Coconuts and waves
Cups of steaming hot tea, good while you talk sense
Or otherwise you just enjoy it
In fours or fives as much as a pot can hold
I shop for colourful loneliness
Which I find in the streets
Wherever I went it was there for me
Waiting as I waded through
Trying to find something new
Something of a message I found
Long-time back when nothing was truer than truth
For whoever I met I fancied was free
Free to own himself
Rather listen, rather not speak
Like a woman whose man is
Beheld by a few on the foreign street
By admirers who wouldn’t let them
Escape their friendly speech
So much to tell them who are rarely seen
About winter, vegetables, fruits and fish
The roads are a good place to talk
You get time to wonder what it’s all about
Since you’re here it’s worthwhile
Time passes by anyway everywhere
Coconuts would be tastier if they’re on a tree
There are no roads where they grow
But from the crossroads of your mind
You would be set free, free to wish for more
The rest you find, nothing could be surer
Something that happens when on the street
You have some time to speak
To find fantastic men there
Who are quick to understand you just live
It’s not the beach but you are tempted not to leave
Like a gathering homely street
Ima market is a place just across from your room
It’s better on the roadsides, the quietness,
A breach of their loneliness and poverty
Some money’s exchanged though it’s not much for me or for them
I don’t come from a land either where there’s much
Truly yours, when we meet each other in spaces we need
At other times it’s not just hearsay
That we did enjoy as it all carried on and on
Somebody we loved somebody we spoke to
It taught us a lot about how to live life
About how words leave you when you
Stretch your imagination far and wide
Do you miss their company?
You can meet forever in the small busy streets
Such as, it’s against nobody’s wish
Mind transformations
Transition at Nambol, the houses next to the road
Drawn back towards the neighbourhood
A mind equally divided, the road and farms overweighed
In the winter cold stocked up with grains
Just harvested the stubble left neatly and the hay
On patches which were reason for delight
Dry to the core now all brown before the plough is set
Don’t know what to expect on the turn at Bishnupur
But there were the hilly mountains before
To show you it exists reddish brown
And the short grown green trees
Mixing it up well, the farms at short distance
With the rising hills and the speed on the bus’s window seat
Only forests and miniscule Kabui villages up the greenish brown rise
Enough for the cold times, bananas, firewood, and oranges when you are high
And the sky was a small milky way, the mist formed
Like nothing before a moving sight
Khoupum would be nice I believe
There’s a river now and a bridge hung over it
You keep seeing it on and off for quite a while on the meandering drive
The trip to the waterfall is on your mind
But there’s a lot more happening inside the bus and the window seat
With the gutsy girls and boys who are thinking but calm
The water’s near and the earth’s mountainside is blackish wet
Topsoil and a dam for the fields
Here it’s dry too but the earth’s wet and provided
The stubble of dry paddy rising up above the watered mud
On the way before the valley small green parrots to meet
The stature of the short rising hills
Every now and then firewood tracks into the hills
And the occasional few houses is all you see
Nothings busy except the hill and the bus through it
Cascading down meant only for a few visitors
The pool it formed cool for the blood running in the open feet
Where’s the life here except work that’s for a road muddied
Quietness a catch word nothings found wrong in men
When there’s nothing but children and a winter to live through
Yet it’s in the world and apart from it too
Like many Himalayan mountains that don’t leave you
Once you have been through a few
This fag end is mostly undergrowth
The nearness of city and towns
How soon you forget it all once you reach down
Downward you go again
And you want it all again once you are sitting
Or getting tired of working the day’s job
The cold seeps into your heart, mind and body
Till it unfolds all of it that your life is about, that not this not this
There’s turbulence in my mind but
Gaan Ngai drums are sweeter for them
How different we are close to each other
When will I find the time so much dear
When they have it all with or without the work
A life that combines both home and the forest near
I seek them as they must be seeking me sometimes
I believe this must be true cause for a moment
I found the years and seasons passing by too
First Nambol and then it might be all lush green
Or light brown caked when I find you
A thought for all seasons I keep for me
Suffused
Such a beautiful place
All green with grass and trees
And the people nice and polite
My friends told me so what if
They get on your nerves sometimes
Maybe it’s something in yourself
Which you don’t like
How could it be that you
Like the land sometimes
And find fault with it
At other times
My friends maybe right
I haven’t looked too deep
Could be that I haven’t seen
But further on
There could be a light
