Works of RK

As I grow older, I can see my shadows from autumn grow longer.  The dull dry leaves of my loved ones continue to fall to ground relentlessly, eventually they become one with the roads that carried their souls on this journey for so long.  The trees are barren for longer. Shorn of leaves, I can see them more clearly now, all their parched boughs and branches, crisscrossing all over, reaching out to the Sun, as if in a prayer for easy exits, or maybe a wail of despair for winds of change. I like autumn. It is less busy than spring, and a lot less noisy than Monsoons. There is only the rustling of the dried leaves and the dull, muted protests of the green ones that fell off anyway.  I like autumn for I can see the forest through and through. I can see through the pine and the deodar and the neem . The big trees no longer block my view of what lies behind them. For as long as I can see, it is just the same thickets, and thorns and leaves and empty stares. It’s the canopy t...

  She would never call Or mail, or text Until I did As if her heart was leadened And sunked her soul Into some dark dangerous depths Every time I let go Some day soon I might just hold on to her As she slowly sinks into her goodbyes And go drown with her Listen this poem here

These ageing wheels creak But unlike my bones They can be greased I am on a slow train Home And when the coal runs out And the pilot call it quits These tracks would hold no meaning anymore It is this slow movement Through the ups and downs Of an undulating terrain That I thought is what we call life The blind beggar woman Who would just not fold up and die The achingly bright cities And the abjectly poor With their unholy cries The covid infected watchman Who coughs for a week Before the government calls him And asks him for a good date to die The little migrant girl child Who saunters in the sweltering summer Sun And will never know KFC Or ABC To the son I never had Little rascal of mine This place won't miss you And to my little Princess My dearest This isn't a place you would miss I hear the rickety wheels changing tracks Soon, it will be a slow beat to a stop And it will be my turn to alight. Light a lamp my dear ones Let there be some light.

Some versions of us live on through the eternal onslaught of time. Deep inside, that person is still there, who last saw you walking Into the land of frozen memories. I remember you as achingly beautiful in your off whites And those were happier times Looking back, it's like a Christmas movie Santa and snow and miracle and all Some version of me still lives there With some version of you.

Over the years Across thunderstorms I have grown to fall in love With all the lightnings  That lit my broody skies And fear the thunder  That reminds Constantly Of what I survived.

Why do roots stay alive long after the tree is gone?  When the little one asked this to me, I was busy clawing and pulling and hacking at an old stump in the garden. I looked around and sighed. All the hard weeds all around the garden were fathered by this one tree.  Wherever its roots went, it spawned stories that entrenched itself like fables and myths.  Looking back,  I think it would have been easier living with her Than dying everyday,  fighting her memories  Spawning all over Like weeds in an eternally damaged garden.

The stories that my mind weaves  For me to hold on to memories of you Are finely spun silken strands of time Crisscrossing through the ups and the downs Of our tumultuous universe. Here I find a wormhole and claw back to where we first met and there the gravity from a distant star Bounces me off the make believe ride And I lose you again It is not unlike a revolving door That opens And closes Into a room full of you.