different strokes

sketch me one of those easy afternoons
-a charcoal sketch- of old friends sitting
together on a day that has not yet met its
expiry date, a time before companionship
became subject to first come first serve rules,
across a makeshift table with chairs dragged,
borrowed and stolen from other clusters
when they weren't watching, having
unassuming conversations over expensive
lunches nobody really paid for, laughing at the
stroke of two when the pull of rajma chawal
was greater than mandated duties, perpetually
planning escapades born of quixotic ambition.
beyond the borders of the canvas sit strangers
eyeing wistfully a camaraderie that is theirs
in some other sketch of some other memory.

Paint me a barmy evening with watercolors
- running into monsoonal excesses- of a walk
through potholed paths and shrill cries for
attention from cars and bikes while cyclists fall
off the edges of a world, theirs only in its periphery.
A piece of discarded blade reaching through worn-out
kolhapuri chappals bleeds alta on the road home
across alleys embellished with trampled flowers
and dog poop.The white churidar stains a muddy red
in response to questions the empty house never asks.

Write me a poem of a reluctant night heavy with
the aching humidity of accumulated pain,
blanketing embittered dead stars in a cityscape
of loss made of concrete, longing for a respite
that is possible only among mountains, rivers and
crickets, where in the breeze that becomes breath,
the space for the 'I' is undone.Write me a(n) un-i-verse.