Cheap Love
Oh, love’s madness is a rare thing.
As rare as kasturi, as cheap as opium.
I have been loved cheap, I always had the opium.
Drunk on love, not weed, not drug, not liquor,
I could drive 200 miles in an hour
on a highway you look up on YouTube
for CCTV footage. When my car swerved,
we escaped unhurt but our love was dead.
I couldn’t bury the corpse. I carry it around
but I am never discovered. Big car, big boot,
the audacity of cheap opium. I am into crime
learnt from big boys. My grief is lighter knowing
I was not arrested for underage driving.
*kasturi: musk
Lonesomeness
It’s blazing as the Sun,
golden as hell,
nature cloaked as crops
in rapidly freezing dusk.
Do not wish me on my birthday.
I want to break my phone,
fall in love with silence,
spend the day sleeping.
I want to be busy
looking at the sky
feeling its arms in my bedsheet.
Some things in life are within reach.
A shot at the galaxy from wretched earth
naked as ambition is but utterly human
to shun humans in favour of the stars.
Estranged
For years we have stayed apart,
peas in remote ponds
impatient to the bone
to all things one could
express in love.
We are not lovers.
We may be like
brothers and sisters, mothers and sons,
childhood friends, class rivals,
strangers in libraries,
bitter relatives in a wedding,
but not lovers, not a couple,
not even casual drifters.
Here on this morning
the phone rings as usual.
there has been a party,
you talk as if I were there
listening to every song played.
If this routine of many routines
had a language, it would be
nothing to do with distance,
longing, wet dreams, and
everything about
noise, streets, several cups of chai,
menthol air on morning walks,
autumnal stillness in Belfast,
laborious breathing in Delhi,
those childhood years
in our hometown
all condensed in a call
Universal Peace
World peace, street peace, national peace -
pursuit of peace is a strange thing.
Order outside, disorder inside.
Places we can live in, we may never leave.
There are no mirrors here, no slogans,
no placards, no police, no dharnas.
In dark chambers, subhuman rests
in silence, fear, compromise.
This peace is violent.
Everyone wants it.
High Trust Societies
I wake up to my daily organizer,
a reminder of day, date, time,
several alarms to wake me up,
hit the gym, go for walks, attend class,
mindfulness to feel the moment
when time lapses into days.
I remember the man on the street
asking if we had five pounds, a duvet,
some food. My Tesco bag full of
rice porridge, cake, noodles, milk.
I want to believe he isn’t rising
to take my anything but I shudder.
I want to, for once, forget
life is not just in online donations,
charity organizations, church visits,
salary contributions, volunteering,
contracts, paying bills, Christmas dinners,
that the man is not in my diary
but I don’t and life collapses just like that,
emptied out of its possibilities.
These poems were part of The Poetry Issue 2023, curated by Shireen Quadri. © The Punch Magazine. No part of these should be reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of The Punch Magazine.
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