My Childhood Mountain

Every time I pass by it on the train

my childhood mountain remains unchanged.

I had conquered nimble footed those hills

prancing along merry paths made by rills.

Now weak-kneed, I can barely descend

though its sight makes my soul ascend.

Its holds in its womb a fecund valley

countless creatures, lush green paddy

pepper scrambling up towering trees

jackfruit and fruit trees growing with ease.

With equal greedy ease it’s plundered

Yet all is gracefully, generously rendered.

My childhood mountain gently mocks

my aging haggard body laid waste

by greedy tastes and corporate haste.

Every time up and down my hill I climb

it slows my pace, makes me sublime

and glues me to solid ground.

Rogue Web

A faint blip in the cosmic web,

marked its birth and its ebb.

Weaving a fine elementary first mesh

it began in the web of life its life rush

to explore, play and trap prey thoughts.

Bigger it grew, intricate and thicker

dual threads of good, bad, it and other.

Then as it spewed, threads of dark desire grew,

widening its move, reach, play and slew

weaving ceaselessly self-obsessed sheaths.

With a swift coup the web went rogue

snaring its source in a universe vague

crafting a web of illusions as in dreams

entwined in a maze of thought-seams

brittle strands of a secure sand castle. 

Death in 2030

A lone cocoon clasps desperately

a semi-wilted drooping branch

of a half-dead wobbly tree

in a vast moribund field

of burnt grass and straggling plants.

The cocoon quakes and cracks.

The probing feelers a blast of acrid air greets.

Its body convulses with indecision:

discard it cosy cocoon, its secure womb?

The pungent air rebukes its birth,

the frying sun, its genesis.

It flaps its pall disfigured wings

with its deformed proboscis to probe

faint nectar scent, first droplets of elixir

from emaciated flowers in the scarred field

tainted by noxious dumps,

treacherous flesh-spitting mines

and dregs of death-belching bombs

- residues of human progress.

A few feeble flaps drain its life sap.

It topples down to the ground

from where it sprung.

Its wings open and close in last gasps

of poisoning, smothering, oxygen-deprived air.

A final tremor of life runs.

Silence follows.