Delhi

Now they have stopped
scratching their balls
they have stopped
staring at my sisters
Now they molest
Now they rape
He killed her with the knowledge
he has got from dowry killings
Yes that bastard burnt her body

Delhi is the city of rapists
and molesters.
leaving behind the thing called home
we survive here in the name of chinkies
with their hands on my balls
with their eyes staring at the tits
and the books call it "Unity in Diversity"

Some Haiku from the night of 9th November

widows by windows,
squatting orphans, searching tear
in the dusty road

in the land of death
a birthday cake in coffin
arrived for the poet

a mouthful of words
i puke, they call it silence
They - those artless lives

dip me in your tea
but free me inside the cup
Let me swim like fish

just the hopeless nights
sings melancholy of souls
which are called lovers

Naked Children

Children!
it is now time to play.
the mad peon has rung the bell
together for this year.

Children! come out and play
Lie down in these fields
gaze the sky, you will know
Nature is a big lie.

You have lived in darkness
So light a cigarette
write a satanic verse
fill your wallet with tablets

Manipur is a name of a football
You can bend it the way you want
wear your boots, you don't need books
don't listen to the referee

don't listen to them
Just come out
let's sell Manipur
you have your share

It is no time to sit in desks and benches
So sleep in the streets
sit by the roadside
see where are they driving your home

Come out Children
let's sleepwalk
and bang the doors

you have been hungry enough
to know what is justice
you have been taught enough
to know there is no need of education
to understand this land

Education is for the ones
who were born ignorant about life and death.
but you Children
you grew up among dead bodies

you have hold the banners in these streets
you were born during curfew
you were conceived when the bed was burning
So burn the books, it is all a lie

Children!
let's bathe in the bullet they fire
we are the naked children
of those naked mothers

My Bible- A poem by Jayanta Oinam

Oh! Man
He is as good as any other poet
Disturb your conscience, was Eliot afar;
When he clear his throat
You will know, he is about to make you clear
Of all the doubts that you think hampers you grow a man
There is no hymn of Amen or Ibudou Pakhangba
But he knows where is Burma and what did our little sister did,
There is No Waste Land, there is no any Byzantyme
For him, Tiddim Road bleeds at Malom

No wonder,
I count myself an educated, civilized and a worthy patriot
With my untamed poems on death and its loose conclusions
That someday I ought to die in her lap
One among her numerous sons!

Oh! Man
There were nights I thought of him, and I got
Dreams stoic and dreaded like a pineapple in Churachandpur
All eyes but blind
And I laughed
What have I done,
In fact, Oinam High School wasn't too far
Few rapes and a lake of sorrow

Let’s laugh a while and celebrate...
Only yesterday, he is back from the killing fields of Manipur
And he brought a book in the name of our lost literature
That sang Kwairamband Bazar and its many crooked by lanes
With each name spelled like a Gandhi and Nehru
And I wished to give each sojourn a definitive verdict
On the Kanglasha and its Sahebs
But, look at him
He brought a book, few pages old and wrought in the mist of Sahitya,
A book seasoned with extict Lamgi Chekla and Pi Thadoi;
Each word I uttered with drunken wisdom,
It proclaimed a bible for Apaiba Thawai!

Help me, I wanted to cry
Help me, I wanted swear
And this Bible, within each imprints,
I seek a vigour, a new morning
Sometimes I thought sacrosanctfor its sake, but what do I do
That’s non-native, in the land of Sanskrit hymns and Bengali script
Oh! He brought this book
That’s bible for me
That speaks of Chaoba, Kamal and Meenaketan;
Tonight, my drunken wisdom says
Embrace it tight
This is my Bible
A Bible surfaced by Akhu!
 *************************************************

Thanks Jayanta for such a wonderful poem.

Haiku by Akhu

Children in the chains
flying kites in the black sky
standing on their books

singing the song waste
when their eyes sob in the smoke
with shadows of death

Poem for Prakash

never before
i have seen such a face like yours
One side of a face wants to live
with an eye looking
at its future of a crippled life.
One side so dead with a blind eye
with the smashed jaw
and broken bones.


"Brother! touch this
See! the bones are all broken
into pieces"

I touched your face
knowing i would write this poem
helplessly peeping through a night
that tells me 'I dont belong here'

first time i saw you
you were lying half unconscious
at AIIMS
with the nurses giving you injections
that your generation already has more or less
unconsciously on some hospital beds
or consciously hiding from the wind that carries
the smell of a rotten valley

You came to Delhi
with a bullet in your head
with one eye blind
with a father who sold away
his land to save a son.

