I come back home to lint falling

over my books like snow falling

on a parched throat, and there's only

one blade in the drawer. My cupboard

is empty every night but somehow,

every morning it has the dead man's sweater.

The dead man has been to my dreams

only once, and then too to take care

of mother. In the dream, I asked myself,

who is to take care of you?

Through the woods, betrayal and forlorness

parade like wooden horses. There's only

one blade and no match sticks in my room.

The sweater wants the kiss, the dead man

"The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?"

"But to hear him talk was like life to her: like starting the breathing in a new-born baby."

A summer afternoon slithering through

a street in my hometown

which is still stuck in 2009.

A sick stray dog sleeps

under the bench laid out for patients

whose eyes spell death

as if that’s the only word

they were taught to read.

Their breathing a forecast

of the starting of a defected engine.

At the medical store, an old man

with chandan smeared across

his forehead, tells me how there’s one

supreme power. Call it god or call it you.

The houses, the shops,

they crumble like lego blocks.

Only they’re rusted, weathered.

A woman hawks bangles, a man

hawks sarees. But they can’t tell

one colour from other.

They are only certain that nothing

is black or white.

It’s still 2009 and the women

are screaming for their kids

to come back home.

It is tough to tell whether they’re

cheering or crying or simply shouting.

They’re already ten years behind.

How fast can they run?

Would it be enough

for them to reach on time?

.

It’s still 2009. A scorching afternoon.

I’m pretending to be asleep

lying next to mother. I wait for her

to fall asleep. I go to dad.

But he is about to fall

into a deep sleep too.

All the doors are locked.

I wonder what my parents

want to keep out because

the world is already empty.

Only loo. Only dry leaves.

Only kids my age echoing

a mocking laugh whose source

I do not know. Licking popsicles

which stain their tongues blue.

Only my eyes trying to peer at them

through a barred window.

Only a barred window which is still

We’re the generation of

stream of subconsciousness because

there is no line between our dreams and reality;

both are as hideous as they could be.

And after all, we do need material

for poetry.

.

We half-poets, half-humans are romantics

at heart but capitalism has failed us.

The romantic isolation is now an aggravation

of our perpetual loneliness

which doesn’t dissolve until

our consciousness does.

.

Recent studies have discovered

less than three days

in absolute isolation without a clock

can lead to brain damage.

Reduced cognition, hallucinations,

talking to oneself

in the name of communication.

.

Being cut off from reality does that

to our minds, we start to make things up

like the honey on our eye lids that just

doesn’t wash off, like the charcoal

sticking to every single eye lash,

like the words embalmed in the cracks

of our lips, and the endeavours embalmed

in the cracks of our feet.

.

You ask me to take a walk

but there is no spot on the street

bereft of the footprints of company.

The very gravel churns and turns

into my teacher’s closet poetry;

she is ashamed of it because the

metaphors are not good enough.

.

Is there no place to go when you

have nowhere to hide? And no eyes

to be visible to? When you blend

into the crowd like a mosquitoe;

worse, like a grain of sand

on your lover’s sleeve.

Why can’t we feel anything

except pain or numbness?

.

And if you ask me whether I’d like to stay

in three days of solitude

and bring back the memories

of three years of hallucinations,

three months of a beautiful reverie,

I’d just say let me rest here.

.

Let me rest in this garden,

envisioning a Kubla Khan who

wasn’t a despot, and a cavern

whose darkness doesn’t

already reside in me;

where I make things up,

where every fresh blade of grass

Why is beauty being able

to count the number of bones

hanging through threads of ice

to form my ribcage,

why is it ugly to write

that number down and calling you out

for conditioning me to do so,

why do my hands not recognize

my body until my fingers don’t rattle

with the very bones?

.

I tell everyone I want to be buried

instead of being burnt alive,

because I would in fact be alive

in my death. They say it doesn’t

satisfy our customs. The plain

beneath their feet turns into quicksand

that very instant.

.

I found my funeral song

on the exact day when I completed

half of my graduation, but mother

says we only let in Rudaalis,

and english songs are a big no no.

I manage to let out, “No Hard Feelings.”

.

You see, “I love you”

is so much easier to say

than “mujhe tumse pyaar hai.”

Everything we say attains

an indifference, and starts to lack

a vulnerability essential to communication,

every time we use our second tongue.

.

That reminds me of snakes,

perhaps their hisses are just an intermingling

of two languages placed upon the

two tips of their forked tongues;

each losing some sounds

in trying to compensate

for the other.

.

And forked tongues remind me

of contronyms: BOLT always reminded you

of lightning, of running away

from your hometown,

of fleeing from fire-dripping popsicles

on a June afternoon of your sixth year;

it only ever reminded me of my BOLTED door

on a July evening, a window shut tight.

.

GO was the sign board hung

to your door after the night

I cheated on you in your dream.

And I only ever knew one place to GO: crazy.

.

Almost Monsoon of 2018.

The WEATHER was pleasant

when I spilled coffee on my baby blue t-shirt

because my hands were shaking,

but the WEATHERING of those hands

wasn’t.

.

You see, “I miss you”

is so much easier to say

than “I love you.” And I’m not sure

whether I would ever say either.

So please ask me to hold your hands

as long as mine are not

completely weathered,

.

because

holding your hands is the toughest sign

to learn in the language whose characters

are tucked between every bone

of my rib-cage.

I might just stop counting