AFTER ALEXANDRIA
What an agony not to wake up next to you.
Not to have fallen asleep with your head on my chest.
I made the bed quickly, as you did every day,
sheets that still smell of your hair and skin.
Your pillows, one that you took with you, take
with you everywhere, sandalwood...
Balasan
I’ve met the river before, but this is a new setting—
like meeting a parent in their office.
Bala—sand, san—stone:
a river baptised for spitting its monsoonal gifts,
like calling a girl Khushi, to bait happiness.
The mountains that fight the grease of dust
when we look at it from Matigara,
they are here now, my...
They Won’t Forget to Pray
(verses in response to “So Long Marianne”)
In the night,
you asked for silence
to speak to angels
for Marianne, for Marianne.
You opened your lips
and dry as they were still breathed
the confession of stillness.
Darkness approached as you addressed
love in its trembling thoughts.
I can’t hear your voice.
It is quiet and...
Civil Guardsmen
From a field of grasses dried
by wind, two civil guardsmen stare
toward the sun for traffic
on the lonely road
they have been stationed to protect.
They are tall
against the burnt horizon,
still as the ground itself,
and one is the reflection of the other
as, side by side, they stand
in place. Should one
turn around,...
GRANDFATHER
You remember more of what is no more.
Past steps into your bedroom and your grandson
becomes your newly born. You love to address
him as Baba – this is how you called your first born.
The present blurred and faceless has no challenges
for you. Your face perks up and breaks into...
SCAR
The love byte is a frozen ripple
seeking the other shore
just as the curve
seeks the circle,
the curly hair seeks the halo
encircling the head.
May be because raw effort is
prettier than the outcome,
sun fondles the dark underbelly
of the forest, floods it with light
only for darkness to regrow
like waiting.
Humans remain banks with the
turbulence...
MOLD
When you left
and I left
When we both left
our glasses
to the loneliness
that'll babysit
our leaving
the place
that has seen
us naked
in each one
of our eyes
There were islands;
green irises & black pupils
they floated the way
we buoyed in that moment
of intimacy.
INCENSE RIBS
I am thinking of you.
Don't move.
Let the cars run over.
Let people walk through.
Let rain...
Where Technocracy Ends
The other day, since I couldn’t recall,
I googled “What was I just thinking about?”
and the computer would not give me
the correct information to my inquiry.
I asked it this question a million times over
and every time it gave me the wrong answer.
It felt good knowing there were still
some...
LONGING
How can Kashmir be a hydrogen conspiracy?
the passiveness, the aloofness—the longitude
they search for their wriggled breathing
abandoned history, stooped pride in city squares
what is the DNA of their guillotined blood—
Dalits
they preserve solitariness in a ledge—Dalits
they store pain in their barns—Dalits
and then the masses of the holy land pray
together for the...
SHATTER
Glass wall inside of me
Looking to where I want to be
How this widowed heart hides
In plain sight, wishing to be seen
False light is blinding me
Until I can no longer breathe
Quiet madness beguiles
This raging fire, consuming
Masked her wall of pretend
Fettered anguish lingers within
Imprisoned by the tides
In murky depths a life...
CREATIVITY
Excogitate a rainbow,
The piebald mind breaks into,
A woolgathering without rains,
On furlough during emphasis,
Precipitation and tedium.
A breakthrough in a belfry,
Is not a quantum of peerless words.
A sockdolager of a man's oeuvre,
Is also a renaissance of mirages.
Scant advertency makes him think.
DEATH
Cessation is a penumbra of the foofaraw.
The patina of sandalwood is...