#48: The Silly Villanelle

I hope you never ask me to leave

The memory of this night, or your hand on mine,

And the little lies we have dared to believe.

Maybe your words and my faith deceive

The cynicism we work so hard to align,

And the fear that will soon ask me to leave.

Will you feel my absence, I wonder, or grieve

The emptinesses of space and futility of line

In the syntax of the lies we dare to believe.

Concoctions that arms and legs in tandem weave

To stop and slow the sands of passing time

Have now slowed, in time for me to leave.

The distances that separate us may cleave

Desire and halt hope and show us no sign

Of horizons that lie beyond what we believe.

May my hope find its home on the eave

Of possibilities- may your kisses live on my spine

For long enough for me to not leave

All that lies between our breaths to believe. 

#47: Abadan

Somewhere in the day I found two terrible things:

The first, that the word for never and always is

The same, the exact same, in Farsi, in Arabic.

I never/always forgot how your hands felt

This never/always brings memories I didn't know I had

You never/always remembered best

How to forget,

I never/always forgot the lies,

So the truths taste sweeter.

The second, as I played with nothingness and eternity,

Was the word, your word, the sodden,

Silly, splendidly sappy name that

I had lost, because time is kind like that;

I found it today, because I needed to learn another-

Zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity-

To put a name to the inky depths our

Pasts have heavily sunken into.

I have always/never fled from

The deadweight cinderblocks of remembering.

I apologize for my merciful forgetfulness

That blurs your smile in my mind,

And hope you never/always remember

The word that isn't ours anymore.

#46: Insurances

It will happen one of these days.

You will sit at an old table, meant

For more people, bent 

In wrought iron the way she'd liked.

Except that she isn't here,

And you overcooked the eggs 

And your coffee is warmer than blood and bitterer than bile.

And I will sit across from you,

The fruits whose bitter pips you forgot to spit.

Remember when we used to talk about

The end of morality and why capitalism

Always wins and how wars are quieter now?

This house is quieter, now.

You talk of taxes and subsidies and 

Heirless shop closures.

An inheritance of emptinesses

A legacy of voids I have always rushed

To fill, to feel some sense of

Having mattered. We mutter 

Of the hurt we are too tired to take.

Maybe I don't live 

Vicariously anymore, through your stories

About heroin and the 80s and

Eric Clapton singing for his dead kid.

I drive to work and buy milk

And worry about taxes and

Ask you what to do. 

You always know what to do.

And you pick up a paper,

And ask me to sign.

Just in case, you say.

And turn the page. 

#45: Leaving Your City

in the last minutes of the near-done day, 

we tie knots in the strings of borrowed time.

if you'd asked me to fall over the edge

of your words i probably would have.

it's probably why you wouldn't ask.

you wait for our photograph to blur

a little, for a lazier focus, for 

a little less exposure. 

i wait for my crime to be caught, my

stolen minutes to be found, unfurled,

let loose into merciful forgetting.

we wait for the warm flush

of love to leave, to heave

another sigh, then bid goodbye.

#44: Sestina to the State

Ten days have passed, and yet the wave
You tried to stem continues to grow.
Undefeated by water, wounds or words,
They trudge on, lifting soil-hardened hands
Together: does Lok Kalyan Marg hear them roar,
Or is it enshrined still in the silence you seek?

Do you fear, sir, the price of what your people seek?
The questions they ask cannot now be waved
Away, or drowned by your propaganda machines' roar.
Direst apologies, sir, for the dissent that grows,
For the milling masses that refuse to kiss your hand-
But "give us our rights" aren't dirty words.

Do you dread the weight of the words
That unwavering voices continue to seek?
You thrust batons and gas shells into hands
That cannot clutch at the crest of this wave.
Is your kisaan only worth what he grows?
In the face of travesty, sir, even the meekest roar.

Uninformed rebels, your primetime mouthpieces roar,
Separatists, your legion spreads the sneaky word.
When, sir, will your famously broad chest grow
A conscience, or compunction? As you squabble and seek
Malformed agenda to turn this tidal wave,
Your subverts offer love and langar with folded hands.

You witness spectacles and clap your hands,
Even as whispers twist into a resounding roar;
Smile, sir, nod and give the screen a wave,
And insist you can never hear a dissident word.
The broadcast, of course, will never seek
To let this foolish antinationalism grow.

Sooner or later, sir, you'll find, people outgrow
The tridents of hate you place in their hands,
And instead they begin to dare and seek
Explanations, with impunity and furore.
I hope, sir, your speeches have enough words
To keep you from capsizing in the next wave.

As we grow together and stage an uproar
We join hands and words, we come together
Seeking succour, we wave at you. Inquilaab.

#43: This Be The Villanelle

Let's talk about loneliness tonight.

We talked about love for the hundredth time,

And you listened, just to be polite.

Look at this lost lover's plight,

Desolate in the triviality of his rhyme;

Let's talk about loneliness tonight.

