SLEEPING WITH YOU
Balachandran Chullikkad
Tr: K P Ramesh

Anna,
Apart the white distances of ice
Why did you anchor
On my facade of artery
Seeking heat?
In a startling dusk,
When the smoky music serpents
emitted by the luxurious inn
Copulate with violet rays
At a sulphor bed,
You told me, fiddling with my angry veins:
I AM WHITE
YOU ARE BROWN
BUT LOOK , BOTH OUR SHADOWS ARE BLACK.
Suddenly the electricity stopped
The light and sound died frightfully
The moment stood still in a pinpoint.
At the moment as your silent church resonates
by the prayer of my hellish thirsts,
When the rod of sound from a violin
split through my body of speed and rust
You murmured :
I WANT YOUR WILD SUBSTANCE.
Oh, woman,
Affectionate like an ocean who consumes
this unpacificated flame,
A kind of life , which you don’t know
Is resurrecting within my ghost house.
At night
In heavy rain
On the verandah of a shop beside the road
Holding the shirt torn by the wind beat,
Embracing the aggressive dogs of cold
Keeping the burning mass in the soul alone
A neglected, sleepless and riggled youth.

Anna, it is the life
When I splash your deep waters
With my trembling fingers
The tobacco forests of my head
Are uprooted by your storm
We flew mutually and
We filled ourselves-
All are the life itself.
However, I have a stream of remembrance
The fire scars still to reach your lips
It is a life-
As I enter to the noon of the world
By get rid of serpent-eclipse of home
Where the mother serves meals
With poisonous words daily.
The mother herself is a life-
As she expels her child to search for his food,
By praying likewise:
"kindly save my son
as he is walking speedily,
sitting without grief and
sleeping without disturbance "
And by burning her life in the same prayer.
The feast may be continued
In the hall downside.
But I feel disgust soon.
In the freezed Vodka, given by you,
Mixed with orange cordial and ice cube
Can I erase the black stain
Of the unfortunate canto I passed
with burning the belly-blood
Without a single element of porridge?
I feel distaste now
The idiotic smiles in the feast,
Words are like fish dead,
Hand-shakings of unknown ones,
Hugging without shaking the dress,
The slippery kiss.
What!
Did you call me?-
With trembling lips, finger tips
And meteor-bursting eyes?
Come, let’s go
Apart from the shiny robs,
Reddish jewel ornaments and
These weights of French aroma-
Let’s become freshen in my bedroom.
Come, till the body’s great fest
Make this night a lovely night.
When did we come here
Without telling anybody
Without seeking anybody?
I don’t remember so.
In a drowse
In your sigh, a piano wept likewise:
WHEN WILL BE YOU, MY SON ?
Why did you decoct
My bitterness into your womb?
You don’t know that
The enemies of the past life
Become the sons to us.
If we have no children
We feel only the entire lack
But if they commit faulty
Our pain increases.
Remembering them, at deathbed,
Our soul call them if we have.
The feast at the hall downside
May be ended now,
A never-ending the silent drama
Of servants who cleans
The dining tables, bearing the heaps of waste.
All of a sudden, the people
Who are always throbbing to eat, drink and fuck
Lose their power of erection,
Paralysis throws them severely
Both blood pressure and diabetes
Beat them cruelly,
And with the message of death,
The cancer comes and burns the whole life ………
And so and so
If we commemorate,
Only a shudder is left over in mind.
Which is my reality
In the whirling of admixture of known and unknown?
Is it the joy of evil and inanimate life
As I lie wetting, with you today?
When I go to the asylum by shivering due to typhoid
I collapse at my own shadow
Getting the hit of destructive sunshine.
Is it the blissful and honeyed joy to a scoundrel,
Saved his life by drenching the spell?:
"Oh, merciful, powerful and kind Lord."
In the retired bodies
The time, with dense lethargy, flows
Through us, the vain ones who lost concepts and materials.
Shall we become separated
In the fathom of sleeping together?
The night ends
The clock chirps, and
The dawn appears in window-glass.
Anan,
Rise and wear the gown.
Let’s go outside to separate.
The bugle of the ship is reverberated.
It is time to go from the harbor.
When the fathoms make loud, deep sound
When the life stands alone at the iron plank
The sea-wind pecks continuously
At our futile flags.










