Land of Ideas

[Note: This is a poem and is best viewed by expanding this blog post.]

I lie restless, thinking on the bed,
with torrent of foolish thoughts in my head,
as if I lost even my Lilliputian wisdom,
when my ideas reduce ad absurdum.

I visit my land of ideas in a dream,
where the floor is white as cream.
My ideas stand there like Gray dominoes,
each one of them in an idiosyncratic pose.

It was like a parade of mighty giants,
mixed with flocks of puny little dwarfs.
Those giants may appear solid and immovable,
but even a dwarf may take one down without trouble.

As I take a bird’s eye view of the land,
I see my dominoes tiny as grains of sand.
From here they form picture of great elegance,
yet they seem so iffy, to tip at minute chance.

I see, as I descend to the ground,
There are monkeys running around.
They occasionally give tinier dwarfs a little nudge,
and gravity takes over giants which otherwise wouldn’t budge.

Enraged, I want to stop this madness,
by putting those monkeys in a cage.
After locking them up I realize,
without them my world is an empty stage.

For my dominoes, their push is like a test,
while erecting them, whether I did my best.
As I observe long blocks of dominoes going down in silence,
now I see an opportunity to build again in their place.

With a newfound hope I become a bird again,
to see what else missed my limited sight on plain.
I observe that my plain was just another cloud,
like millions of other floating around.
 

As I go closer to one, I see a fellow dream-lander shine,
building monuments on a lonely island just like mine.
One of them gave me quite a laugh,
a straight line dividing the whole cloud in half.
 

I ask "why? Have you lost the sense of art?
Or have I missed some interesting part?"
My fellow says, "every domino can trip only its succeeding,
so, the chances of them falling diminish for each preceding.
 

If like this I go on all the way to infinity,
then nothing’ll cause the first one to plummet"
So, I went to the very first of the lot,
kick it so hard that each fell with a loud racket.
 

After that is over and we shared a laugh,
he went on rebuilding with a fresh start.
Then I came back to my own island-stage,
and notice a long loop in my own domino montage.
 

Now my own mistake was crystal clear,
I was stuck in an argument which was circular,
as if expecting the fall to go on forever,
just based on their local behavior.
 

I kicked one of the dominoes in the loop,
with a smile, and saw the last one fall on the first,
after a while. The cloud now lost a little shade of Gray,
and happiness rained down from sky-island today.
 

The dream was over, and I woke up with a start,
now I wanted to take my whole world apart,
But the trouble was that dominoes were all missing,
it was imminent that I right now start searching...
 

I looked, I looked, I sought them everywhere,
And finally, I found them, floating high up in the air,
now I wonder how I managed to put them there.
I will continue to experiment on them for fun,
 

but first I’ll have to bring them down one by one...
 

First draft: 6 am, 3rd November 2013.

 

This poem is accepted for publication in CRR (Case Reserve Review: Spring 2021 Edition). It was written a long time ago when I couldn't speak English properly (still it was better than what I could say in Hindi. Marathi was only language I was comfortable with). I could write though. I hope you found it interesting. Let me know in comments...