Pride in Place

Pride denies 
Pride  takes on life
Values itself
At the going rate.
I cannot afford
It's affront to my
Heart.
My heart is a place
Of happiness.

When I'm not seeking looking
Or marking time
Pride is defiant, petty
Wants me to take
Second place
While it roars alive
Its affronted rage
Too proud to appear
Unhappy
Too proud to seek solace
Too proud to admit
It's only
Losing grace.

I wasn't unhappy
Till I tried not to be.
Desperately seeking
Happiness
Trying tested formulae
The doorways so promising
The lock clicks open
And shut
Ali baba's magic cave
With its catch phrase password.
Meaningless pleasure
steeped in
Piquant spiced up meanings.

So one last treacherous embrace
Knaves of gluttony,
My forty thieving friends
your defiant deviance
My alter ego raves
Brandishing such brazen knives Sparkle of nickel cadmium blades.

Undaunted, I dance enmeshed in seven sinful veils
Lust rampant in sulpherous haze
Deception's soft flurry lace
Vanity hiding behind
vapid vacuous face.

Pride's a two faced shrew
It can act so truly
humble and meek
To save face it will even feign
Timid appearances
frail and weak.

The flitting happiness we hustle
To keep
Ostentatiously it's perfume reeks
The pride that pretends not to weep
Forgets what the heart must truly seek.

I am so sure now,
I was better off,
better off than this.
When I was content
To be
In the is.

Much better to crush and shatter
brittle hopes
Vaporize  bawdy
Tawdry dreams
When I look at what could be
And is
Oh existence!
And existence of
consciousness,
I am but a beautiful ravenous kiss
In your peerless timeless
Fleeting breeze.

With no time to spare
On  dubious luxuries
epiphanies and fits
Of futile future bliss.

Blustering red faced hubris
I hunt you down
On your wounded animal pride
I firmly ensconce the thorny encircled crown
Reductionist of life's very scope
Pride you're now disrobed 
A recurring clichéd trope.

And though
Aimals have a right
To lick their wounds
It's only in helpless innocence
If they bleed upon the ground
But arrogance howls
like a defiant wolf
Into the moon's visage.
Shedding blood as its nightly
evil purge.

I am a glass pane to reflect
the world that is
Clear, frosted
Even better when stained
With gorgeous golden joy or
Grapes' passionate purplish hues
pain paints me in such wondrous
Blues
I wouldn't part with these sorrows true
They make earthly kaleidoscopes
Forever beautiful.

(c) Amrita Valan 2015

Golden Words

Oh shucks I'm the devil. We're currently facing planned power outages every evening between 7pm to 8pm.
This is the time while waiting for 8pm lights and dinner we have adapted into each doing our own thing.
I of course fiddle with my cell try to write surf the wildly exciting and impossible net but today baby asked me for a drink because he was "feeling dry!"
I carefully made my way to the kitchen to get him a glass of water correcting his English on the way and realized I couldn't pour water into his narrow necked sipper in the dark.
I asked, "someone fetch my cell please."
Kids were busy rioting with their daddy in the only room equipped with a power box light. Noone answered.
I shouted "can I have a light? water's dripping everywhere!"
No answer except squeals of delight from kids being tickled by daddy.
"Light!!!", I roared.
More squeals and squeaks.
"I need a light", I screamed then waited till a count of 3 and in an ominously grave voice I thundered, "Let There Be Light!"
It was impressive if I say so myself.
I stood waiting for magical things to happen. And they did.
As I finished my thunderous command our entire house was plunged into pitch darkness.
I closed the tap and said cuttingly, "Anto, if this is your idea of a joke then...don't you... Dare!!",  stuttering my indignation.
Anto shone his teeny cell phone torch and looked at me puzzled.  "I didn't
switch off the power box"
Just then baby handed me the little lamp thingy that attaches to the power box.
"Here mamma you said you wanted light, so I unplugged it and brought it to you."
Yes he sure did.
I'm now thoroughly enlightened.
A) I am Not God.
B) God lucked out that saboteur Josh wasn't around to wreck creation when he said let there be light.

I guess golden words should never be repeated.
Perhaps not even by God.

(c) Amrita Valan 2015

Conquistadors Kissing the Sidewalk

Conquistadors Kissing the Sidewalk

Kissing divisive sidewalks
Separating moth eaten
Nightmares and
Dust laden dreams...