MERRY FLOW
Balachandran Chullikkad
Tr: K P Ramesh



You went by unadoring the roses,
I drizzled in blood, for you
You went without seeing my words
inscribed behind my soul
You went without a touch
on my strings throbbing for you ever.

Beyond the blind years
Beyond the infinite memories
Beloved, you are the autumn-dusk
adorned by saffron.

Though there is grief,
The grief on you is happiness to me.
Let my goblet fill, for ever, the pain
your absence conveys.




FICUS LEAF
A Ayyappan
Tr: K P Ramesh

The book of biology, given by you
Is a love poem to me.
The ficus leaf, kept in the book then,
Commemorates your green nerves.
Now your face can be seen
In its transparency.
In memory of the green leaf
Which lost all its sap,
I lent the book, kept each leaf in each page,
To the hungry fire of love.
If we reborn as leaves
Let’s germinate in the same tree.
I don’t need a darling, but a sisterly-leaf
Soaked by joy and greef.
When I see children who collect
The fallen leaves to survive all seasons,
There arise the smell of death in spring’s heart
Within the hidden smile
The window of autumn blows.
Who’s dropped poison
In the plate filled by milk?
Who’s sung that
The poison given by you
Become a remedy to me?

EFFIGY OF SHADOW
Vijayakumar Kunissery
Tr: K P Ramesh


All but myself
A burning candle
A grass-hopper from the seventh ocean
Remain in this cell,
As the lingual wonder of colour jumble
Colourful ugliness of the music
And, the scintillating throbs of sculptures
Continue their shadow dance.
With redness of Parthinium
Festering heart
And swamp-dwelling poltergeists
I remain in this cell
In the company of a firefly
With the granny-rain
Prattling outside.
The summer wind spread
Buds of small-pox
The marching ant battalion
The mad dog that provokes
The elephant in ruts…..
They go on and on
Still I remain here
With a burning heart inside.
Aromatic destruction of plastic flower
A street-whore stripped off
Her obscenity
Foetal-terror of swarming flies
And, the maddening rebuke of " oldy wind"
I remain in this cell
With the hysteric cries of a psychotic maniac.
Black tongue, evil eye
A day that is burnt down
Hatred fuming out in flames
Suffocated earth yearning for oxygen
Lighting and
The whole crumbling sky
And myself with any own corpse.















FEAR
Kalpatta Narayanan
Tr: K P Ramesh

I was feared
To lie alone at veranda.
I lied , locking the door bolt and pintle
Once again opened and closed,
Touched the hook to know
Whether it is closed
Switched the torch to confirm
There is no snake beneath the cot.
But now I know that
After my sleep
I am outside-
All the nose, eye, neck, chest and leg-
Everything outside.
Though I lie with anyone
I am alone after the sleep
And I am alone as well as outside
Like a tree.








POET
Kalpatta Narayanan
Tr: K P Ramesh

Is there any door, except of the word
To go outside ?
Is there any door, except of the word

To enter inside ?
Man is inside the fort
Without a door
Except the word.
It knows by the poet alone.
Making anything a door
He goes outside
Making anything a door
He enters inside.










TO THE BLACK FRIEND
P P Ramachandran
Tr: K P Ramesh


We , the residents of two continents.
Between us the ocean,
And the devil is behind us.
We, who couldn’t meet evenly.
Then what?
We have the same night.
Curfew in your continent.
Then what ?
I get the dreams,you buried , safely-
As the east gets red
The whole yard spreading the white bauhinia flowers.
We are at two banks,
The ocean is between us.
And we who couldn’t meet evenly.
Then what ?
We have the same pallor, the same sun.






