Ode to thee,
Who cajoled me
Without saying a word.

Day in, day out
You put in an appearance;
But “patti” is all I heard.

Gracias mademoiselle:
Your inaction did prod me,
If at all a fraction…
It was as Einstein said:
An equal & opposite reaction.

Never believed in love at first sight
until I saw you.
You didn’t belong to me,
but I was besotted.
Ur eyes said all that we
never spoke.
We made a connection:
A bond was stoke.
I always knew I’d fall for a thinking man!

***
A little bit of talcum
isn’t welcome,
when o’ Masala dosa,
you are good enough to eat!

Blaming it on procrastination, I
Let it prolong.
Obviously, didn’t consider it my swan song.
Gathered I simply wouldn’t belong.
Guess it was an irrational fear,
Easily swept under the carpet with a
Dose of wit or the lack of it!

Bull’s-eye

Yoke in the sky,
poised so high,
playing peek-a-boo with the billows.

Now you see him,
now you don’t;
it’s a pursuit of glee.

Hush

When you feel the night descend on you,
when you hear the sound of wood growing fat with moisture,
when your thoughts are louder than they’ve ever been before,
when you take notice of the rustle of your sheets,
or the scratch of pen on paper,
when you perceive the song of nature;
the birds mating call,
the trees cha cha cha,
the resonance of ripples in the water,
the footsteps of a preying mantis…
When times arrow lay cast aside,
then,
my “out of context” friend,
you’ve heard silence speak.

12 Angry Men (movie review)

Directed by Sidney Lumet
Cast: Henry Fonda as Juror #8/Mr Davis
(DVD Synopsis:The defence and the prosecution have rested and the jury is filing into the jury room to decide if a young Spanish-American is guilty or innocent of murdering his father. What begins as an open and shut case of murder soon becomes a mini-drama of each of the jurors' prejudices and preconceptions about the trial, the accused, and each other.)

At first, the scenario of one juror trying to turn the table doesn’t seem plausible. He’s Henry Fonda… you know he’s the hero…the undeniable catalyst. Preconceiving the course of events comes easy…but when the drama builds up in the juror room…you wait for it to unfold.

Willing suspension of disbelief doesn’t take long to creep in for what you see are believable characters not trying to be larger than life… — the distraught, bitter father, the worldly-wise septuagenarian, the impatient garage owner, the cause & effect doc, the swings any-which-way ad man, the fence-sitters…

No flashy “I-can-prove-he-hasn’t-killed” rhetoric follows…Instead, the “I don’t knows” spouted by Fonda reinforce the fact that he ain’t trying to be the saviour…just the sceptic maybe…or better yet… the only one who’s given his verdict some thought… It’s a different argument altogether that he could have gone with the flow and dismissed it as open and shut just like the others — he too has a job to do, you know. But flesh his character out a bit and you know that principles far outweigh everything else for this gentleman.

Another interesting aspect is that, there is just a blink-and-you-miss-it shot of the accused at the beginning of the film. So the formula of garnering sympathy for the underdog — in this case the Puerto Rican has been clearly ruled out. Good move.

The whole beyond reasonable doubt angle… is what takes the movie forward. So minus the pseudo hero act, Fonda’s underplayed ‘suppose this were to happen’ arguments make it palpable.

And what’s more no fancy camerawork or unusual head shot angles here… Almost 99% of the film is confined to the juror room — one monotonous setting. Yet the unraveling of the murder… that too by ordinary people (yes, it only happens in films!!!) makes it riveting.

Cut & dry case, they say…I say it’s cut & dry production that owes its brilliance to all the characters…in particular to the exceptionally subtle Fonda and the blatantly loud father (Lee Cobb)…representing two sides of the coin… Yup, it’s an out-of-the-court-room drama worth watching without a “reasonable doubt” whatsoever!


links: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050083/
http://www.filmsite.org/twelve.html

Juveniles

Permanent darkness,
perpetual angst,
irrelevant courtesies,
guilty pangs.

Suppressed anger,
merciless time,
unuttered words,
immature rhyme.

Excellent weather,
ceaseless wait,
relentless rain,
unfortunate fate.

Raised voices,
unusual din,
strained silence,
original sin.

Usual call,
clear line,
superficial talk,
everything’s fine!

Masked faces,
unshed tears,
thorny path,
wasted years.

Seeking destiny,
unforeseen journey,
blinding lights,
wrong turn…

Reality penned,
dead end,
dead end,
DEAD END!

****

A poem for you, my dear
a poem for you.
A paragraph or two of poesy,
for a very small fee.

Don’t mock me with those pennies and coins,
just a dash of adulation
seasoned with praise would do.
Is it too much to ask of you?

****
Longer days,
endless nights,
empty hours,
meaningless sights.

Nothing what-so-ever
can fill the void
without you,
that I feel inside.

****

aa,bb

Wrapped, folded, tucked and draped
the seamless into a form was shaped.
Blithe at its new-found mould,
it let itself pleat, gather, fold.

When it stepped out into the world,
it was a kaleidoscopic sight to behold.
And then the wind sang its song,
luring it to play along.

Trapped in the silhouette grooves,
the curves and contours arrested its moves.
Now, it wanted to be free
free as a cockatoo on the guava tree.

The zephyr was willing to aid.
The promise of ‘the unbound’ was made.
Grabbing, tugging, ballooning at the crepe
it contrived a flighty escape.

Concealing, revealing the wrapped figure
the hegira began to configure.
Except, it wasn’t a kite
to release itself in mid-flight.