Glass slippers in the air
raining cinderella ashes
Slipping off for a fantastic
Tale... hope on hands
Doing freedom cartwheels.

Snap of electric
Stars crackling in my hair
Terse static power
In defiance of gravity
Standing on its head
There's no dreaming grace
No dread reckoning
No redeeming our undead.

Buffer memorials
Toast past regrets
Oases of heaven
Shimmer in silence
Rusty ramshackle
back gates.

Fallen scarred
Martyred starred
Marked for life
With instant body art
lightning tatoos
Tightening nooze
A mother a while
And a while ago
A maladjusted wife.

Scared to death
Why don't we learn
Of late
Reality plays its eclectic score
too subtle too flawed
Too variable
flowing in a steady flood
from under earthquake's floor.

Predictably unpredictable
Eventually everyone
dissembles
Let's play musical chairs
To unseat the disabled. 

Trust is a swear word.
Lets get unplugged
And like thanksgiving turkey
And Halloween pumpkin.
Carve out the inner angst.

What devilish self absorption
What a diva's distortion.
Narcissistic love marries
Agonized angst
Just islands revisited
In a reality show's
Wide screen stance
Some highs
Some lows.
Unjust desserts
Ill timed romance.

On a childhood excursion
Handcuffed to parents
Protection's privileged
Prison, unto the private beach
Of parental sand castles
Of secretive sea shells
Sounding guarded conches
Development of a rich
Variegated interior self
Left undisturbed and
nurturing itself.
A life that's not sacrilege
Nor sacrifice designed for
Global gluttony.

Surreal jutting bones
Drop dead  beauty
Comely cannibal cliffs
Ushering us to the cynical climb
Upto Conical Suicide peak.
The cyclical ritual sacrifice.

Beckoning deep blue bay
Wherein danger lies
froth dancing high
Sunken basin of guilts
And unpaid debts
Our  burdens are ever
What we can't deny.

Your exhilarating evil panic
For the crazed hissing gaze of millions
Bored to death
So will she die?
...
Before or after the break?

Atonement in beauty.
Synchronize with nature.
Arise in simplicity.
Strength in acknowledgement
Certainty reduced to shreds
Capacity derived from
Deprivation of
All control.

The faith in which a soul is blessed
Is a requiem to depravity.
Arousal of soft edged visionary
Wild child of acceptance.

And the fine fellowship of deceptive
Dapper dandies and deliquescent  divas...
In the antechambers of
Valhalla they hold court.

Fake Gods and heroes
Their heir humanity
Drooling indignation
Desirous to be sold to
The highest bidder
Who thumps his chest
Buys the best
And locks art up,
Chaste chattel in his bed.

We must rake their chests
Probing for evidence
Clawing gnawing into somnolent  souls
clueless what hearts
May be.

Maybe in the age of plastic
Hearts became pace makers
pulsating plasma meat
Transgendered trendsetters accelerating hysterical
Entropic beats.

Exploding the notions of
Exploring the realms of boundless
Imaginations
The alms without boundaries
In humble bountiful souls....
Precious precocious
Conquistadors
Seeking cosmic gold.

(c) Amrita Valan 2015

Fume of Sighs

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs
How beautifully ethereal it's music to the ears
Annointing closed eyes with tempered visions
Matchless romance beyond gates of fear

I am entranced to think it today
What might have been could've stayed
It was sweet perfume my innocent bliss
Now the fumes of sighs make night's blue abyss

Yesterday's misty haze proves no lie
Love lies beyond our questions
Above Hows and Whys
It's always been for better and for
Worse
Love creates it's rationale and ambience
Mortally stricken I delved into
My antique shop of
Potpourri
A few free moments I dwell in peace
The portal gleaming a golden arch
My hands lift up the urn with the
Magic powdered pass
Once more before morning
Overtakes us my life
Find me take away the loss
With your bewitching love
Smoke of heaven
Fume of passionate sighs

