A City Full Of Sirens
On a rain kissed day
Sirens from ambulances wring at full volume
Sending a shockwave through this lazy vacuum
The city has been suddenly diagnosed with Stage 3C
And all of us who mattered to her:
slum dwellers, uber rich, middle class,
upper castes, lower — sub lower — middle — sub-middle castes,
converts, casteless, outcasts, pimps, city planners
were all late by a minimum of six months in pre-empting this disease
Nobody took the city to an oncologist who could have CT scanned
Pointed out this infernal spread
No one bothered when her vitals had temporarily shut down
No octogenarian ruins were consulted
when they screamed, “she has a history!”
Now, water levels are rising
Her stomach bloats with one spell of monsoon
and there’s no omental biopsy in sight
No cytology report collected
So everyone’s figuring out which part of her abdomen
could be punctured to release this flow
Not knowing we’d all forgotten to close the tap, long ago.
The city has kept a lot in her womb for far too long
Regret and debris
Garbage and a festering wound
What she needs now isn’t saline and drips
but a memory from the books of sunshine
An embrace from salt lines and mangroves
The reassurance of leafy smiles stretching into infinity
Somebody holding her hand, somewhere
She deserves a Sunday with a beginning, middle and end
An unclogging of her mind with forests of her childhood
Ultimate forgiving for all traffic jams, under construction sites,
incorrect saat-bara and rivers rechristened as gutters
A forehead filled with deep-rooted kisses, not immigrant sweat-soaked goodbyes
She needs hope in her veins and laughter under her tissue
Maybe, a joke from the past
before she’s sent for chemotherapy.
The Coordinates Of Us
We are not poets
We are translators of culture
We are not wordsmiths
We are a cavalry, language created
To defend the last bastion
of human intellect
We are not writers
We are nuclear weapons
Designed to not destroy but create
We detonate peace
Our chemical warfare brings
strange mutations in love,
We can inject love in
the blood stream of humanity
And yet,
We never find ourselves.
We stay hidden in our alphabets
The Matras, The Velantis,
The Aakars, The Ukaars
Under the burden of punctuations
The weight of our grammar
Outweighing the rose that grows
collectively within our bodies.
Until now,
our territories were unfounded
No land ever united us
No geography ever showed us on a map
Until you
Unearthed me in your words
Under your dots,
Hanging below your colons
and exclamations
While peeling the sticky sheet
of grammar
Where I lay sprawled languages below
Waiting to be unearthed
We never knew we had coordinates
It never occurred that we too own
a country, a state, a city, a town,
a village, a home, an address
But now we know
We have a place,
Where borders vaporize and words meet
Where languages make love on open esplanades
Where silence can be arranged
in alphabetical order
The point where you and I stand
That is where a new nation of whispers and pure echoes will be formed
Those will be
The coordinates of us.
A Song of Infinite Touches
You sat with your naked back to me
I watched it intently, taking in the geographies of its vacant regions
Turning it into a screen
Watching a dessert change its shape under a full moon sky
Where stories unfolded and dunes shifted patterns
And a weary traveller found a way but never reached home
Your back could morph into anything —
An empty canvas waiting to be painted by darkness and colours of the breaking dawn
A blank piece of paper, hungry for words made out of kisses and half-read poems
A window that opens into another window of a galaxy undiscovered yet
A curtain with flickering reruns of laughter before and after feverish lovemaking
and moments yet to dissolve into deep slumbers of nothingness
Your back could be a mirror that unmasks face below every face
Until I meet the spitting image of me, hidden below layers of agonizing years
What remains is this bare skin waiting to be devoured
So when I touch your back with my finger
A crack goes through like a lightning
A future divided into two halves
The mirrored veil comes crashing down, soundless into the night
You turn around, broken from a reverie
Only to sing a song of infinite touches
Before putting me to sleep.
Between
Between this moment and the next,
A wire, tense and taut could snap:
Alphabets would litter the floor like pearls
A million unwritten letters would melt like raindrops
and scurry into the unknown letterbox
What was once the zip code to a heart
Between this text and the next
A story would unfold in three parts
A twist would form in the gut
And a new ending would be rewritten
In its own lost blood
While all the sweat drains from its pores
In bringing a lost child, home
Between this rendezvous and the next
A mango could silently ripen in the dark
Fall on the roof and disappear in its own youth
A season could pass on the wings of a bird
Altering the history of broken reveries
Between this promise and the next
Silence could perch on the soul
Grow bigger like a boil
Effacing what were once roads to new addresses
Between this laughter and the next
Pain would lie down in the empty spaces and fall into a deep slumber
A quivering heart would metamorphose into a butterfly
And still fear the scent of freedom
Between this birth and the next
We would pass through unending cycles of rebirths
And yet not know
Where were we supposed to once meet
And break this chain
Between...
A thousand betweens could lead to beginnings and ends.
And we would never know which exact between
Befell us.
The Queue
You stand in a queue full of yous every morning
like schoolgirls before the morning prayer,
single file; one hand distance apart
Each you takes a little bit from the you standing before
Each face, like the same pinafore but worn differently
The first in line stands the Poet — You
Two eyes looking at two different galaxies
Touching the tiger skin of humanity with words
The Poet — You is more soul less face,
more silence less space, more leaves less page
The Poet — You is yield and crave,
Ebb and flow of an eternal gaze
The next in line is the Researcher — You
Going deeper into the soil of questions all the way to the crust
Meeting questions at one traffic signal and answers at the next
Challenging the skin of whys
Peeling the skin of logic with the scalpel of truth
Entering the filtered sciences of two realities in cells of an excel sheet,
sealing rationale with text wrap
Then comes the Storyteller — You
That will never leave anybody alone
A monocle in one eye and magnifying glass in another
Placing a story on the fingers of time
Traveling with faces all the way till the last known station
where sequences end and loneliness meets the ink of a new story
The Researcher — You questions her being
The Storyteller — You answers, “You are not alone,”
Both yous sit hand in hand on a single branch of an evening
The Dreamer — You stands right behind
Waiting to join a tribal dance
Ready to make love to the wind
Keeping a bag packed in the corner of a universe to escape
Right before the Mother — You
Silently watching a seed become a girl for ten years
Dousing curiosities with fabled reassurances
The Lonely — You
Looks longingly at the city, spent with rage and promise after promise
Waiting for a time, unfounded by any clock yet
The Lover — You
Venerates with lips
Consumes sweat and tears
And fills laughter where they had been empty echoes
A new you is added everyday
An old you subtracted
Two yous coalesce like atoms to make a new you
Two yous divaricate into a million yous
Celebrating a silent festival of yous
What if all the yous united one day?
A naked eye would see a woman in full bloom
The mind’s eye, a Goddess.
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