DREAM ANT
P P Ramachandran
Tr: K P Ramesh


An ant, bored of the earth,
Was conquered the heaven crawlingly
Over a drop of sunshine.
By the way, it sat on my window bar
For respite .
Owing to weariness it fell asleep.
Then, I could see the dream
Of its apparent microcosm.
A courtyard, stagnant of dusky blood.
The atmosphere is husky by the band and fireworks.
In the paths and fields the hot elephant dungs.
The night which is unwinked and swollen,
Finally shot dead by the dawn.
Suddenly it rose, unknowing that
Its dream is ceased.
And the sun was set then.
It unclinged and fell down to the earth.


YOU DON’T FEAR
AnwarAli
Tr: K P Ramesh

You don’t fear.
I have conferred a kiss yesterday, unknown to you,
To our affection buried at foetus stage
On the centre of your left palm,
Between the two lines of sign
Near the line of life.
It asked me:
" Why do it so ?
Is it for the keen protection in the earlier life ?
Or to be discarded in upcoming life? "
I told:
" No,
at an evening
when the rain has soaked this life,
just before the dusk hang upside down
silkcotton trees of the wayside
from heaven to hell,
Witnessing the noise of a
Lambratta scooter passed nearby then,
Becoming two by torn hardly to the cloth-lines
Of two homes to arid-
You are the penalty
To me and the woman who couldn’t be your mother" .
It awoke by laughing
And followed me wearing the kiss I gave.
You don’t fear.
You may ask instead
As I don’t know tonight.




CHANNEL
Anwar Ali
Tr: K P Ramesh


I
Myself a channel,
Expression of despair.
Starts the telecast attested before the
blackholes in the sky and earth.
I
The share of numerous dense sap of the nomads,
Stimulation of numerous veins,
Jugalbandhi of the dead and frozen.
Live telecast from tomorrow until demise.
Soon , let your antennae turn towards the inmost darkness.









CROSSING THE RIVER
Anitha Thampi
Tr: K P Ramesh



As the fishes make a blot on the river water
Your eyes illustrated me.
In banks the green thrived
And inclined to water.
Moving the tongue
The sunshine lied by smacking.
In the stone steps
The gowns of the day
Removed the dirt,
The bodies unfolded the wrinkles.
The buoys which came through water
Have gone flew itself.
Canopy
Of those who returned after work
Came across the river,
It stopped by reading the flow in the same octave.
While they disembark
The rain showered heavily.
Heavy rain painted the roofs in every compound,
The turbid winds make mark the trees.
Shattered lightning has tightened the pictures.
In the river basin, when the rain ends,
Your foot-prints painted this bank.











FIRE-FLY
S Joseph
Tr: K P Ramesh



When she opened the window
The flame of a cantle, put on a table,
Fell aside.
Above her exists the sky
And the darkness along with.
As the room becoming cooler
She closed the sky and came to lie together.
She continued to say:
Then one day we went to the valley.
There is a home
There is always the wind.
His call knocked the ear
And dissolved in the wind-noise.
In the room
A fire-fly draws the sheer lines.
I , too, had a deep past with a woman.
I remember her
As you cuddle my hands.
When I fell in her soggy eyes after these words,
In the drawings of the fire-fly
Remains the light, light, light…..











THE BLACK STONE
S Joseph
Tr: K P Ramesh




I remember my playing
on the black stone in my infancy.
The stone was born prior to me .
It is like me, the black stone.
The stone was lied there without a gesture and pain
In the sunshine and heavy rain.
I remember the play that I baked the soil-bread speedily
Over its elephant-back.

I sat alone on the veranda of black stone
Searching mother in the window of frightened wind.
Crossing the summer fields
Mother comes bearing eatables things
Either from the market or from the workfields.
Dusty rain over the hunger.
The compound is covered by the darkness.
The hawk singing in darkness.
But there is no colour to the homosexual- neighbour coming by darkness.
All these are the dustbins
And I throw everything.
Far-flung, to take care by the doctor,
But the flows are penetrated the research centre.

Black roads, black harlots and black children.
When I open the black book there is the inantry.
I go back to the black, to my black.
I won’t forget you even if I forget
My father who feed me much by toiled worn in sandstone,
The mother whom we returned from death by lamentation,
And the sisters who smoothed the dress
by ironing box burning coconut shell.

