Poems by M. K. Ajay

(Painting by Sri Mahadeb)

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The Many Faces of Sadness

Red first, then the pale white of jasmine,
cotton rolls in a dispensary.
In summer, a wetness that arrives at dusk.

A moss forest, ferns old as time itself,
a sun hidden by monsoon clouds,
shadow falling through translucent glass.

After an early morning dream, that shadow
is cast in flesh. Blood is drawn
by sunlight, along with two purple curtains.

Seconds rotate slowly,
clicking like turnstiles.

This is classical Indian music of my body,
and heat plays a tune. The smells
of a sunflower field and a freshly painted
coffee mug after a storm enter.
There are crushed saplings on the road side,
and someone’s abandoned bicycle,
black, solid, rusting.

Words leave me and return,
standing beside my limbs.

At the bedroom’s corner,
where the table lamp meets
a poem of Basho and Ron Padgett,
I watch shadows of raindrops
forming a puddle, my former selves line up
as children do.

Shangri-la

There’s an emerald hill among clouds,
at least two weeks away
from every mud road I have driven upon.
Its slopes are always one second ahead
of what can be taught, or learned.
The fig trees on that hill
are outside the grasp of a poet’s cry,
or her fever’s delirium.
The river that flows down the hill
reverses its currents, walks like a goatherd,
water dancing like an angel.
Walk into the shade of that hill,
unarmoured, shedding your skin too,
search for the slope’s coordinates
in the captain’s map you misplaced.
If you don’t find that hill,
lost between moonlight and its memory,
make do with a garden variety of love instead,
one in which easy to crush leek stems grow,
and pungent garlic, a garden that is as bright
in moonlight, as it is inside a cloudy nightmare.

The Way the Ending Ends

It’s that minute before sunset
when our relationship must stir,
churn, recede
like water rushing
into the kitchen sink
swallowed by steel
hurtling through a pipe’s throat
hundred eddies of despair,
anguish, loneliness.
What will go down first?
The disco colours that are now faded
or the temperature falling to lukewarm?
Will it be the sapphire blue
of an ocean turning on its belly,
waves walking away from my eyes
as yours search for a coral reef
and a ripple of hurt in mine?
Or will it be the story
of your skin’s sudden ageing
as it crawled away from mine?
Let me know,
there’s no hurry,
no reason either.
A text message will do too.
Goodbye then, you should be fine,
you tell me, as the last drop disappears
into the kitchen sink.

Apparition

Enslaved by my breath
a grey sky, a desert wilderness.
Stars in the Milky Way
come and go in my retina.
The galaxy had limbs, I see,
legs that walk backwards
into a red liquid womb.
Beyond, scattered among possibilities
of cloud and moonshine,
supernova of speech,
and vastness of silences.
Inside each space shuttle of silence
a word is held like an oyster.
Inside each word is a cave,
thousands of crickets
I heard singing in my childhood.
Those words flew
like birds without flesh,
like dragonflies,
like poison from a blow pipe.
Someone, or something,
emerges from indigo
dropping from a spider web
strung like a hyphen between two words.
Is it a story of our beginnings?
A light that was a star?
A breath filling a cave with mist?

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M. K. Ajay is a poet, editor and senior corporate leader based in Hong Kong. He is the author of three collections of poems, is the Associate Editor of anām: journal of international writing and co-curator of the Odisha Arts & Literature Festival. His poems have been translated into more than ten languages, and featured in prominent literary publications such as the Bloomsbury Environmental & Nature Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. He is a native of Kerala.

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