Conscious Notebook Poetry and those that didn't make it there

The poems below are extracted from the book, "Conscious Notebook" which you can read full text offline here: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/7929525 and a few that didn't make it to that book but may exist in other books such as here:Haiku Harvest 2001 – 2006

Dream

You stepped into my dream

Like a whiff of rain swept Earth

A cool breeze blew through the windows

Rain…created music outside

The room bore your silent eyes

And myself lying on the mat

From an unearthly distance you bent down

And breathed softly into me

While I …kept on struggling

To reach you

Through dense jungles, steep slopes

Gradually you receded

into that never ending corridor. 

Grass

To the scorching summer sun

Burnt into an orange evening

You held out a blade of grass.

Back

It was quite sudden

When I noticed her

From the back

Was it somebody I didn’t know?

The next instant I knew it wasn’t true

When she turned momentarily

I continued to stare at her back

Two completely different persons

I never knew the back could have a personality of its own.

Faces                                

You wouldn’t have known

How smoothly I pocketed your face

The other day when we met

For a second time on the lift

Now… I can savor it

In the privacy of my room

Or the silence of the library

In the bustle of a crowd

Or whenever I’ve reason

To be distressed

I’d simply take a look at you

All golden rays of the sun

Shimmering on the waters

Of an unusual calm

As it sets over the horizon

The dark silhouette of a returning sail

Light

Today again…there was this light

After a storm

There were clouds too…but

 In their midst there was this bright

Shining through a huge cumulo nimbus

An orange glow…which

Shone through the cornfields and

Children’s faces that watched

Their paper-boats go in fast rivulets

The light seemed from another time

My yesterday and your tomorrow

Merged in a swirl of river rapids

River

A lot of mosquitoes

In the water

They don’t let her sleep…

River tosses and turns

Through the night

In her bed

Unable to sleep also

Are the fish

Until they decide

To go to the market

Buy a huge mosquito net

At night…inside,

The snake-like long net

River bathes…               

In moonlight streaming

Through the net

Fireflies light up the riverbank

In these early hours

Fishermen start… to row out into the sea

The moon seeps into the dense jungle

Of mangrove filled by the river

There is a gentle breeze

The mosquito net swings lightly

And along with it… the moon

Mountain

1

The day one comes face to face

With a huge mountain

Automatically windows open

Deep down somewhere

Inside the brain

Dark brown clouds atop a black massif

Penetrate your innermost corners

One fine day they suddenly emerge

Barging into a busy office room full of overworked colleagues

2

There are some people who never get to see a mountain

All they can do is simply wait

Any of these days it might just happen

Flapping its wings out of the blue

Would appear a shining desolate golden mountain

And lift them off their park side benches

3

In this extremely plain city

You sometimes wish

The road behind your house

Led to a nearby mountain

Every day on your return

From office

You’d take a walk on its steep slopes

Everyday…in this extremely plain city

One longs for a very own dear mountain

4

The rain stopped for you

To open that window in the bus

For your eyes to feast on those rice fields

Beside the road and at a distance

A shining ivory tearing through the clouds

5

I strongly believe amidst us somewhere

Resides a gigantic mountain

Full of perennial snow

Shining brightly in the afternoon sun

Changing colors with time

Morning…a pinkish white

Evening…a orange hue

We go about all our lives

Trying to scale our individual mountains

Somewhere deep within them

We exist…ourselves

6

Let down your hair in the wind mountain

Let it flow like a torrent through poetry

Swept off false moorings

Your volcanic lips let it burn each syllable

And let it cool with your icy stare

7

This mountain is an institution

One staying here too long tends to gather roots and branches

And finally …one day…becomes a tree which nests

Innumerable eggs of countless dreams

Each day we struggle to hold on to our mountains

Our roots, our dreams, losing our smiles in the process

In the end the institute crumbles and leaves us

To fly on the wings of freedom 

8

You resemble the mountain of my dreams

Is that a running stream or your hair blowing in the wind?

The day our eyes met and clouds burst into rain

I had to carry a wet heart all the way to the top

What are those pock marked scars

Did some one use pitons on your body?

One day I too had longed for a climb atop your majestic tresses

Every day I had been saving a jumar or a carabiner

All is lost today in your flowing hair

A mountain stream that floods my dreams in the plains

9

One day, they show a mountain on the TV screen

Walking towards a lonely traveler

It grew bigger and bigger and the traveler

Smaller and smaller until…

The whole screen was full of the mountain

Snow covered soft powdery white and the traveler…

One of the black dots on the tube…yet

Nobody really ever moved from their individual places

10

Oh no! Mountain she’s not for you

She’s just a bolt from the blue

A thundercloud, which will drench you from head to toe

After a time you’ll notice the smiling sun

Point out to your cloud over another distant mountaintop.

  

11

For me, I am sure await

A few playful mountains

One has to cross them on the way

To the biggest of them all

Its peak…lies invisible amidst clouds

Its surroundings…serene, silent

And yet…there’s this welling of love

Shining mountain…do stay put I pray

For you, I shall come definitely, one day

12

Imperceptible and yet a gradual accumulation

Of hatred, anger and distrust…human relationships

They form a thundercloud of emotions from a wisp of smoke

Far down from the valley…all within seconds

A gigantic mountain of misunderstandings

From mole hills of misconstrued notions

13

In terrible tensions sleep is only possible

On listening…to a far off melody that emanates

From deep within a desolate, distant mountain

There’s a hint of the smiling sun

At the distant mountaintop there exists

None of our dreams and wants

Only sleep…deep and restful

14

On returning from the mountains

One roams in the city…full of visions

Giant skyscrapers resemble Makalu…Lhotse

Vehicles ply on disgruntled streets…remind you

Of hurrying sherpas on the Khumbu ice fall

15

One day…maybe on a trip to the mountains

One might just encounter crumbled rocks and dust

On both sides of a road which extends into a never ending desert

A gradual wear and tear through the ages…play of air wind and water

Cities buried deep within them…houses that twinkled once at night

Atop dense dark mountain shapes.

