friend

For a few days now,
I have noticed a pigeon
atop the iron grill
outside my window.
Yesterday it perched
by the sill awhile,
then flew back to the grill,
to stay the customary night.
My companion of nightly
contemplations and
academic writing.

Nesting in unlikely places.
finding momentary refuge,
pausing for movement,
trading beginnings for ends
and verdicts for silence.
Is that you, my grey friend, 

or me? I wonder.

a questionable inquiry

Everywhere you turn, the overcast
skies of your mind weigh you down
with endless inquiry and doubt.

To be and not to be.

What responsibility do these shoulders carry?
Or want? Or hope to finally put down?
To whom is this responsibility owed?

Can you compartmentalize yourself neatly
into slots of nature and nurture?
These desires of your heart - are they your desires?
What authorizes these desires? Or who?
What authorizes them as yours?
Where do you dwell? In what? In whom?
Who unveils you, and how do you unveil?
In what violent silences are you implicated?
Would you interrupt “collectively inherited epistemic frames”?

What structures of thought and habit bind you?
What holds you back? What takes you forward?
How do you begin to disentangle yourself?
How do you disrupt the enforced linearity?
What if you don’t? What is liberation worth?
Can you imagine equality? What does it look like – to you?

What does silence mean to you?
How do you escape the siren’s melody?
What does it mean to surrender to its song?

What is your educational ideal?
Where does your educative utopia lead you?
Who is coming along on that ride?

When were you last brave? What did it take?
Where do you look for courage?
Where do you draw the line? And when?

How do you engage with your belatedness?
How do you take responsibility for the common world?

Where might we start?
And with what whimpers do we end? And where do we linger in the interim?

in-between

Would you be willing
to speak from the fringes,
to spill from the edges,
to gaze from the margins
imagining border crossings?
Would you be willing
to wait at the gate,
to stand at the doorway,
to keep open your heart
as much as the door?

To be always on the cusp
of beginnings, and of ends,
and the in-between possibilities.

responsibility

How do we begin this – and where –
This undoing, unknotting, unmaking,
unmasking, unsilencing, unhiding?
Perhaps start with that call for help
addressed to no one in particular.
It is meant for you –
You alone, as much as you too.

Are you response-able?
What provokes your response?
To whom are you responsible?

resonance

In mythology, Echo was cursed
never to be able to express
an original word of her own.
What curses do you echo
in your acts and omissions?

Resounding silences need
spokespersons too, sometimes.
Perhaps you want to consider.

resistance

They might write of you as a hero,
for your refusal to walk with them.
I suspect they will prefer you a villain,
the rebel without an acceptable cause.
Chances are you won’t be remembered –
That might be their greatest victory.

After all memory has no market value,
And History’s account of victors
paints resistance very differently.

meeting

We have met before.
I was a certain ‘I’ then,
Which ‘you’ were you?
Now, as we meet again,
across this strange screen,
twice-removed, or more,
I am uncertain which ‘I’
is meeting which ‘you’.

I keep my mask handy,
for when I am summoned
on video. What about you?

baggage

I remember that day clearly.
A warm summer afternoon
the sun breathed heavily,
the ceiling fan whirred in pain.
Suitcases of questions
had arrived home with you.
Later that evening, no one knew
what we were unpacking, or why.

The suitcases are empty now.
But our everyday conversations
are somehow so much heavier.

being/ becoming

The continuities of being –
the irruptions of becoming –
but always in layers, partial.


always in layers, partial –
The continuities of becoming – 

And the irruptions of being.

scholarly responsibility

To invite. To speak. To name. To confront.
To bring into being. To come into presence.
To be present. To imagine. To make possible.
To be radical. To be unfinished.
To be “radically unfinished”.
To look in. To throw “outward towards the world”.
To question. To remember. To interrupt.
To be educable. To be educative. To be.

course

Imagine a course.
Would you like to run it?
What if you chose to walk,
with thoughts coursing by?
Imagine that it rains just then.
Where do your thoughts go?
What happens to the course?
Of thought. of action.

scholar

Scholar. Educator. Citizen.
Suspended on the hinges
of a trepid in-betweenness
held together, in solid precarity.
What do your books say? What
solace is there in others’ words?
Tell me, what do you want to believe
about yourself, and this new calling?

verse for wear

This halfway house used to be home.
Rendered half, I seek in jagged pieces
the peace we had once known, lived.
but yesterday is so much more distant
than memory’s hand can reach, and
remembrance is seditious. Much like
Junaid’s skull cap. The Constitution.
And Gautam Navlakha’s spectacles.