out of order

This neverland is sooty
and smells of crusty blood.
The sun never reaches us,
though we burn feverish.

We have been counting
the days and the bodies,
studying hopes and ‘likes’
you have been sharing.

There is no space to keep
the dream we dreamed
from the last time we slept.
How the sky was silent
that night, and we were certain
of the next morning. In the
“sort of time we inhabit today”
we are too tired to lie down,
Never mind the azure is ablaze.
We sit together, cramped
in huddled wonder between
yesterday and tomorrow.
When the wind of thought chimes
its Aeolian sound, we sing
the songs of our ancestors
and our land, in return.

mourning

How do you commiserate?
condolences and silences
in appropriate measure
spread thin over the surface
of that place of yearning
grief and loss has ripped
into the fabric of our being.

Your language of mourning
searches sincerity in trite phrases.
sending empty thoughts and
faithless prayers,
and thoughtless apologies
that disguise our failures as those
of language, always inadequate.

In this rubble of babel, how do we
trace once more the lingua franca
of besieged, divided truth?

My silences lament in lavish despair
haunted by a restless dream
(or a dreamy restlessness?)
of catching “thought-trains”
that traversing through “banal
and radical terrains” might
arrive toward (if not, at) meaning.

being human

Standing on jagged edges
lingering in the interstices
Waiting to cross over,
To that other place
We all have names for.

When the schools were blown up,
We pretended to be dead
They pretended to be deaf,
And everybody watched.
They say, Wails and prayers
sound the same on airwaves.

You turned your eyes away
From the jigsaw of bodies-
It was only a click for you.
we searched missing pieces
and found only wrong ones.

“This ontological vocation
of being human”
asks more from some of us.
How should we respond?
To whom should we report?
Who will come with?

taking account

Across four thousand kilometres
sitting in concrete comfort,
across a screen, we watch
bodies like ours,
waiting, wailing, wading
sifting, shifting, stifling
falling, flailing, failing
through smoked rubble
of fire and brimstone,
clinging desperately
to remnants of (hi)stories.

scattered piecemeal lives
lived on shrinking strips
of what used to be home.

Memory serves up a map
whose contours have changed
as if drawn on vaporous clouds,
if not desert(ed) sands of untimely time.

Who will take responsibility,
Or perhaps, will we take responsibility
for remembrance and forgiveness
from which thought might be born?

How do we begin to take account?

grieving

The community of grief
Does not define itself.
Every time it draws a boundary,
A body falls on the line,
Effacing it, extending it,
Rendering it less exclusive.
In homogenous empty time,
Where the good is as banal
As evil; homo reparans –
So certain in its impulse to repair,
Wonders how to deal with
Its inheritance of loss. Where
do I place these gifts of anguish
delivered to my doorstep
more often than I can pick up?
It was not I who ordered them,
But they keep coming. These packages
Of death, despair, and helplessness. And
I pile them in all corners of my house. For
There are no return addresses,
Eviscerated every time I close the door.
When they first started accumulating,
They made me think. I have come
To expect them now,
every time I open the door,
Even the luxury of surprise is denied.
I collect them, maintaining a “strict economy of hope”,
The legacy of this grief is as much mine
As is the bequest of thoughtless accruing.
I send money, and post on Twitter. I even dare
To bring up the news in ritual social engagements.
this seems enough to think myself good.
Grief doesn’t end. But I have things to do.
So I’ll make space in the garage, and maybe
some more in my conversations. After all,
The world is always burning. For my part,
I’ll share some water - after my bath,
and filling up the underground tank, and
after washing and cleaning, and after tending
to my summer garden, whatever water remains
you can take it, to put out the fires.
I go to bed in peace knowing I have done my bit.

laundry - Part II

You had asked - Where does one begin?
We begin here. In medias res. In the middle.
In between. For that’s where we are.
In the present. which is also the past. And the future.
We begin together.
We begin thinking together.
We begin naming together.
We begin bearing witness together.
We begin honouring each other.
We begin sharing stories with one another,
Of one another, together.
We begin writing stories.
We begin restoring and re-storying together.
We begin at the pedestrian crossing. At home.
At the border. In this room.
We begin at the dimly lit liminal spaces
That hide the ghosts we are haunted by.
We begin, as Zembylas says, “having adventures and being in the impasse together, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and also, allowing for some healing and resting, waiting for it not to drop.”

laundry - Part I

For many many days now, you have found no energy
To do your laundry. Even today, here you are,
Not having done it, but willing to air it, in public.
It feels like a sign for our times.
Perhaps mother would disapprove. But here you are.
This might not be what we signed up for. But here you are.

