
and give me your venom.
I am blue and I am the death.

Centuries of wounds
and millions of scars.
Silence of sky,
and lull in the clouds.
I am the storm,
and I am the gale.




* I am... I exist...

Satish Verma

HIERONOMO! *

A sin between us
transcends hidden paths.
I start digging endless questions.

What was that interminable and esoteric?
Give me a clue. Lift your hand
and write the name of the recluse.

I am connecting to unknown
for the answer.
we are all guilty here.

Do not wait for me
I have steered the boat
towards the rapids.

Without time a half moon
will shift
And I will weep for the fallen saint.

Begging for the words
beseeching the pernicious wounds
I will go in hysteria.



* The protagonist in Spanish Tragedy of Kyd.

Satish Verma

SYSIPHUS

Let it go, do not touch it,
you had been negating the bare truth.
I was part of you
once at the shore of tragedy.
Life was treacherous
and I was free to laugh.

Come September and I will be chasing
the fireflies again.

How time takes revenge
from the innocent commitments?
You start returning to your roots
and I was still surfeiting
on the secret fidelity.

Where was the need to be tied down
to god? No body was honest to forsake
the fear of nameless nemesis.

The myth of rock still haunts.
Water still boils under the clay.
Petals fly in dark alleys
and I cannot find the door.

Satish Verma

A YEARNING

If hate was becoming an absolute truth
and love was transcending lies
where do we go now?

This daily life, I was seeing
the pain of troubled identity,
turning into punishment of unbecoming.

The hired untruths
are killing the tender doubts.
No body wants to look back
at the subscribers of violence.

Be my friend.
Let us go for a pilgrimage into past,
for a sacred bath.
Uncovered and naked
in the hot spring of madness.

At last we will take the heat of sun
in open sky,
manipulate the wind metaphorically
and sleep in our bodies.

Satish Verma

PHEONIX

Let us not cry for the fallen statue.
he is still alive and writing his own epitaph.
Eagles sitting on tall branches
will wait for the prey.

Why did he fake for a genius
running the lives of millions
toward the gates of heaven?

Do you think the quality of question marks will suffer
when answers remain incarcerated
in a system with flawed satisfaction?

I am going to die of shame
being only a bystander, in this bleak times.
Every day a murder of a blue chorus
is being announced.

Let me sing a new tugging anthem
sweet in my heart
harsh on my tongue.

Tonight a full moon will make me weightless
and I will be orbiting like an earth
around a burning name.

Satish Verma

THE PROTO...

Today the poem was still on the brink
of completion,
but never came to an end.
The whole day it was burning
in restless mind
and I looked down from a hopeless height.

No further movement of thoughts,
only dizziness.
I craved for a clear vision
between retinal haemorrhages.

Was it a hara-kiri?
I cannot move the pen.
Being half or complete
what was right?
There is no completeness,
only recalls of piecemeals.

Hiding behind excuses and myths,
failed to go for vivisection.
Or life failing to talk to death.
One day
I will pay for closing the door.

Satish Verma

A CIRCLE WITH AN OUTSIDECENTRE

After drawing a self-portrait,
I want you to believe
that I am not in it.
The style of rebellion cannot be judged by
blurbs only.

A chunk of refusal,
a narrow escape,
and thin veiled hysteria,
all go for a parody of exactness,
which had been really absent from our lives.

Can you find out
who is betraying whom?
where the tears are migrating?
And where the smiles have gone?

Instead of brutalizing,
I care for the tender torches
moving in the dark bush.

A precise definition is needed
for self-denial of molten lava
which moves like a river
but does not grab the heights.

Satish Verma

KAHE RI NALINI TU KUMLAHNI...*

When glacier recedes,
Your eyes start flowing,
and by the swollen river
an island is swallowed up.

You swim from the lake to the shore
of grief to err again.
Water was your home,
water is your life.

Soft marble swells up in deep crevices
of brain, shaking the foundation of
thoughts, naked as it is.

The fog sleeps on the sea for eternity.
The wrath of sky will burn the skeletons
buried in sand.
Summer will bring the violence.

You cry for forgotton greens,
and kelp and sailing ships
full of hops.
When the hymn recedes,
your eyes start flowing.




