You aren’t lovers in Delhi

if you haven’t been to the bylanes

of Connaught Place together,

seen the broken balcony

above the chai-wallah shack

and shared the vision

of standing entwined on such a one

to encase the sun setting

into the abysmal cemented

terraces

but shared it in the space

between two separate heads

that which is better left unarticulated

and indistinct in shape

like the smoke released from

two separate cigarettes 

making love in the air,

 exalted.

Without-Another

(Inspired by Eunice De Souza’s ‘Another Way to Die’)

I would have imprinted my name

in the space between your ribs,

if only I liked my name enough,

and carbonated the eight letters so that

they may be clung to your skin

when your body is nothing more than fossil

And those eight letters would be

as dysfunctional as I am,

breaking into funny patterns

when you’re all alone in the dark,

when your brain shuts down

and only senses remain

because you don’t see maggots  

suffocating you to death,

or yellow bulls floating in the air

with blood dripping from their horns

-your blood-

only to realize that there is no

cosmic carousel,

nor a fantastic marvel

to your self-loathing.

Only being called out is enough to

make me realize that it isn’t your voice,

only touching my finger to someone else’s

is enough to remind me that it isn’t

your body next to mine.

Writing through Peepholes

What have I got to write about

when experience falls short of the metaphor

and those sailors of the sea use and abuse the nausea and sickness  

for all the poetry in the world

and those soldiers, friends of the soldiers,

friends of friends of the soldiers have their grim realities to themselves-

struggle, life, strife, achieve and lose- all in the same moment

which sounds more hysterical than grim

--so you know how they package their syllabus,

those English departments of the world, defining Sassoon’s poetry

as a moment via the experience of shell shock

and you know that we’ll never get rid of categories, but you also know

that engagement with categories is essential--

all too familiar to me when, with no sense of realization,

I have to shit and piss and bleed in the same moment

to get rid of the undesirable category of pretension

some name-dropping guy puts me in,

but you have all too many selves to keep track of  which one

is thrown inside the court to fill the numbers because

man, you’re too scared of the ball hitting your head

all that you can do is run around and prevent coming in anyone’s way

--but the point is that the ‘I’ remembers a time when

I wore that guy like a pair of jeans

and you know how they package pairs of jeans

with all your ‘Curve’ and ‘Diva’ collections

but that doesn’t prevent you from buying them either

it just makes you feel like living in exile,

the scale of which is set by comparisons between

a Malyali and a Kashmiri living in Delhi,

an Assamese and a Mumbaikar studying in Ghalib's city

--because when I say that you know how everything is packaged

I’m talking about staring into the sun teary-eyed and seeing a personal rainbow

but don’t believe ‘em saying that to add colour in your life

is the best way to live--

yet even this is'nt something that I have got to write about. 

Circle

There’s always a circle

which no theory talks about

it doesn’t disrupt my

everyday functioning

for I’m still gliding through to do

what I have to do

like an unworn skate

on a slant surface

of both pleasure and pain

and if I glide through for long

the dose of regularity will

prevent all my palpitations,

I know,

except in that accidental moment

when those half-internalised tunes 

flow in the background 

carrying the scent of 

Urbino’s bitter almonds,

I become aware of the circle

and palpitations resurface

I am an empty flat in some

suburban part of town

where noises are always heard

from the unfamiliar outside

while a nauseating silence lingers inside

compressing the air too hard to bare

I want to shit out memories

Do you see now?

sounds, smell and shit

always in a circle

revealing the lie of

gliding like a skate

but even if I know that you see it

there’s hardly any solace in this state.

                  

From The Inside

At the finishing point of a book

chosen insecurely from the pile
that should rather be read

before anything else,

hours spent in the makeshift spot on

the mattress that has made a pit

hugging my ass like it was never to let go

of a favourite tenant,

like it had never known any other before

and the ass and I diving right into

the only habitat that would accept

us without anything asked for in return.

