Nothing here’s worth a tick. I hid everything except the heads. They respect slaughter. They respect only slaughter. They forget the other things we brought them, the ghazals, the gardens, the ice and symmetry. It’s an affliction to grow
The mornings of my courtyard awaken to her yellow cries; she is the wrinkled meaning of evening passing into stark night. No one knows her exact age. She belonged to the mid-wife’s time. The old neighbourhood barely remembers her arriving
I take the beatings of memory It lashes me whenever it finds me alone. When the sky shuts down in the night merciless memories tie me with chains of pain and choke me in the liquid darkness. I did not
“Even one’s own tradition is not one’s birthright; it has to be earned, repossessed.” – A. K. Ramanujan 1. Tirumurukarruppatai the six armories of murugan Like a man with half a dozen wives, a woman for each season, you keep
Sob! The rain sobs! like the sobbing depressed mind sob by sob it rains. Downpour like hail stones bursting despair and pouring grief knitting the torn sleeves of mind My song roots in rain that has no end. a poem,
I collect all my drippings In little wooden bowls of poetry Tears, sweat, ideas Hopes, musings, dreams Shattered, whole, globules Particles, chinks, droplets These little wooden bowls When struck on their edges With thin bamboo beaters Create percussion It’s the
The pines are flying into wooden desires. Some birds like hand-written letters, do not arrive. Long ago, we were done with land, now we go for the sky. Our stories have claimed some fragments in a map and only fragments
(After a Kabir Sumon song) Get your lover to take you away, fly oh fly Get your mother to not have the fourth baby Get your father to stop drinking out his guts Get your heart to stop counting skipped
Such a long, long walk Through sizzling raindrops on burning tar Such a short distance to never Such a long, long shedding Of autumn leaves on yellowed grass Such a short season of blooming lilacs Such a long, long memory
One there, one here, dreams mixed-up, dreams enjoined; Dreams, two of the same kind, like two-in-one, the dreams. Just like that… hand in hand, lip to lip, body to body, mind on mind… Caress me, look into me, says her