16

One day just before elections you chance upon

Political workers painting graffiti on the mountain

Slowly and steadily it gets covered in slogans and speeches

As you go near it becomes illegible…childish scribbles

You leave and from a distance… see only a sparkling sun

17

Everyday I return to you

Like you are home waiting

With a sweet smile and a cup of tea

The sea gulls fluttering in your eye lashes

Throw up incredible patterns of white

I am sucked into them in a vortex of river rapids

18

If one can’t go to a mountain

It comes to him

I’ve been waiting for a long time now

Molehills cover my body

The Earth on it sprouts Trees

With the passage of time it seems I have

Become the mountain

Respiratory Care Nights

Breathing machine pumping love

Eyes of dying hens

Pierce to depths of turbulence

Needles, blood gas and movement

Brisk sharp and painful

A cascade of alarms, ventilator settings

Causes and remedies

Eventually dropping off to an unusual silence

Mountain valleys, placid waters

Light of dawn and a distant bird song

Waking up to a humidifier alarm.

Acute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy

One night a black raven swooped down

And carried off all the power in his legs

Next day there were hordes of them

Screeching and perching at his hands and arms

One rude jab and he lost his voice

Another made him choke to swallow

He was brought to the ICU

Breathing slowly turning blue

A large ostrich perched near his head

Delivering mouth to mouth till he turned red

Gradually his power returned

One by one in all his limbs

All birds one by one returned to their nests.

Pulmonary medicine

Take a look at this chest x-ray

Hmm dense forests bordering on green rice fields

A cow munching grass, lazily waving away the flies

The setting sun, one or two clouds interspersed

Hmm looks normal-show the other one

What’s this! a giant jungle mower

Concrete new buildings-all cooped up look alikes.

Hey can you hear the trees crashing!

Can’t make out – over here the mower’s creating a din

Hmm see anything more?

A lot of alveolar opacities

That’s the smoke from our upcoming power plant

Hmm the diagnosis is clear—Lung cancer

Get a bronchoscopy but the prognosis is bleak

At the most 3-6 months.

The battered bronchial tree

Last night I discovered the fruits of bronchogenic carcinoma

Growing on my bronchial tree

Ugly and slimy it tasted of blood and phlegm.

This tree…had long been a source of shade

For travel weary souls amidst sun burnt fields.

Not any more…falling leaves,

Shriveled bark, ugly nodular fruits with a slimy sauce

With each and every cough it shook from its very roots

Caught in a raging storm

On being a Medical Student

First published here::http://student.bmj.com/student/view-article.html?id=sbmj030241 and subsequently as a book chapter here:http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/7929525 (reviewed here:http://www.amazon.com/The-Conscious-Notebook-Narrative-Ontology/dp/1606927353/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t)


I had started being a medical student 40 years back and ’am part of the teaching faculty now but I still feel I am a medical student. The science is ever changing and whatever we learn today soon is washed away in a deluge of rapidly accumulating newer evidence. We tend to look back and think how awed we were by our seniors who always seemed to know so much. We thought that we too would know as much when we got to be senior ourselves. 

Many years rolled by and that moment never came, only we noticed ourselves being thought of as more knowledgeable by our juniors. Whatever we learned instilled in us, the capability to apply a rule of thumb in patient management. However, it never worked when confronted with diagnostic uncertainty complicated all the more by a dense jungle of evidence, which has grown remarkably over the years.

As medical students, when we finished the basic sciences and started clinics, there was a pleasurable difference noted immediately, as we no longer had to cram dull theory like in the basic sciences. The patient was our greatest teacher of medicine as much as the dead body had been in anatomy.

The best way to learn was interviewing the patient and going to the depths of his story, which in 75% of cases would yield the diagnosis. It was a detective game and the clues had to be meticulously elucidated. This is where our teachers played a role. They showed us how to elicit these clues, which were vital to the diagnosis. We however learnt not only plain hunting but also to love our patients. It was great to collect their stories and keep them in our mental hard discs and reflect on them over our textbooks. That was the first time we experienced our books coming alive. At a time when our contemporaries were collecting stamps, coins or people’s autographs, we started collecting people… live people who were not just long dead characters of a novel but would greet us from bus stops or morning walks. Interacting with them we experienced a vitality flowing like a river in and out of our lives.

The greatest gift however, my formal training in medicine provided, was the ability to look at the human body as a machine. I had initially instinctively rejected this mechanistic way of looking at humans but gradually became used to it when I realized it was one of the most advanced systems ever invented or evolved. In this scheme of things, off course, doctors lose their halo and become more of system troubleshooters. They can be mollified by the fact that its one of the most advanced and complex systems they trouble shoot.

However it’s peculiar how a whole health care industry manages to remain preoccupied with only one single objective day in and day out and that is system trouble shooting. We don’t develop new systems, we simply try to solve problems and keep learning from them, newer methods, and strategies to solve further problems. Very often there are problems in the system we have created ourselves in our bid to solve a few relatively simpler ones. Luckily the body in its advanced complex framework has been endowed with self-repairing capabilities. Its system of self-repair often also does lead to problems, a reminder of the fact that we live in an imperfect world.

All humans have this propensity to solve problems be it mechanical or human. There is a medical student in all of us. More often we tackle our innumerable day-to-day problems just by listening to them, analyzing them from a different perspective. This however requires time, something, which has been lost to medical students who are also, designated interns, residents or consultants.