Kozhikode city
an ancient cave.
I can’t decipher the hieroglyphs
and cuneiform of hunting
you scratched on its inner walls
and you too who lie scattered in the dark
like the ruins of a fallen race.

Words
more helpless than the eyes
that open from the earth
letters lonelier than footsteps.

Two lines
two rail tracks.

You are for him alone
- the one in hiding.
Daylong you hang upside down
in desolate corners
and at night come as salvation-denied flutters
that put out the lamp.

The sun sets in the sea
and you in moonshine.
What passes is a festival
faltering, an entire generation
tongue tipsy, an intact culture
lying numb, a land
for which the sea
by the axe retreated5 .

At midnight
streets ruminate over your footsteps
and you sabotage a train
with a skull.

Worms
the fingers of which blind god?
Rivers and stars travel with us
sometimes at dusk
the hills and rocks resemble the dead.

The Shoranur-Mangalore railway line
the sound track of a one-eyed demon.
Never gaze into the depths of a running train.
The chopped head that rolls is not a prey:
killing and throwing away
are pastimes of chakradaris.6 

T. Guhan- a young avant-garde Malayalam poet who committed suicide young.
Kozhikode- a coastal town and Capital of the erstwhile Malabar (North Kerala) under the British rule where Vasco de Gama first landed in the Indian sub-continent.