A Laundry list. Of things done. not done. Of things come undone.
Confessions.
You lose track. Too slow to keep up.
Too lethargic. Too privileged.
Too traumatized.
Too self-absorbed, they seem to call it self-care.
Sometimes you forget to care.
On some days, you politely decline.
On others, you rudely refuse.
It started when you no longer knew how.

Yemen. South Sudan. Palestine. Haiti.
Burkina Faso. Congo. Ukraine. Iran.
And all in between.

Stop. What’s with the naming? Rephrase.
Ok

Genocide. Famine. Bombing. Insurgency.
Occupation. Coup. Wrongful detainment.
And all in between.

Stop. What is this voyeuristic morbidity? Rephrase.
Ok

Rubble. Blood. Smoke. Hunger. Homelessness.
Separation. Grief. Chaos. Loss. Incomprehension.
And all in between.

Stop. Why so sensationalist? Rephrase.
Ok

Places. Days. Events. Statistics. News. Shock and awe.

All across, the world burns. In fires of varying intensities.
You watch. And look away.

You don’t take up friends’ invitations to join protests.
For the time you spend on social media,

You don’t share anything you read. Or think.
You don’t react to any posts that throw light
On the darkness around. You expend energy, instead,
On changing the algorithm. It takes time, because
You slip up. But ah, that persistence.

You stay in safe sanctuaries you loosely call home,
Even though they are not where you belong -
But belonging, and home, and place
Are preciously scarce these days. Only some of us
Are allowed to dwell on it. You have shut your windows
to the rain and this politics of engineered scarcity.

Every day, you cry. Despair, desperation, and longing
Still catch you unawares. It unfurls daily,
Like the destruction. We all crumble.
But that’s one half of the ritual. The other half -
You wash your face, switch to an old rerun
Of something mindless
On a borrowed Netflix account.
Comforting in its predictability, reinforcing walls of denial
That privilege allows you to build.
You have not spoken of the tattered world
With your 12 year old at home.
You have introduced her to music, to drown out the wails,
But she doesn’t know that.
You have given in to fear. And retaliated with numbness.
Its easier than some of us might think, you say.
You have closed your eyes. Zoned out of conversations.
You don’t contemplate life anymore.
You have listened to stories of pain,
And empowered yourself with learned helplessness.
You have become resilient in your ignorance. Wallowed
In the luxury of distanced sympathy. Just enough.
You have let passions and convictions move on,
And held on to empty Insta consolations,
Its pseudo psychology gives you reel length relief
And lets you pretend it is all okay, and that your
Transient concern, that brief moment of shame as you
Go out to eat with friends yet again; those
15 seconds of guilt as you walk freely on this land that
Is not your own - is enough.

You used to want to speak up, to say something.
But the language for it escapes you now.
You have nothing to offer. The gift of
awkward silences is yours to keep.
Sometimes you manage to hold
Their accusatory glances with derisive whataboutery.
Most times, you don’t raise your eyes
to meet another gaze. Lowered in expectation
in self-doubt as much as self-preservation,
this sight needs no vision.
Perhaps it is not only the mind, but also
the body that must re-learn how to respond
to the crushing weightlessness of being.

The laundromat is 5 minutes away.
This dirty linen, the very fabric of your being,
Needs some cleaning, some clearing.
Are you up for the task?
The hope you permit yourself after much struggle
fades when you ask - Where does one begin?

empty

Standing at the unsteady brink
of our own muddling stories
too long in longing, (way too!)
arrested by indifferent fears -
named as much as nameless,
slipping on sharp edges of
borrowed and stolen meanings,
We fill ourselves with words and
store-bought food. Until we can
think no more. Until we can
binge ourselves to sleep. In dreams,
we watch again life and death
play out, and wake up drenched
in blood and denial. Shaking
our heads, we open the news app
to shoplift words that will take us
through another day without feeling.