My sister,

she’s been on four phone calls

since the last few hours,

Four long intense conversations with

friends from the old days from the old cities,

while I’ve been twitching around in my pit

making an aspirational hollow

and measuring my irregular hair strands

with the words on the page

a message from the boy I fell for

a message from the boy I slept with

and the unmoving I stuck in the pit carrying

all my weight

for it would never complain about it

or anything else,

for it would never ask for a response

from she who mastered the fucking

art of unresponsiveness  

like the hermit who but for their ideals

desire sociality, except that weighing

down deep in the pit was never

my ideal.

Colours of Yellowed Letters

And as it happens with distant memories

you begin to question their existence

always ending up with “maybe,

I just made it up”

But those yellowed letters are a story

I am not creative enough to write.

Where did those words come from,

I think now

Was it the grey December and

shivers it sent through my body, that

spark of romanticism that bursts

out of nothingness

or the whiteness of the paper I laid

myself bare on, screaming out rainbow

stories I can no longer make up

the end of,

or perhaps it was just that blues-

stricken face of yours I conjured up

to believe that emptiness has a colour

as mine,

to answer your “So, tell me about

your dreams” for purposes other

than storytelling itself, until the cigarette

stubbed

It is on nights as black as these
sweat-soaked body meek, that
feverish yellow appears shiny 

which makes me wonder, maybe

I just made it up.  

Patterns

A tear trickles down her eye, a pair which seem tired not of age or overwork, but of the latent sadness of life itself, a clockwork of dissatisfaction, as she had read somewhere. It crawls down her cheek towards the nostril, as her face lay tilted, when she snorts it in. There is something peculiar about consuming your own tears. She considered it as a kind of solidarity with herself, as the salty tear which was produced in the fluidity of her own eyes, ultimately doesn’t fall on the keys of the laptop, or on a page of the book she had been reading at the time, but goes inside her own body.

I see her going through the whole process, over and over again.

In a moment, she breaks the pattern and changes the song of the same band that had been playing for the last twenty minutes now.

“Associations. Fucking associations! They can make you fall in and out of love with a piece of music.”

She doesn’t really mean it, not with the same intensity. Although, she has a certain sense of repellence brewing up inside her, when she listens to that same piece that had made her appreciate its introducer, and feel appreciated, in turn. Somehow, it made her feel like she was good enough to listen to that kind of music; like she deserved it. Now it can’t make her get up in the morning, so she doesn’t. It loses its “feathers of hope” and rather makes her cringe, leaving her in search of something else.

I see her naivety, while she is subconsciously thinking of an Emily Dickinson metaphor for wording her mind. I note the helplessness in expression, but I can’t do anything to make that better. Does she even want to make it better? Expression is a twisted thing; I get that from a lot of those human minds. Once you master that art, there’s nothing left to aspire for. You reach the pinnacle, and then you are left stranded in a lonely place with others only feeding on your creation. Perhaps, she knew the truth too closely, that her creation is only going to be an inspiration, at the end of the day. Why should she even try? Perhaps, she wanted to be the one feeding herself, rather than being the bread and wine for others. I can only speculate.

“Sometimes, playing Ostrich is delightful. Putting out the lights of the room, playing the music, and becoming averse to the world out there. Like the mosquitoes inside. I bet these silly creatures wish for their lives, that sucking the blood of a few of us would keep them content, fulfilled, knowing all along that they’d have to get out in the air sometime, or they’ll die of inaction.”

I know I am drawn to her with an unusual force, but like a rational observer, I take note of her examining the strands of her hair, one by one. The irregularity in the texture of each strand irks her, not like something unwanted, but rather like the crack in the middle of a wall. She can’t understand the reason behind it. And she craves for some kind of order and regularity, over her hair at the very least, since nothing else was in her control. Or so she thought, which would be in keeping with my previous observation of her naivety.

She had nothing else to offer that night, since I had carefully followed her mind. So, I left.

***

She read this account that I officially submitted the next morning, which left her generally satisfied. It proved to be ‘real’ enough for her with the part which detailed her naivety. Too much positivity leaves them in doubt of the authenticity of the observation. She got what she wanted to know, like so many before her.