Texture of Forgetfulness: A New Poem by Me

Texture of forgetfulness

Slips away from my fingers

I don’t even remember how it felt

Probably it was like sand or silk

Or like a young woman’s curves

Or like nothingness

Or like feathers of a dead sparrow

Texture of forgetfulness is like daylight

Inside which we can see everything clearly

For instance when I am on my bike

I don’t see the vacant spaces between vehicles

The spaces which would be vacant

And those which are already vacant

Texture of forgetfulness

Is like the eyes

Limpid and sharp

In their absence

I don’t even see

What I am not seeing

Even the invisibility

Is invisible to me

Texture of forgetfulness is like a poem

We have forgotten to write

We don’t even remember what it was

And how it went

Or where it went

I dream of touching forgetfulness

Which is full like a cup of tea

Or empty like the forgotten sea

I smell the texture of forgetfulness

It smells the touch of mother’s saris

Before she went away to sleep

Or dad’s trousers

When he used to take me out for Bruce Lee movies

I listen to the texture of forgetfulness

It sounds like the music of the forgotten son

Which you can’t even replay in your heads

Texture of forgetfulness grows like a cobweb

On a winter afternoon

I feel like a lazy spider

Spinning the web of my forgetfulness

Trying to trap some unknown buzzing words

Which I don’t even know

They exist.

19 December 2010

2.55 pm

Sinbad’s Afterlife Blues: A Poem by Sachin Ketkar

Sinbad’s Afterlife Blues

Sachin Ketkar

Ocean is an old discarded myth.

I hear the leisurely blue songs

Of the whale swimming

Serenely

At the back of my mind

I view her sprout jets of love

As she dives and crashes

I thought she was an island

On which I could live

But she fled.

I have gone down under the waves of sleep

Waters as voluptuous as death

Have engulfed me

When I open my eyes

The world turns its back upon me

They say

She is just a blue apparition

On an inky night

Her songs are the merely moving ridges

Tumbling over one another

Plug your ears they say

Now that I am just a pallid corpse

Floating like a weed under the sea

I will reach out to her

And let her secret songs

Run like silk through my veins

12 August 2010                     12 pm