slippery slopes

Sometimes stubbornness is merely
helplessness,struggling for meaning
in escape. Silence often gushes out
of eddying thoughts, and you remain
unsure whether the minty unease at the
base of your throat is acidity or words.

you go back to the music of a man
who hung himself on your best friend’s
birthday, and didn’t find you worthy of a
‘why’, after all this time (if indeed a linear
measure can fit).

                           sometimes,you wake up
to the noose. 

                         and the lingering scent of
insect repellent fills your nostrils reminding
you of the night before. when you played god
to a wasp that failed, or perhaps refused
to comprehend the purpose of a door.
Where is Disney when you need it? In their
romantic hands, this could have been a
heroically yellowed flight for self affirmation.
Definitely a musical. 

                               But as it turned out, the
inglorious end was mopped up under the
darkness of a monsoonal moon, even as
unsteady hands slipped into sanitized
narratives of sufficient guilt and numbness
on loan.perhaps that is how it all winds up.

And the sharp edges of borrowed pain will
take you through one.more.night. morning
will bring mother’s disapproval of kohl stained
pillow covers.that saw more than they reveal.

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.

mirasmus

When did you last let yourself go
on a wooden swing whose creaks
have coloured memories older than
you, reminding you unwittingly of
the things you used to fear. height
wasn't one of them.back then.now,
so many things are so different.
age creeping into your knees.metabolism.
the scramble for company.ear wax.
glass shards in your eye.sudden noises.
Fashion sense.unborn daughters.

swinging to these rhythms of change
life catches up with you in the name
of the holy spirit,the watchman
telling you of the curfew on swings
in this community park, free for all.
Not after 11 pm. (children get
preference all day, giving you a window
too tiny to climb into and make it.)
Reflection is not suited to LED lit AC
rooms, you want to tell him. That the arc
of oscillation is ready to reveal a potential
secret and you are fated to receive it, here.
now. But the haggard man in uniform
helpless to follow administration's orders
expects compliance.and pity, not sure for whom.

The open doors of your house greet you
with a warm stench of something rotten and
the irremediable hope of pushing your fears to
the pit of your stomach with the force of old
over watched sitcoms, where they will lie until
5 am dreams regurgitate them, leaving you
wakefully suspended in mirasmus.
the prisoner of a war of your own making.

mirror mirror

Every morning, you stand before the mirror.
You look at your face, but never closely.
there are things for dryness (your nose tends
to break out into little white flakes, Dead skin),
things to smoothen and hide 'beauty spots',
You recently bought something for the little bags
collecting darkness under your eyes, harvesting a
fatigued view of this world.
the liner keeps you from unwanted questions,
the new kohl pencil justifies a watering that
just cannot seem to catch a break. Salty.
the lips are allowed paleness. sometimes their
fruity flavours help change the now homely
metallic taste in the mouth. From too much coffee,
or a long pending root canal, or certain kinds of days.

in the day, you can hide inside a mirror.
it gives you an outside face you can carry
around for the world. But as night falls,
the mask melts, wears off. Even for the
bipolar mirror. Embittered by its own
hypocrisy, it will force you to come closer.
to look at yourself.shorn of comforting narratives.
and when silver truth peers at you,
sleepless nights are a foregone conclusion.

mornings must find you once again
before hallucinogenic mirrors
glossing over your losses,
making up for things that can never
in truth be made up.

Of God and Grammar

This is a poem (to use the word loosely,
as it is in the nature of words to be used) 

about a God I don't know
but whose name I capitalise
i am not sure what kind of noun
God is. Proper and yet common.
Collective. Mostly abstract.
The pronouns are as confused. He.
She. It. Singular. Plural.
Adjectives have varied over time
and circumstances. Benevolent. Wrathful.
but always Just.
Articles have caused other kinds of conflict
- a god or the?
Middle school language classrooms rarely
address God's grammatical inconsistencies.
Wren & Martin may give you platitudes.
Much later, surrounded by fire and blood and
limbs and fear, you will question them.
Wren, Martin and their platitudes.
Middle age will calm your nerves,
acceptance and cynicism will leave space
for neither God nor Grammar.
God tends to be rediscovered in old age.
When language fades,
you find yourself clinging to the idea of God.
You are told, and you believe that God is the
grammar of life, understanding, perception.
or maybe that of chaos, who is to say.

meanwhile in a Middle school language class,
the teacher is telling her bewildered kids
for the nth time that Grammar is God.

loneliness

Loneliness is socially awkward.
Even among its own.
when two or more lonelinesses meet
(often in a nightly spell)
they deepen and darken one another
without a hint of malice though.
There is the barest acknowledgment
of an absence of light,common to all.
a necessarily uncomfortable quiet.
There is no scratching of surfaces,
corrugated as they are, nor softening
of edges. they become whetstones,
sharpening themselves on each other,
ready to stab their renewed selves back
into restful hearts hopeful of
dawn's companionship.

sometimes though,
a loneliness tests its limits,
questions itself without fear,
or pity, or affectation. Not even
love.unfazed it fades.an implosion
swallowed by watchful but silent
skies. As dawn breaks, a restless
heart wakes up to a poem.

a letter

I want to write
I want to write a letter
I want to write you a letter
I want to write you a letter so
I can tell you how much i miss you.
A phone call could do that.
And if i wait.just a little bit longer
and let it fester, then allmymissing
can become a poem. But that would depend.
on whether i dust the memories everyday
or let time accumulate over it. Either way,
there is no guarantee. Of remembering you.
or finding that poem.
a letter seems practical.and romantic.
though ours is the romance of
dry rivers and empty skies.

But then the letter would stir up expectations.
A poem can be content in its disappointments.
given the rich harvests of our lonelinesses,
the latter seems better suited to us.

What would you like -
Should i pander to your fancies?
We were strangely one in our
whimsicalities, come to think of it.
(Everything else clashed.)
You would find the idea
of recording absences ridiculous.
i wish i could disagree.
What about this conversation then?
That was us too. All of our time
a contemplation of fashionable trivialities
(in distinct idioms of silence,
less definite when we are apart and
time lags into a language of longing
necessitating this interlude.)

Let us go then.
As it turns out, true to our natures,
we are too passé for a letter.
too impatient for a poem.
It will be a note. A story without words.
An asoka leaf. buried in the heaviest book
on the topmost shelf of the public library
that we used to visit.