(c) Amrita Valan 2015

Regarding CM Mamata Banerjee

Our Chief Minister of state. Despite mistakes can't help admiring her simplicity and plainness of living standards. She epitomizes the mindset of many simple motherly hardworking women of our poor state.
We die to welcome in urbanization with the Ratan Tatas and the Nano car but what we don't realize turning our rural brothers and sisters into cheap labor for mass produced tinshell contraptions not worth the money spent or the pollution of our already overclogged roads will ultimately bring about our economy's collapse.
Pushing the green belt further away from city limits increasing the urbanized sectors setting up special economic zones and behemoths of super malls and movie theatres...
What good will it do to you when the cost of food skyrockets and you cant afford EVEN the hybrid GM  fruits and veggies you eat?
Congratulations to the cobbler who could afford the nominally priced Nano and commiserations to an entire generation of free holding farmers who lost their independent livelihoods and evergreen lives.
While a behemoth industrial machine quietly swallowed a 1200 crore rupees loss with ease locked up the factory built on lands bought at laughable prices from the poor and oppressed under the previous corrupt government
(often under threat, by local political big wigs), and decided to punish the non cooperation by building the same factory in another richer state where political conditions are entirely different.
As if the bloodbath of Singur was not punishment enough for those rural folks who had already been coerced into selling their ancestral lands.
Laugh at her if you like she has a finger on the pulse of the poorest of poor and one day the not so rich but comfortably off will realize that industrialization at the cost of environment isn't a blessing but a short lived gain...

Wishes of Shubh Bijoyadashami from a quaint lady with her own peculiar charm, someone who can only happen in West Bengal. And I say it quite fondly.

(c) Amrita Valan 2015

Receding Shores

Receding Shores

The black waves came pouncing
Clammy claws of abject supplication dancing
Ferocious fury controlled
God's hand reaching out...
Wrath
Or despair?

The shore dancing like dying embers setting on the cityscape
Lights twinkling in individual hearths
Sinking one by one
out of sight...
Sleep
Or oblivion?

My eyes wet and darker than darkness
Dreaming about
Flower petals
Inside which my sons'
Shiny sunny faces
Appear
We are swayed by winds
To sweet sleep
In a beautiful grassy knoll
Carpeted by flowers...
Dreams
Or revelations?

My little boy did indeed dream
of being tucked on mommy's lap
Rocked in the center of a flower
Which swayed to the breeze
In zephyr blown
flower strewn fairyland...

And joined two tiny palms
To pray to God, sucking
succulent thumbs in his mouth
That mommy and he
May share and
Meet in dreams...
Now and
Forever?

Oh my little indispensable loves
Don't you know
That your prayer
Is my prophesy?

God has returned the
Tidal waves of despair
From tumultuous shores of
Wrath.

And the city, my world,
Even I,
And two precious lambs
Sleep in peace
Guarded by their
Temporal shepherdess.

(c) Amrita Valan 2015

Yellowstone Tree

Another chirpy piece!

Yellowstone Tree.

Have you seen evil
When you close aching eyes
In strange serpentine bends
Dark labyrinthine mazes
Sharp and stark
Of comatose grotesque mind?

Have you spied an ugly
evil tree that raises its surreal
demoniacal head?
Yellow weevils and spiky fuchsia bolls ushering portals
Of fibrous dead ends?

If I could show you
Portraits I have drawn
Ugly evil  pictures
Strangling all my dawns?

In shiny stiff sutures
Cauterizing steel wool pain
Suffocating dead air
Filling stifling my sarcophagus
brain?

A soul sterilizer, tears
Melt to
Tangled afternoon flesh
Mangled motions
Strategic emotions
Planning escape.
Steaming and turgid
Bloody entrails of discarded notions
The dirty buckets of dreaming trash.

You would shiver
perhaps you'd cross yourself
But hush!
Be thou still...
Nighttime will come
And you will tell your tale.

Byzantine baroque and eponymous stale
Your litany of doom.
Brilliantine mazes of eternal
Recurrence of dingy rooms.
The magic never wears out
Yet matter decomposes,
Becomes decadent stale...
Dark labyrinth mind
Yellow Gold blossoms
Florid pages of hell.

You shall find
Glowering libraries
Arcane books all out of the stock
Memories alluring store
Run by mom and pop
Unseasonable
Unsettling distraught.

Voids unreasonable
Distractions, distortions
dormancy and lingering debts
Frustration's fingers wringe in despair
And gingerly camp in your head.

And the dilettante yellow blossoming tree
Such steady soft focused flowers
Destiny's fruits ripen in the making
Gravelly bitter, and sweet and sour.

The draconian  brain empirical
Graveyard of all our Time
Lecherous vault of the leering dead
Reasoning all out of rhyme...
Ugliest rearing of fuzzy
old yellow heads
Affecting us in our deathless
Livid soil...nameless tombstones
the ephemeral
Life giving flowerbeds..

(c) Amrita Valan 2015