I touch Kashmir through your words Of snow I find its fair skin turn Dark in the eyes I see Its green frozen in trampled ice I hear strains of music waft From strangulated corners where The cold is alive

In Ngariyan Maring, you are flesh, spiked with bamboos. Riddled with holes even before the fun ends. Exhibit number one to nine nine. Traitor. ‘Rebel pussy’ shot with mainland guns. But, you are safe in the city. In Gajapati, you

A newspaper cutting on extinct fish is pasted on the college wall The ones who pasted it dissolved among the other students Images of swimming fish are there with the news Through the pictures plenty of paths open to the

It is possible they’re telling the truth. You must be mad to want to live With dammed-up rivers of eternal youth And jobs that take all your give. But live you must (somehow! somehow!) Raisin desire clutched to your breast

After they put us on a high flame and left us to cook on their new law of deserting forests, our practised enemy riffled through the contents of our heart. They wanted our stash of weapons, our snake stones, and

What will you sketch on my skin when I am dead, I asked her? She said, cheerfully – On your brow I will draw a dry well. On your cheeks twin horns of a sterile bull. On your nose an

For three days she took it for spilled red ink Or nail-polish. Then a scab of flies Peeled to hint at the wounds shut Behind that door. Her head buzzed As she called the police. Such a sweet boy, She

We feast all the time eat like emperors each meal a banquet sip the smell of rain the stubbly moon spread uneven fingers over trees drink in the quiet of pooled thoughts divide light with moths, mites, crickets and the