My hero is Anais Nin and by extension Kamala Das and Namita Gokhale. I detest the male swagger of the Bombay School and their women poets imitating the style of Nissim Ezekiel. Ezra Pound’s Cantos which I imitate in my Paradise isn’t Artificial (Red River, 2021) opened out the form to me as for countless others. I wrote ghazals before Agha Shahid Ali whom I admire as I do Suniti Namjoshi, a pioneer fabulist of lesbian experience. I began as a Writers Workshop poet in 1990 after having published my first poem as a graduate student in America in 1973. I have done a 20-year-long Sadhana before publishing my first book. Mainstream presses like HarperCollins took me up in the 2000s by publishing my Sufiana in 2013. Navayana published 100 Collected Poems in My Sunset Marriage, 2016. My poetic prose which I learnt from Elizabeth Bishop is found in my Autobiography, The Man Who Would Be Queen (Penguin, 2011) and in Rebel Angel: Collected Prose from Dhauli Books, 2021.

Hamburg,1938

Everyone remembers the water and swans

But I remember the stumbling stones on pavements for the Jews deported and killed

Gay suicide artists big dicked

Hausfraus scurrying under their Titans erected in squares

A Titan uses Diana’s breast for arm rest

These erections no more powerless than the bombed cathedral by the pier

Indian spices wash up from the shore

Anita Ree, Jewish painter has just killed herself

The city fathers must’ve been pleased

Julie Ann wanted a poem but I remember these rained on swans

From Hamburg Vietnam Afghanistan

Hamburg, November, 2021

Heer

Heer saw Ranjha toil

Below her high balcony

Her heart went out to him

Soon he went out to her

NO

Someone said No

All music stopped

But Heer heard it in her heart 

So did Ranjha in his

The night was dark

Lightning cracked the inky sky

It poured in sheets

Snakes swam out to circle Heer’s

Feet

She swam out to him riding a clay pot

Our bodies,mud

Would melt in water

But for a clay pot

That reached shore

Love is a yes

Love is a yes and a no

Body is mud

But resolve is stone

Water melts stone

What use differentiating rain from river

When all is water in water

Blood,sweat,semen,spit

It's all water

When Ranjha played Holi

Colour poured as sweat 

Melting, he had become Radha

When Heer played Holi alone

In sensed

She wore Krishna's crown

But war has no favourites

If love is war

Blood pours equally from all

Even enemy blood is pure

If my breath pours

Like the flutes lament

Into you

Then where am I

And who are You?

A man can become woman

A woman can become man

In love a woman becomes a man

But a man becomes the Sea

In Kabuki, the Onnagata

Using cunning make up, costume

Becomes woman an entire stage life

So too in Jatra

Chapal Bhaduri

Or Rituparno on film playing Bhaduri

In the marriage bed

Men and women mingle

Who is who?

It’s as if two flames mingle

Yet at parting are two again

But while one

She became he

He became she

Futile to talk of he and she

May be there are not two

But six genders

May be there aren’t two

But only One

Like Black subsumes all colours

Or,light made up of seven.

Ajanta

All art is local said Vlaminck

Repeating something makes you own it

A child’s thrown ball

Mother’s picking it up

Artists copying Ajanta 

Over and over

Mastery is what is owned

The cave is dark

A lit match

Whites of eyes dart out of darkness

A world recedes

A world is born

Out of black comes all colour

Here the monks imagined

The repeated lives it took

To make a Buddha

Bird, beast, fish, flower

Padmapani holds a flower

A moment of a day

His eyes pools of compassion

Our bodies brands of fire

A lit match

Eyes dart out

Bodies, bodies

Animal,man

Fish bird fowl flow

We grope, behold

Become

Let go lover, sage, master, artist

Art is what is made

Darkness

A light out of darkness

I must find the midnight clew...

Politics without poetry is dry

Poetry without Politics is effete

1

A Korean pianist plays

Chopins Revolutionary Etude

On video

2

The video shows

A thawing river

Freeing itself in spring

3

The piano

Has set up a storm

4 

Who will clean up the mess?

The old have departed

The young are left.

5

By writing this

I, the poet

Have become responsible.