Me not satisfied with this.
I want to pierce your heart.
Black stone, I want to open the lid of
the grave of my dead friends,
I would like to be a kin of a gypsy who is wandering
through the streets,
I should wet in the rain with her and
I have to draw a tiger in the sky with a stroke by my eyes.


In the dense winter there is the black void.
The stone is resided in it.
Is it sleeping without locking the door
Or without a response in silence?
Is it raised from the far depth in olden days?
Or shall it tumble to eternity?

MARITAL STATUS
V M Girija
Tr: K P Ramesh


Afterwards,
I lied prone on the cool floor
And became an ice-heap….
Naked you are sleeping a far
Like a cloud after downpour , solacingly.
And I am the earth
Torn by lightning and thunder, wounded……….
Within the soil layers
The uproar, laughter, youth and love.
The moment when you dissolved in body first…
And these….lies ?

In the cool floor
I became a naked statue of stone
Blood-oozing black moonlight….








DO THE AFFECTION FLESH BASED ?
V M Girija
Tr: K P Ramesh

When I smell the flowers he liquifies as honey.
The anthers become fill and tense pollen and pain
Through he and wind console me while the flowers showering,
The mind is taking it and drawing in it…..
As he , like a moon, is shedding moonlight
My heart, through situated in a sculpture, throbs…….
He is rising only, not setting.
He smiles with a pleasant face in all darkness.
My love, like a sea, rushes with wave-hands to embrace him.
He is far away in the depth of cloudy sea,
Behind the heavenly waterbeds prepared by the
Mermaids who give elixir from the depths.
He is far away.
Can I surpass the sky of sea, with him,
like a star bearing shining wings ?
Is there remain the kiss which can undress kindly ?
The kinship, hugged to know oneself ?
Who knows?
Will he go apart like a magic plate?
Do the affection flesh based?



GRATITUDE
P Raman
Tr: K P Ramesh

As I encounter death after drowning
A fish gnawed my old wound and told:
"May I tell something
Though I haven’t trapped
In the net you thrown one day
Sitting at the bank of a river.
I feel joviality , never before, to you.
I instill the pain, the same given by the fishes
you wedged to me,
In the fathom of your sore.
At the very time you reach the bank by swimming,
Throw a net to capture me ?"
Yes , the man who reached here by swimming
May be myself,
But why do a fish is protruding
From my wound?

I could neither pluck out it nor scorch .
But it seek great depth alone.
Hence, I am afraid, to go to the river,
For the fish may leap into the fathom carrying me?



LIKE THE MILKYWAY
P Raman
Tr: K P Ramesh


The bodies will smash
In the silent bang of time.
Pieces of the body will glowingly fling
In the precedent days
And the upcoming days .
In the case of somebody
This hot way will expand
To the very rearward and foreward.



THE THING GUSHING AND SOLIDIFYING
Sreekumar Kariyad
Tr: K P Ramesh

I haven’t read a book Anandan read.
And Anandan haven’t read a book I read.
How Anandan can read the book brought
from Madras by my father ?
It has 678 pages, which has
a picture of an owl in the back cover.
The copy of the book, read by myself alone
And pecked by the crows at last,
Is not redual even at British Library.
And this is not unfamiliar to Anandan.
Because,
Anandan’s living space is beyond my ignorance
In a home transformed to stone throughout cogitation.
Recalling me occasionally
Like a silverfish twirling in aquarium,
Hearing my far blabbering by the other ear,
Supposing that a crow-like cloud
Can devour a tree which has owl-face and 678 branches.
Anandan sitting in octangle
In the shape of ocean staggered left and right-
Anandan, the first of the world who become
the globe while sleeping.

TO THE POET
K S K Thalikkulam
Tr: K P Ramesh

Oh, poet, will you compose
A new but sweet song for me to sing?
I won’t blame-
Please don’t swindle me by hiding
The olden songs, sung by many,
In easy and mild terms.

Don’t feel that I would fascinate
of the pretty completion.
And don’t blend, by covered in the
grin of the moon, the freshness.

Oh, poet, will you compose
A new song freely for me to sing?
Hearing it, my blood must hasten
through my veins hastily.
And suddenly, with thrill
I’ll cut off the chain of repression.