As light as lonely swaying emptiness,
buoying weightlessness all chantlike afloat,
the one and only apt appendage,
That floats in principle taut right above
all the depressed states,
revelling in movement for movement’s sake,
One’s wildest thoughts and tight-locked bottled up emotions
all slide across and dock like dulcet song
in glorious homecoming
Quite like the eye that sans obeisance
in leisured manner most entranced
so slowly rests on the blue, sky-blue,
delighting in drifting
to that pinpoint precise line
where bluest sky begins and ends,
begins and gently ends,
begins…..
Travel does that to you, doesn’t it ?
No sooner has one voyage been concluded,
satisfactorily or otherwise, than sundry sketches
and itsy-bitsy itineraries
for the next start circling your space
and intimate setting
releasing their latent energies
overwhelming your imagination,
clouding your otherwise pre-occupied mind
And you are reverently poised promptly
for the reckoning.
Equations eternal commence,
oblivious to all that,
representations as in algebra.
Make provisions adequately for love. Is solace
the only offering you could think of?
Beckon shyly! Reckon obsequiously,
then rigorously, like the count
at the ultimate reckoning.
The stone’s unchanged thanks to the long drawn out
lack of wind, unlike the food chain.
One species vanishes, gets harshly extinct,
and all goes chaotically haywire
swift as outmoding fashion charts and dresses.
I’d like a geography that stands still.
A history that occasionally moves
like well-drilled marching army
to marking time ‘attention’.
But we’re perpetually glued to the glide.
Gliding like glue….. onward in fine fettle
without settling preliminaries.
Night shatter like glass and the sun
appears in a trouncing trice.
Like the bell that ceremoniously
disrupts school’s stern pindrop silence.
All poised for the reckoning,
adage and appendage,
the adage of that forever circling sun,
gold light the appendage.
The sayings all on cue go blithely on.
floating around those vast fortifications
of unpaced space. I mean the left-behinds
of these so-called sayings as all the voice
has slowly gingerly drifted off. They hang about
in thinnest air uncompromisingly
Like tiny humming birds all hovering,
beating their waxen wings in fixed chains
and echoed timed refrains, as though someone
has set time in reversal incisive
and beamed back incontestably the echoes
While the bright articulate originals
have leapt forward considerably in salience,
in those giant leaps towards renown and fame
and even red carpet publicity.
Most things and beings don’t exactly stay
fixedly glued, don’t draw themselves
to strict attention positions when you ask
them to, most things and characters drearily
insist on staying on when you don’t
actually ask them to.
Fortuitously sleepy starts all lead
to chirpy pungency-laden conclusions.
Alert, all wide-alert beginnings all end
in sudden dramatic take-offs
and oppressively opaque sleepy tail-offs,
that is that iridescent realm of airy
nothings most incorrigible, inconsequential.
Imagine trapping wayward water dexterously
in incongruent containers all incarnadine.
Steady in volume all propriety,
it readily assumes all kinds of shapes.
Lopsidedly weighed over, as fractions
improper might be. Inadequacies flat
of liquid fluidity or the unassailable fact
of being contained that it rebels against.
So gather your hearty sayings all and your prize,
rose-pink rose-red rosebuds while you well may.
Collect collect inflections all infallibly.
Accumulate until you well and truly require them.
That indisputable philosophy of sequence
not of greed indomitable.
Greed is a different entity altogether.
But picking pebbles inconclusively
one by one isn’t. And fossils is!
Should you scheme upon selling them inflexibly.
Gather the drooping skirt up most luxuriously
And skirt off leisurely, off the greed centre.
Enjoy the wide circumference and the whirling
Of circumference over swishing circumference.
Gather then all you can exclusively,
all without the slightest hesitation.
Slow in rising, slower in sleeping sound.
Let’s all rise bright and early this time round
alighting to leave all that behind distinctly.
It isn’t exactly what I’d call ‘entertainment’;.
But rise and shine, yes! Oh yes!
Sounds like a snake shedding its skin,
a devious diabolic creature then pretending
to be a saviour of sorts. Who knows
who rose when from where and infiltrated
the world screen schematically. Somebody
walked around skinless and boneless,
in ghostly exterior. Some truly liked their body intact
In their spectral walkabouts indistinct.
Disintegration. Integration. Disintegration !
Cannibals of nature eat your daily food
and bread dry and leave you starving. That’s when
you get that rousing pang of hunger unsettling.
So the poet or naive native thinks!
A swirling story of seed and slender sprouts,
Seeds scattered far and wide, sproutings
that turn to tree and yield fruit in time.
Swing pardonably from tree branch
to thinner tree branch
And revel in the sun.
Incursive fog rolls in and occupies
the empty streets like enemy tankers
in hardpressed wartimes.
It lingers on like those after-images
of tunnelled trenches, of unbecoming tragedy.
The stench inexpiable then permeates
the city unrecognisable.
See someone’s hungry, eternally eating.
Eating slices and slabs of eternity.
Giving us al less time to dexterously
launch ourselves into …
Eat that hungry someone next mealtime
and you’ve eaten up time too.
Doubling your intake of insatiable desires.
Get back to being good,
as your parents and teachers always said
As their parting shot.
They’re usually right, you’ll see!
Get to those farthest points of geography,
furtherflung history, pointer
to the unconquered uncharted distance.
Light a long-glowing fire
that neither wind nor water can extinguish.
Saloni Kaul, author and poet, first published at the age of ten, has stayed in print since on five continents, including eighteen states of the USA. As critic and columnist, Saloni has all of forty-five years years of being published. Saloni Kaul’s first volume, a fifty poem collection was published in the USA in 2009. Subsequent volumes include Universal One and Essentials All.
SALONI KAUL has been published recently in Mad Swirl’s Poetry Forum (contains ongoing Saloni Kaul poetry page), The Penwood Review, Scarlet Leaf Review, Blueline (State University of New York), OVI Magazine, Mantis (Stanford University), The Whimperbang Journal, The Imaginate (Rutger’s University), Mystical Muse Poetry Magazine, The Charleston Anvil, The Treasure Chest, The Poetry Leaves Anthology and Exhibition, Arteidolia, Quail Bell Magazine, Harbinger Asylum and The Transcendent Zero Press and The Lullwater Review (Emory University of Atlanta). Upcoming poetry acceptances include those of OVI, Conceit Poetry, W-Poesis ,Writers In The Know Magazine and TV Show, Rundelania and Verbal Art.
In addition to performing poetry solo, Saloni Kaul collaborates with artists on installations and exhibitions revolving around her own poetry and with musicians and composers on live and recorded performances of poetry set to music.
Euphony Journal 