And when the mortal pinned it down,
the dance of abandon
was reduced to a fastened gown.

Until, it was cast aside
and lay spread eagle;
clinging to its pride.

A puddle of fabric’s monologue
is better than a human soliloquy.

Validation

I
What beesth praise?
Eulogies recited when you’re long gone?
Lies strewn to sway the vote?
Inventions made by a charlatan?
Or a rapture that all crave?

II
Praise (in the mouth of men) and rats have “little” in common.
They come when they please.
They pillage with their ways.
They are employed by shifty characters (akin to rats).
They are your one-way-ticket to the spoils.
And, they are little things that sometimes make all the difference.

III
“Validation,” shrieked the voice in my head.
“Eureka, eureka, I found it,” is all I said.

Rewind:

Faults are there for all to find,
some so obvious,
child’s play for the blind.

Irked as I was,
with constant nitpicking,
(as if that a valid reason be!)
I embarked on a quest,
a mission to unravel the cure;
the antidote to all sorrow…

I looked distant and broad.
(far and wide was too cliché)
It only came to naught,
for what I was looking for
isn’t what I’d thought.

Play:

Then as I lounged on my bed
it came to me…
Fully clad, I didn’t rush forth as Archimedes did.
Instead I shrieked in my head,
“Validation”
Yes, that’s what I said!

Transience

That look when you are fast asleep,
that stainless mien,
erases the past in that fleeting moment.

The transient innocence caught in slumber
is a far cry from all I remember...

Those lies you wove
like the tawdry needlework on moms clothes
or those games you played,
that put monopoly to shame
- all forfeited in that flash.

Eclipsed by the shadow of naiveté,
arrested for just an hour or two,
until your sleep cycle pedals into dawn
and then what was you is a bygone!

The Women in my life

A fickle being full of woe,
reeking of melancholy from head to toe.
Revelling in tragedy,
she cavorted to the song of fallacy.

A “smurf” in sheep’s clothing,
put lifes reality up for loathing.
There she stood, at an arms distance from mortality,
branding all “despicable” in the name of myopia.

And then there was she,
who worked night and day.
Applying her every skill to ‘earn’ the title of a "housewife" someday.

But the one who topped them all,
was the nymph who idled away,
hoping for that perfect life
and pining for the consort,
to complete her ensemble.

Wasteland

U wanted out of the delusive world.
So did I.
We converged on that plain;
left it barren with nothing but emissions
words that rang untrue,
remains of a “dejavu?”
Deserted, spurned, thwarted
we were one in this jilted expanse.
Together we slew
notions of a perfect romance.
And there it lay the turgid carcass,
the facsimile of what we once loved.

Officeku

Chronic colleague
— teeth boring into fruit
with feverish urgency.

Cheshire cat grin:
Jumping at freebies,
he hoards all things not his.

Harried, hurried dash.
The pictures clash,
‘dead’lines come alive.

Walking into the pavilion,
he’s out on a duck.
A century seems decades away.

Cheaper than a plane ticket;
fake gonorrhea, herpes spell:
escape from monotony.

**
Fully loaded,
she sticks up her gun
and screams, “Bloody Mary!”

Tea cup in a storm

Spasmodic gusts rise within.
Simmering, raging, they foam and froth;
spewing pangs of regret.
An unfinished epiphany ensues,
relinquished by another paroxysm.
One more gastronomic disaster,
the end of an epicurean sin!

Cleave

As I sat and saw the present
mirrored on the wall,
it came back to me - the futility of it all.

Six years of augmentation
was to be cleaved at its seams.
Before the axe fell,
an eternity is what it seemed.

Reeking of suspicion
and clinging to the past,
the indecisive mind blanked out
and let the future take its course.

"Severing ties never was easy,"
was all the old man said
and then he was dead.

But I was no old man,
more of a 12 year-old boy
who was oblivious to
the long and short of it.

Courting the issue

On a lark,
questions and answers were flung.
Cornered into this position,
the defense spurned.
Pleas, alibis and motives ran amok.
Robbed of its clothes,
Truth relinquished its stand.
The dregs of a moulded reality remained.
When Conviction cried foul,
the assembly laughed.
Hypocrisy bellowed, “Order in the court”
And justice prevailed.

Evanescence

Perpetually lost in the pell-mell of our minds,
transient lives become them.
Akin to a lightning flash,
they awe-inspire one moment
and fork into a shadowy void in the next.
Leaving you with marvel and regret,
they are the second chance you never get.
The best poems are the ones you write in your head.
Unfortunately, you have to read this one instead.

Loom

They’ve sprung all around me,
mushrooming to dizzying heights.
Awe-inspiring looms
that started out as an alternate space.

A vertical solution to city limits.
Poised to conquer the skies,
they cleaved the view,
in the name of progress.

Now, all they do is shut out the world,
burying me alive in their concrete hold.

Destination: Prolixity

He wrote ‘embargo’
She penned ‘phosphorescence’
Together, they endorsed grandiloquence.

Caught in this war of words,
the naive cowered into the rabbit hole of retrospection.
Days went by with no sound,
and they sniffed around with the rambling dog hound.

Finally, he clambered out of the cavity,
with a sagacious halo on his head.

When bombarded with the ‘what, when, why?’
A voice boomed from the incandescent sky,
"Mock not him, for he knows all.
He’s tried your tricks and seen your ways.
And in this farcical stageshow, he remains unfazed.
The superlative truth has dawned on him
- never to use the pseudo word janus-faced."