Six Poems From Prakash Kona

Confucius

Nothing is older than a speck of dust
Or taller than a blade of grass.

Three people God wished he never created:
Darwin, Marx and Bertrand Russell.

To liberate women is to liberate the mind of man
From ignorance that enslaved women in the first place.

It’s when I’m ready to leave a place,
That I want to speak my thoughts.

Our worst enemies are hiding
Beneath the faces we love.

I thought of you and wrote about bread,
I thought of bread and wrote about people,
I thought of nothing and wrote about flowers.


Sounds

Whisper in my ear Andalusia,
Sunlight trills in my hybrid veins.

Russell, there is a viper ready
To strike the bones yellow.

Bazaar and my soul is defined
In the babble of throbbing streets.

Trinkets and I hear your heart sing
While day spins into arms of night.


Skyline

I took away the dimension of performance from the truth.

Truth speaks for others.

Since body is one with soul

I abandon myself to a perfume that sweeps the corridors of the brain.

Death is a river and paradise a jewel of hope that comes from a desert

Asleep in its perfection like the sea resting against the bosom of the horizon.


Beads

When an actor dreams she pokes fun at the audience.
Sleep is relative – the face of the sleeper is not.
The actor is dreaming of beads – perhaps.
The actor prays that death may not catch her
Drowsing eye unawares. She is afraid for the face
Delectably naïve. For her the stage is an absence.
No one dare contrive the truth. That would defile
The totem. It means disaster to the existence of the tribe.
My brother eagle circumambulates the clouds and my
Sister crow is earthy as a worm wriggling through the soil.
The thing I cannot imagine is the mind of a torturer.
I suspend action to let myself into the solitude of
Drifting thoughts. I’ve the anger of a victim in me.
I’m the victim of a life I could’ve avoided living.
The torturer is not an actor because he contrives
The truth without believing in it. Torture divorces spirit
From flesh. The torturer is at war with the stage.
Evening lights take me in the direction of the wind.
The time zones of the past are framed in missing
Spaces of the present. On a red hill night came as nights
Do stealthily eclipsing the day’s madness. You’re not asleep.
Like all actors in the grinding mill of the imagination the
Day permeates every cell of the night. Was I weeping
At the thought of my death? I braced myself for
An end no more real than the life I lived.


Overture

The timeless body is queen of illusions.
The space between standing on a road
And dreaming of pavilions –
No fool that knew the queen would return into
The cave of time. You cannot glamorize
The perishing world of senses except
Through the gaze of the queen.
Untranslatable as the dark is the
Queen of pavilions.
In my dreams but never in
Reality the queen is a trespasser in veils,
The dream is reality – I don’t
Need walls of prisons to persuade me
That I’m serious to the point of
Ill-concealed bitterness. What is written
On the forehead is not the same as what
Lips utter with the conviction of a born dreamer.
Death forgives in a way that life never does.


Love’s Nest

I

Love’s nests are built by the art of putting twigs together stolen from birds.
Migrant laborers return from spaces where they work for survival. When they speak of returning home they mean lying in a love’s nest until morning.
I want no home for my own. I built my nest in your heart that flies from hill to horizon back to the hill. Your love nestles everywhere. Homeless is that heart of yours but that is my home.
In the fatal embrace of lovers we discover our homes in the warmth of each other’s faces.
The nest shelters from sad raindrops falling on your eyes and my head in your lap. The bodies of lovers never part. They remain in nests for lover or beloved to come back into the arms of the other.
Love is your body that crosses mine like pencil marks on a page gently wiped out by an eraser. On the page of my life is your body. All the pencil marks add up to the point where they eternally diverge from one another. At the point of divergence my life becomes one with your body.
I need your lips on my neck. We coil into one another. A tree with branches opening to the sky. The sky filling the bosom of the tree. The tree nestling against the sky. In your belly is a button. I press the button to reach the home I come to sleep.
I imagined before it happened. I make my nest in the thoughts of the sleeper. The sleeper is one among infinite other bodies. The sleeper is infinite in one body.


II

I hugged the body with the strength of my arms. Will that body remember me when I’m gone?
I felt each part of the body with my lips. Will that body forgive my lips for daring to feel?
I composed music for lips on a soul inside a body. Will music produce the passion of a palm tree when lovers meet at dusk?
I was alone inside you sharing the loneliness of your innermost self. Will you make me a slave of that dark region that does not allow words to enter?
I battled with jealous ghosts in fear that I might lose you. Will death spare my soul the memory of your caress?
I ran from mirror to mirror in outstanding places for the hem of your shadow. Will your shadow smile into my eyes with pity?
I wondered if a word is what makes something beautiful or something is beautiful before the word knows it. Will you let my words pass over your body like dew from the sky?
I drank from the cup of bitter sweetness the waters of a tap made for the mouths of children celebrating their long gestation in the womb. Will the cup teach me to endure moments of your absence?
I longed for the littleness of a bonsai that I may be in the room of your heart. Will you expand your heart to accommodate a stranger that speaks in the tongue of the intoxicated?
I turn in bed that night may pass and morning break the monotony of a restless body. Will this body be patient when it sees you uncoiling from the hibernation of a long night away from dreams?
I dug the grave of my early youth for words I used that came to end in a romantic nothing. That was how the world of light looked to me. Darkness is thicker than light. The smell of sweat in a glimmer. I am in love with a vase I’ve never seen. Blood is water mingled with time. My blood disseminate to the sea. Mingle into the blood of the one I love.


Prakash Kona (born July 14, 1967) is an Indian novelist, essayist, poet and theorist who lives in Hyderabad, India. He writes in English, and is the author of six books to date: Words on Lips of a Stranger (Writers Workshop, Calcutta 2006), Pearls of an Unstrung Necklace (Fugue State Press, New York 2005), Literary Criticism: A Study of Pluralism (Wittgenstein, Chomsky and Derrida) (Wisdom House Publications, Leeds 2004), Streets that Smell of Dying Roses (Fugue State Press, New York 2003 & Yeti Books, Calicut 2006), Poems for Her (Writers Workshop, Calcutta 1999) and You and Other Poems (Writers Workshop, Calcutta 1997). His fiction is highly unusual, an experimental combination of free-floating emotion and political theory that can depict, for example, a city or a love relationship in an ambiguous, flowing, non-concrete and yet highly personal and heartfelt manner.