Enemy
I had just fought this war and come back
Minding my own business and drinking beer.
Then I met this girl
Who wrote poems on the back
Of paper napkins with tomato ketchup.
She said,
Show me your heart.
Don't have one, I said.
But she said hearts were what made her go.
Finally, I dug up the old, dark thing,
And she said, oh, but this is a grenade.
I told you, I said, and bit the pin. |
Poem
There was a poem he had to write.
It was right there choking his fingertips,
Tickling his tongue, irritating his back like an itch,
Insulting his world, tiring his mind.
So he sat at his desk and surfed the Net.
There was this poem he had to write
It was a short poem and it was slowly eating
Him alive; a hungry poem.
So he got up as if he had remembered
Something, and went around looking for it
In the bank and at the post-office.
He went for a walk. The poem walked with him
But a step ahead, so he broke into a run
And he ran till his feet ran out on him
And the sun set in his eyes, and the moon rose
In his head, and the cliffs clapped their hands
And the wind blew through his thoughts
Like a hoarding full of holes.
It was no good.
So he stopped
And started to speak to himself like a child
And then got furious and shouted into the dark
Behind the moon. The poem laughed
In his face.
|
Aasa Khosa
Met him on Marine Drive, walking
In sleeping-clothes, on his way
From Srinagar,
Four hours by air,
Where he had a house.
It exploded.
There was a garden too,
That hissed down like a match in water.
Just flared and was gone in the war.
Not to mention
Two sons and a wife
Who went missing
In the grocery shop.
Enough things to make a man
Not believe
In God and country; make him walk
In sleeping clothes all his life.
Khosa said, looking at the sea,
He had acquired
A recent problem
With his eyes, they took a long time
Focusing.
Like just now, he took a long time
Focusing on the sea.
When he finally got a fix on it,
He said, remembering everything
Behind his eyes, it's hard to believe
Your life's your own. If someone told you
The story of your life when you were
A child, you wouldn't have believed it.
Perhaps, we are all leading
Other people's lives, I said.
Yes, he said, everything's somewhere else
And I'm so far away. |
Kalki Brimming
The kneecap was the drum.
Thighbone stick.
Vultures nesting in the crook of the elbow.
Fire and filth piling up in the heap of the eye.
A plum-dark sea roiling in the veins.
Marbles stacked in the hollow of the bones.
Serpents coiling in the grotto of the groin.
Thrust through the skull a lit torch.
A grenade for a heart.
Sour wine in cupped hands.
A man in full,
Looking for more.
|
Terror My Brother
I look down from the moon
In the rock of a room far
Far below, my grandmother
Lies curled, a spring drying
On its hard bed, her back
Studded with pebbles of sores.
I crawl up close to the thunder
In her big heart
Listening for whispers
From my past
Lightning
Revealing the dark
Her pillow's wet
With tears she can't feel
I reproduce conversations
I've had with the moon
A mime she enjoyed
When she could laugh,
And consumed
Half a cake of Pears soap in one bath.
She doesn't care, though her lips move.
She's counting
Her bubbles drying up,
Her body, a question, hooked
To the secret
Of her going
I sit there miming
My hand resting on her head
A stone inside a box
Beyond the touch
Of moon
And water.
In the other room
In the dark
Terror my twin brother laughs.
|
Because
Because his life was like that
Because his love was like the stone
In the bed of a river now dry
Because what he remembered
Made sense only if he lived twice
Because the milky-way opened mirror doors
Into small rooms where the phone
Rang like an alarm no one attended
Because water brought him shadows
Of his childhood fleeing like killers
From their past.
Because the calendar showed
Only Good Fridays
Because men who knew told him nothing
Because women he knew didn't know
Because the sea cried for all the world to hear
And the world heard nothing
Because a dog bit him in a haunted house
And the doctor injected him with a dog
While a nurse patted his ass
Because the spider of his thought
Spun a web, trapping far in the centre
The sun of his joy
Because everything he did led to death
Because everything he gained
Was a way of gaining everything he had lost
Nothing new or nothing more
He wrote.
|
