I wear no crown
Nor do I wear any mask
I am not the prophet's prefect
Nor I am the God's reject
Nor I was ever the God's child perfect

I look as I am to be
I am what I think as to be
As the defoliated tree looks to be
As the dethroned leaves sway awhile in cupid love
With the dirty frogs leaping in high breeze
As the straighter path bends
Along the autumnal way to discretion
Even as the death blows the other way around
Even when the depth of meaning tears me wide apart
Even when the splotched soul dies me dead
I look to be bending as what I am in the burning morning
From the very beginning to the end of whirring chugging
Days and nights I am what I am doing and undoing

Even as I were dead
Dead as darkness in full light of the day
I would shed my shroud of dead skin, my mask
I would do off the crown of thorns
That my soul had buried for a long while
While I thought what I ought to be as what I am to be
Like the defoliated leafless tree looks to be
Even as I were dead I would be as what I would look to be.

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(This is a true story. I see her everyday coming in rickshaw in the evening. She waits in railway platform for her customers. And at night he returns back to her dilapidated shanty a few kilometres away. She has a little daughter but has none and nothing.)

Sabina her name
Her man had written off her fortune
Leaving his last will for her to swallow her own days in nights
All alone wandering her long nights to sell her wares
Her only wares of bulging flesh and fading beauty to longing eyes
And sweating bloods in shadows of big men in dark disguise
Nobody knows whether her own man is dead or alive
In this world of filthy riches and sacred sermons
But this unkind world of hers has its way of impeaching her
Of her body of dignity falling flat over the lost sky in shame
And in despair her hungry body taking refuge in the arms of her big men.

Who sells her a morsel of rice?
Who sells sagging her breasts for her only daughter?
Her days are always in quest of nights for her big men
They all come hungry of slaughters' gaze
Of cardinal lusts and ordinal pleasure of wolves' prey
An easy prey as always it is in the whorehouse of freedom
She frees herself so dearly, unrepent and unsmattering
As if the nights are her long day closing its wings
Falling head over heel in eagles' love
Of unrequited sinner more sinned than the God's gospels
She cares not knowing the pristine flesh putrefying
And blood blowing cold over the hill of her aging ages.

She sells herself her only freedom
She sells her one and only right to die anytime
She sells her all and everything not to shy anymore
She sells her body only aging to die
For her only love to feed her breast in a lullaby
As she kisses her smiling crying herself on the sly.

And for her life goes on and on
In the whorehouse of freedom for an eternity
And the days diminishing in nights of darkness at noon
As she lives as long as her bulging flesh spells the slaughter's gaze
And her nights pay her a bowl of frothing rice
To feed her breast to her only love to pray for none in her lullaby.

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Abandoned
And befallen - gods
Trespass the moon
So black
- in a fresco of silence
Like a solo drop
Of dusk - godly foibles
As if dying
In lowly fables
- shredded
And camouflaged,
Nocturnal truth
Of infernal desires speaking
At a remove
From the earthly soil

Thus spake
The spell of oracular lies
As the gods fumbled
In celestial fuss to reverberate
In teardrop shadows
- unfettering hundreds of lives
From the fiasco
Of unholy war as lowly
As godly disdain
Forbidden far from the heaven

Thus -
As the fresco of silence
Smacking
- of an epic delusion
Dies a demise
Of godly death
And the fiasco ends there
In godly foibles
And in godly disdain...

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Who is God?
Asks the dead ghost
Beheaded
In mystic guise
Darkly
As if to brave
The howling wind
The macabre shadow
Walks past the archangel
Unknowingly
In sombre disguise.

The shadow asks
The bemused archangel
Where is to find the Almighty
In sight of God?
The dead old shadow
Of the ghost
Resurrected never
To be wise more
Eyelids hoisted high
In Nirvana mudra
Unknowingly
Up upon
The left and right
Of the seventh heaven.

The bemused God
High and dry
Leaves his home and hearth
Praying to the unknown
Unknowingly
To save his face
From the hiding archangel.

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Staring
At the bottom of depth
I see nothing
By the dash of disdain - a man
Plucking the porcupine
Of illusion
- a cadence of servile looks
As the inferno rages
The flowering blues, whistling tra la la
To a dismantled tune
- but nothing comes to a full stop
In parting repose
And whispering colloquy
That falls
At the feet of chasing shadows
In false tendon

The man - as I see him
In infantile disorder
Carrying the priest of his death
Roaring and roaring
In jungle smile - to love
For the antiquity
In hatred as if the totemic faith
Breaks asunder - so slowly
And repeats
All the while
In montage of blue silence
That prays to presage
Those doomed myths impending
In another ghetto
And he dethrones his self-image
In swapping lethargy

As he never cries
As he never dies to live
So he upbraids - me
And forgets me not with malice
But humour, he dies
In another life, and he dies
In another ghetto
To leave me alone, bleeding
In dimes of reason
And reality, never so ending

The man leaves me
- the man worships me
Not to die
To be back coming over me...

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez has always fascinated me to no ends.
I have always had the opportunity to read quite a few number of his novels. His unique style of writing is just magical - he follows reality on tiptoe later to transcend it in an uproarious manner which he uses to enthral his readers in many phalanxes of caustic reality bordering on surrealism a la Latin American genre as envisaged by legendary film director Luis Bunnuel.

Very recently one of my friends showed the courtesy by passing me his copy of Marquez's OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS proved to be simply irresistible to be. The story is set in the slave market of a Columbian seaport where the Marquis family lived with their godforsaken twelve-year-old daughter Sierva Maria. The story begins when she was bitten by a rabid dog. Cases of rabies were neither limited nor insignificant in the history of the city. But nobody cared too much about the bite. The wily and wise physician Abrenuncio professed in his soothsaying, "No medicine cures what happiness cannot." Then what happened to her?

At long last the Marquis sent her packing to the nearby convent of Santa Clara to lead lead a ghetto-like life there. Tortured and quarantined, she became more and violent and behaved in an uncouth manner. The convent people thought that she had been possessed by the evil spirit of a Black Witch and as such they decided forcibly to exorcise her of the virulent demons of her sickness. The young priest Cayetano Delaura was entrusted with that job.

Delaura took charge of her with his heart out. Most compassionately he delved deep into her tender psyche and eventually he surreptitiously fell for her in love. But all his solemn and sober designs to win her heart and favour came to a sombre end. And she died a tragic death as if to be cured in full bloom of happiness bereft of worldly pains and cursed superstitions. And the unrequited young lover of her vanished into the with bated breath of shame and self-indulgence.

To me, Abrenuncio's soothsaying is the moot point of this passionate love story and that revolves about the enchantment and disenchantment that Marquez is so apt to deliver and display his satiric characters in wigwagging shades of hope and despair. Like his all other novels, he profusely uses mythical and biblical allusions in many splendours to leave his readers in a world of phantasmagoria. He weaves the pattern in a web of his inimitable style and his all too familiar magic realism carries his readers to a far flung world of myth, mystery in a seemingly supernatural ambience.

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