* A line from one of Kabir’s famous poems which means ‘O lotus! why thou witherest thus...’

Satish Verma

BYANTIUM -2

Long night will start the pincer movement;
pyrexia is rising.
Something like an extraterrestrial hand
digs deep in the mind to open the tomb
to unravel the tragedy of nuts and bolts
which could not fix
the mutation of the hour of death.

Dark blinking lashes of soul
measures the cliffs of silence
and then pours the hot red
vermilion in parted wisdom of sky.

The clang of bones again penetrates
the liver. The green flaming jelly of
innocent bellies.
The hyacinth is choking the village pond
hiding the corpses of precious flowers
with green blood.

One day foundation of skeletons will build a
temple of hope.

Satish Verma

NO, NO I'M NO OVID!

A useless space between the sentences,
ghastly story does not end in black and white.
Again the heart cries.
I keep on knocking on the doors
and then return to blackness.

Sometimes people become insects.
Cockroaches, ants and spiders,
weaving their webs and hills,
crawling, creeping, clawing.
Flesh eaters. Pouncing upon hapless victims.

Depression. I am devastated.
Something churns in breast, dousing the spirit, lines and words.
Cannot sit quiet. Agoraphobia. Don’t want to talk.
Somewhere a name crops up. Saint or beast.
Under the trees there is no shade. I walk barefoot.
Hungry dogs chasing the flies.
Humidity fills the eyes.

Silence of the night.
City has stopped running.
All the dead will speak now.
Not asking any revenge,
but peace for the living people.

Satish Verma

DELIVERANCE

Have not asked much,
still attached to you with subtelities,
I wanted freedom from you,
For removing stings from the flesh.

Anxiety was the darkest color
of floating buds on lake.
Sitting on the edge of panic,
I started counting the waves.

Mixed emotions always subtract a smile.
Just lonely, I went for the swim in rimless agony.
Have not heard much of you in ages.
Still memories crop up for a while,
I wanted nemesis from you.

Talking of blue and white clouds
love has many moods.
Devastated by a burning moon
I was wishing a watery burial.

Satish Verma

THE PENULTIMATE DILEMMA

I must not go beyond sunset
to discover the consciousness of night,
Standing alone on a cliff
I was ready to jump for salvation
atoning for guilt of survival.

My regret was time
and timeless suffering.
Where was the maturity of age?
Mind must go for the beloved ones
for a virginal touch of flawless blaze.

They should have come to join the prayer
not for me, but for the dying sun,
and white valley of fears.
Half my tongue sings for the shade
and half I cry mutely.

Satish Verma

HEMLET BY CHOICE

I was not capable of
contradicting the quietness.
A silent emotion was insulting me.
Forgetting the self-denial
I went for choosing the impossible.

Am I sick of myself?
The agony overwhelms me with mystic relief.
Here and now I feel the human spirit
outsmarting the gifts of revenge
in the eyes of past.

No hope of breeze. It is hot inside,
the spirit burning. False peers
were scoring with debts of darkness.

Tiny ideas crowd the mind
flying straight through the mist of anguish
I elect to be nothing.

Satish Verma

RESSURECTION

The wind writes a name on the clouds
and sun wipes out the letters.
This game continues daily.
coming into life after every death.

Exhausted I want to believe
and make up my mind to go
for a new birth.

The resentment has accumulated
all the life
against the futility of winning a race.
In the end you reach no where.

A void impossible to fill.
The years monitored, lay waste
something to die.

Satish Verma

A PEEP WITHIN

I woke up clutching the dreams
in deluge of tears.
Night had a brackish taste,
the other side of moon was dark.

One by one the stars were dying
ideas were no longer candles in gale.
The final thought of liberation demanded
a tribute to partners in revolt.

I wanted a sunlit corner
in the blighted sky of hopes.
Instead of scorched impulse of a mob
injured truth, walking alone.

Give me a bitter fruit of certainty.
I don’t want to loose myself in fogs.
The truth must meet the lie-
alone, in woods of craft.

Satish Verma

LEAR AGAIN...

It was not worth it.
Building of castles on the dirty roads.
Offering spiritual coalition
of unscented certainties.

Admission of reversing the course of river
does not exonerate.
Mind polluted, face dripping with fantasies
clairvoyance, but confirming nothing.

