Anatomy Lesson

You do not have to go
To anatomy rooms
To see dismembered bodies.

You can see them on the street.

Eyes blown out of sockets
Faces ripped apart
Torsos crushed and mangled
Torn limbs strewn around
Like playthings in the pathways
For stray dogs to tug and tear.

Streets are now open playfields
For wild men on the prowl
Masked out of identity
With black dress, hood and gloves

Seeking to blast the bodies
Of unwarned fellow beings.

To assert a waning manhood?
To express an inner hurt?
To avenge an ancient grievance,
Or serve a faceless God
Made out of stone or timber
Or a non-material myth
Born out of countless stories
That spew from many mouths
Where each new wash of spittle
Reshapes a previous tale
Painting in shadow patches
That lead one's mind astray
Cloud it with dark suspicions
Seed it with bars of hate
Streets no more ring with laughter
Doors stare like vacant eyes
Hold whispers in shaded corners
Wails in the corridors.

The wails are warped with anger,
Tears hiss like molten lead.
The heart's once smiling garden
Is a patch of deadened earth
Spewing new bugs of hatred
In each human, beast or thing
Cramping their growth and action
Shrinking their inner selves.

Trees chop the sky like hatchets
Grass flares like blown-up fire
Birds slash the air with curses
Beasts glare with gory eyes
And each man sees his neighbour
A monster in human dress.

Endoscopy

You think you are a person
With a mint-marked face and body
A singular gait and speech
A fool-proof fingerprint
A prefigured DNA.

So dress up and smile for a snapshot
For others to see and say
This is surely so-and-so.

But some think you are a mansion
Even larger, a row-house street.

Housing a million microbes
Unseen by normal eyes
That control your inner traffic
From wherever they sit
Switch on your pangs of hunger
Sweep in the swallowed food
Soak it in steamy juices
Turn it into flowing blood
Run it through throbbing channels
To a secret central pool.

Some help;
But some are harmful;
Some build;
But some unbuild
The streets of this homopolis.
Do all this under cover.
The snapshots can't locate them,
Unless they screen and scan
With all kinds of new devices
And read out the cryptic codes
That reel off their ticking ends.

Even in your normal viewing
You are not wholly you.

When in the early morning
You go to wash your head
Before a laughing mirror
Good lord! You notice there
Your two eyes move quite freely
On the floor-mat of your face
Wink, blink, stare and ogle
Shoot slanting glances,
Squint
Quake soft like trembling jelly
Freeze hard like sharp-edged flint
To say, though we are within you
You are part of what we see.

Then, when your jaws fall open
And show you your shadowed mouth
You see with wide-eyed wonder
Your ribbed and restless tongue
That unfolds its fleshy body
Like a squirming caged-in beast
Or swims in a pool of spittle
A playful skin-robed squid
Greets you with handless gesture
Watches with eyeless stare
And runs in grainy edges
Upon the lips and teeth;
Rears up like a rising reptile
To the roof-top of your mouth.

Seeming quite independent.
A visitor from outer space?
A loose-limbed sleek alien
Who sneaked in a previous night
When you left your lip-door open
And the fencing of your teeth
While groping in sleep-sunk waters
The white buds of your dreams?

The poems have been earlier published in Two Poems, K.G.Subramanyan; Courtesy: Artist & The Seagull Art Foundation