Perhaps Delhi is the origin
of the bullet in your head
yet you come here carrying
your half dead body

Doctors they looked at you
with their face squeezing out
like rats
You came out saying with the best smile
i have seen:
"they say "bahut mujkil hai""

i distracted you saying
"there was an article on you in tehelka"
you asked "Is my photograph there?"
you wondered how your friends would react
after seeing you.
But your face is the face of our generation
every broken bone is the broken dreams

you believe you will recognize
the one who shot you at that night
Yes, slowly this world will forget
only you will not forget this world

and your father in his slippers
walked away for his sick sister
Leaving us alone stranded

And we shook hands
but you passed me the anger
and you left me
carrying the unconscious land
on your small shoulder saying
with your innocent smile
"i will catch my own vehicle to Manipur Bhavan"

I asked to myself
"who left this land here?"
I see every pieces of it in your face
I see it turning its back on me
as you walked away
like it is prompting;
I can't do anything like every ship of fools.
I watched you fading away
And i found myself in a market
of potatoes and tomatoes
looking for something to cook
that could make me feel home

Collage: Free Verse

Cut my tongue
slip it inside your cunt
it will start speaking
something else to please you
or it may die
before it reaches your womb

it is not the tongue
it is the matter of heart

Waking up at this hour
i cook bamboo shoot
as the dream smelt home

i sold away my freedom
to all birds
in return they pay me
bird's eye view of a tiny insect
who seeks freedom
from elephant

slanted eyes they look at me
poisoning the sound of silence

deprived of a clear blue sky
i pray for a red one
a red sky with nipples
which rain freedom

some go for bullets
some go for tablets
or all they sit by the roadside
chattering like sparrow

and they celebrate
a feast in the name of east

is it sadness or madness
that night is crying
through the hole
of the old banyan tree
with the fallen leaves wiping
the streets scarred by their boots

To a sick Man

To a sick Man
who coughs to be scolded
by his wife

to a sick man
who lays on bed when his night
tangled up in his eyes
to never let them close

to a sick man
who sings like crow
who still collects books of poems
when bombs rain on his tin roof

To a sick man
who demands his friends to revolt
when all he knows is
how not to sleep at night
when his wife is sleeping next

pride of a poem

this is a poem
written sitting
by the bank
of Imphal river

and see
there is no
blood

Slippery Indian Citizen

Sailing across the Indian Ocean
fishing with a bamboo stick
all the way from the Koubru mountain
fishing pearls for my love
who left me for good
who left me hanging between my rusty guitar strings

a small town boy I was,
who has seen the ocean only in Baywatch
or in Discovery Channel
I have never smelt an ocean before
but it smelt familiar
it smelt like the god of hand's job
the god that create humankind
No, it was all a day dream
call it a poet's fantasy
I was sailing in my own semen
with my bed as boat
with my zero balance ATM card as map to nowhere
with no compass to tell me I am east or west
north or south.

Why? Why?
Why did I confuse a pool of my own semen
with Indian Ocean?
Why, you tell me?

I remember reading by heart
the preamble in school of fools.
still I remember by heart
all the fundamental rights.

Yes! I am an Indian citizen
with bonus fundamental rights
"right to to be shot any time
right to be called an militant"


again later that night
I smelt something familiar
I couldn't move too
It must be a nightmare I thought
after reading Hindustan Times
and Tehelka Magazine
with 2000 farmers committing suicide per page
with two women raped in Kashmir in a corner
with Manipur in flames
I couldn't move
I have never understood India's head
but now I felt India is on top of me
with all its blood on my face
suffocating me

that morning I woke up tired
in the garbage boy's knock on my poor door

until the day I went to Khajuraho
and saw those god given positions
I didn't understand that
that night I was in 69 position
with India.

I never had sex that way
but why with India?
Was my citizenship demanding too much?
Why did India let me suck all her blood?
Why did India take my tongue within her slippery organ?
My tongue was stuck, it tasted blood
Why did it all happened before I could see India's face?
Or Is India wearing a burqa?

Nevertheless I discover India
I am the third after Vasco De Gama and Nehru
But I have become a joke
since I claimed it
like my own sperm
dying under the Summer fan.

O! I have become a slippery Indian citizen

Stranded

I am stranded
between this city and that land
my body here
my shadow there

nostalgia is a phobia
when nights die slowly
with fragments of poetry

i am caught in a pool of blood
yet my toes dig the morning sand
of my innocent days

i wear this city
with all its street lights
yet i cry the tears
that brought from home

i have sliced the night of this city
with words of anger
yet i sob as i learn
my anger is synonymous to hunger
that i carry from city to city
for the land i never own