Quasi-tales mingling with facts
take you to summer of hopes.
You are not here. I feel a cheap anonymity.
Charred body, clayey hands building a tomb.

Frond unfurling from the stump
gives a clue, without plea.
Rising from nothingness
to unending nothingness.

Satish Verma

SWINGING....

I did not will them
dreams of crystals
a stupid calendar of flight
from insomnic past.

Do not want to return to future,
hub of my clouds.
History had been writhing and screaming.
Present cannot redeem my woes.

I ask my bleak, frosted branches
where the birds have gone?
The songs, green hills, divine particles?
When they will enter in frozen affairs?

Anti-matter is now colliding with black energy
I am faltering a rhythm.
helplessly watch a xenomorphic face
disappearing in the blue sky.

Satish Verma

RAAS! *

The evening opens a wound,
a secret agony.
It neither heals nor gives solace.
The sacred whore who liberates herself
from the flesh.
Sun is pink and ashamed.

A crescent moon thought it was time
to step outside and find out the truth.
Night was willing to participate. She
wrote a message on the sky
as a survivor of a slaughter.

And now the paths of winds trace
a faded destiny of earth. It had
nothing to offer, till the god of hopes
comes in purple light and the jasmines,
open their dancing eyes.

Satish Verma

IN THE GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE

I tossed back the hot questions
before searching the answer.
Flaming torso of a limbless man
was seeking a place to rest his soul.

I inhale the death’s pungent odour
so opiating and so brutal.
Burning train chokes the windows
calmly, billowing the ebony smoke.

Cries mingled with whistling men,
haggarded infants were stupefied.
Grass was their pillow and stone
was the bed.

Courage was needed to write a poem
to fill the vast emptiness of a long night
without moon, when human torches
were throwing the light.

Satish Verma

HOME COMING... HYPOTHETICS

I will make amends with me today,
stop fighting with myself.

Unthinkable to live without pain,
in war with suffering.

Quietly cries the flame without sound.
While night lingers on.

Nothing was easy for a quick resignation
of ephemeral tears.

Again love opens like a senile gash,
a chandelier suddenly crashing.

Going back to old city, blowing the limbs off
I will find my house.

Trying to search a clue to the colour of wound?
Catch my style.

I will remain in your thoughts for eternity.
Was not I your hoary past?

Satish Verma

SONG OF THE LAST SIREN

Somewhere in between slumber and arousal
the twilight zone scoops a fistful of memories.
Atrophied limbs. Mottled skin. A cancerous face haunts.
Not afraid but I am anxious. Life has not yet ebbed away.
I scramble for sparks, my hands burn.
Very disquietening!
The severed bones in a heap.
They wanted to appease the goddess,
the gnomes were dancing in a circle.

The land, the country is breaking, sky is falling.
Run, run for cover.
I scream in a dream.
Are we disintegrating? Disappearing?
A black hole is calling?
The mega truth has been broken into myriad fragments,
We are now thinking in chips, holding our own mirror.
Show your mirror to your truth. Future is fogging the past.

Come hither my child of sorrow.
We are old tribe. We will keep our pledge
to maintain fidelity towards verses of sadness, evening, night,
stars and dust. The sparkles will die one day. Only the moon
will rise on the dead bodies. Where will you like to go?

Amongst the ruins, walking straight back to the treasure-trove
of ancient wisdom.
Wake up
Bells are chiming.

Satish Verma

BODHISATTAVA

For the sake of lake, I climbed
on the weeping hills
to see the other side of moon.
The precipice of hunger weighs heavily
on shoulders.

Capricious time moves inwardly,
Strikes at the chest.
I set free the love-birds.

Conflict of trees tramples the grass
All summer the smell of dry winds
was scorching tear drops.
Every word was crying.

Dark in my city
I am wandering alone in alleys
of hostile homes.
The collective guilt of the flesh
blazes the mind.

Satish Verma

NINTH SYMPHONY

A scented moon caves in
on a tree top
and solitude withers up in a seminal cloud,

It is good to be friendless sometimes.
Me and homecoming become synonymous.

We are ruined by familiar paths.
The mist deepens.
Not reaching anywhere.
I come out in dark to find the stars.
What will you do if the soul sneaks out of a body?

The wind starts a dirty dance.
A tall cedar scowls.
It starts raining,
fabulous as tears on an immaculate face.

Pull up the veil.
It separates the truth.
Do not filter the pain.
We may find a god.

Satish Verma

SUBSTANTIAL SHADOW

Walking on dead leaves covering the grass
to and fro, to and fro in solitude, hiding
behind the mask, pithy face, ideas rebounding,
a loaded eloquence, opening a diaglogue with self,
quietly bleeding inside. You are hearing
the sounds of winged carnivores who had been
devouring your brain cells. The time is ending,
death has no relevance, no respect for the survival,
insulting the existence, anguish overtaking
the joy of new born, lifted by a fog.
We are reciting the hymns now, lighting the lamps
to see the stains on the walls. The bronzed
sculpture refuses to come down from the pedestal,
afraid to go to a warehouse, to the lonliness.
A shadow moves away from the light, makes its own
length and buries in unconsolable sadness.
Pure eyes in which float the tears of million people.
Dying lips will always narrate a tale of abandonment,
will not be able to say adieu.

Satish Verma

TANTALUS

Tonight a dark force enters my room
I will play with planets to decide
the course of my destiny.
A future has been tied to my past.

Such pain, strange exorcism, the evil spirit
stains the bed.
When I squeeze the eyes
fog deepens.
It hides the treasure of subtle creation.

Every thing is turning into black energy
I stop thinking.
A pretention of kindness, and monumental grace play
to stop the suicide after loss of
standing harvest.

The hope has been abducted
for a ransom of a child.
There is rape of a classical painting.

Corridors of power resound with promises
styles smashed, seeds thrown
randomly on the land of guilt.
We will wait for the showers to come.

Satish Verma

A TRUE DECEPTION

Going to shake my inner world.
Inconsolable is the loss
of faithful truth.

Echo of past comes between the knockings,
some one shoves a semblance of a riot,
death is not a ceremony any more.

Slowly, dark breast of night
will feed the moon.
Air will kiss the lips of fire
and loneliness will take over the heart.

Not sure of the pattern, and my existence
first I must look beyond the self
and find out the forbidden belief.
I think I don’t trust myself.

From the smouldering psyche
the muse always runs out
falling between vision and confusion.
Sweet ephemeral strife
always in toe.

Satish Verma

THE RED ROCK...

Give me some time
to live, with the possibility
of oscillating between temporal and spiritual feel.
I have already exhausted my age
behind the spiked doors.

I was longing
to meet myself today,
to find the throw back.
Which of me was real?
An antique bird feeding on honeydew?
Or a honed up desert hurricane?

A tremendous impact with retribution
pulls down the unbowed towers.
But the spirit screams in dark
and a light glows from the debris
true to seal the kisslock of death.

The century will still march forward
arranging the years in neat rows
at burial ground of memory.
The walls are still standing.

Satish Verma

REMEMBERING ADAM!

No cure seems to work.
Between absurd and wise,
Lone he walks.

It is a note on the timidness
of a star, which couldn’t come near the earth.
On the slope of a crater, a boulder
stopped it.
No laughter seems to amuse him,
sullen and depressed,
lone he walks.

Genes take a giant leap,
he could not break the fall.
Brick by brick the fort crumbles,
a black halo fills the canvas.
Now carnations will not bloom,
and time will die with the clocks.
Lone he walks.

Duplicity was the word or tragedy,
Transparency got mutilated.
some of the sufferings could not come to the surface.
Both waves and boat collapsed,
Lone he walks.

Satish Verma

REGENERATION

Why it should happen
the parting of ways?
Between the will to arrive
and the goal?

Between the unlearning and contempt,
lies a tale.

Terror. Petrifying fear ……….,
doggedly I was defending the door.
Inspite of the terrible blows
I wanted to be myself only.
Reverse, the wheels were turning
aghast I was turning blue.
God! They were creating him new.
As I remember now
they were melting the rocks to make a new face.
I have swallowed the flame, like pride.
melting the iron in eyes.

I shall soon become a tree
with unborn flowers.
Some sorrow, some tears
will drench my roots.

Satish Verma