Words never soothe what fears incite,

And my tedious litany is my biggest crime-

And yet you listened, just to be polite.

Stay a while, so I don't lose sight

Of the ticking clock and passing time,

Stay up talking about loneliness tonight.

We can say nothing, or just make light

Of my hope, and your fatalism. I'm

Still glad you listened, just to be polite.

You can ask if our solitudes might

Spare us some of their borrowed time

So we could talk of loneliness tonight,

And you could listen, just to be polite.

#42: The Idiot Ghazal

Years from now, when toothless love will no longer have stayed with me, 

I will smile back at how you almost had once strayed with me.

We could promise each other only the hands of the clock;

Will our hours that remain within still fade with me?

If your cynicism happened to cross my hope on the street,

I wonder if it would stop to have prayed with me.

Between your will to leave, and mine to remain,

Did you also sometimes feel afraid with me?

Reason beckons and bends even the straitest of fates-

I hope you are glad yours wasn't made with me.

I suspect we were each others' best kept secrets.

Did you also feel your hardest resolve being swayed with me?

I can turn and twist the ropes of shared minutes all day;

Forgive me if your time appears to have frayed with me.

My cupful of regret runs relentlessly over now.

The heavy ifs of our other lives stay weighed with me.

How Radhikaa mopes around, a child who lost her reflection.

Let her know, nobody stays to read her tirade with me.

#41: Follies.

I think I met you 

In the exact middle of today.

It was a lull in the conversation-

Some inane mundane

Moribund nothing and

There you were and I

Could almost feel the 

Air grow heavier as

It waited with bated

Breath for me to

Say something and I

(blinked and)

Smiled and shook my reverie

Ridden head and apologized

For my absence, for

Having left parts of me in

The exact middle of today and

Some aged afternoons and

A few half-dreamt-of cities ago.

I apologize to what memory 

Clings like cobwebs in the corners

Of regrets and remembrances;

Forgive me this foolish souvenir

I keep waiting to lose.

I hope you don't see me 

In the places I find you in;

In the pauses between days,

And the littlest hour of nights,

Or a tight lipped smile you know 

That always meant goodbye.

#40: Manifold

Tiny lines criss cross all our insides.

It's like my hands hardened

And creased over the years

Skin folding over skin in

Papery attempts to hide sin.

Will I ever know what wrinkles

Your unclenched fists hold?

Your presence holds universes

In the safety of my sweetened lunacies

Remaining unaware of how absences feel.

Should I have confessed 

Or left my shameless sorrow

Sitting on the sill, till

Time and (more) distance lets you know

My fingers might untwist themselves tomorrow. 

Maybes sit next to catastrophes.

A jarful of hesitation slipped 

My grip, so you found us another. 

So we sit still,

Hiding our hearts in hands

That will not touch.

#39: On Reading Language Games Today

Please go mad,

so I can build you an asylum.

- Agha Shahid Ali

I went mad looking for 

something that justifies this:

To be wanted is to have existed.

I rearranged my letters,

But yours were always better.

You were always better.

My consonants stay stuck 

To the back of the board,

(ENCHANT.

And you add another letter

Triple score, and win, again-)

st my penchant

To pretend this existed,

In my mendicant mooning,

To not be unwanted.

And I surrender.

It's nicer this way,

For me, the cowered 

Coward, covered 

In three day old excuses

For this feebleness.

It's nicer for you, too,

I hope. I hope this

Is worth all the words

In the world. 

#38: Pasting pasts together

What's known is known

And you've probably begun to sink

(Your teeth) into depths I couldn't

Have known- it's known.

And you've probably never

Looked at the time and wanted to make it stop

Or looked at me (you've never seen me, and that's okay) and wanted to ask me to stay,

And that's okay.

And I remember trying to answer

Questions before they existed. I

Remember looking at you and trying to

Predict how this night would go.

I still didn't know.

And I guess I'll always

Ask myself if you knew

And tell myself, after all

It's better not to know at all.

Our breaths tightening over our skin stretch the thin paleness

Of wisps of whispers over mouths that never met. Would you

With your are-you-hurt-yet,

And your hurt, help me roll

This husk of a million probabilities

Into its final sinkhole?

It doesn't matter when it is unknown.

This will have to be enough, 

So you can safely theorize

Over love and longing and then

You laugh your laugh,

And my nightmares feel heavy again.

#37: Sestina for Remembering

It is nothing that hasn't happened before,
Yet every time we hold out hope;
We wake up, hold ashes in our mouths,
Lying in bed till the day breaks
And forces the sun to rise red,
Over a country that refuses to stay still.

This land is our witness, and still,
They say that we were mistaken before;
"What stories you heard, lies you read!"
The blind eye of justice extinguishes hope.
Three decades ago, masjid and law breaks,
And a birthplace was born from a million mouths.

To shut a state in, they barricade its mouths,
And for over a year Kashmir has stayed still.
The voice of dissent weakens and breaks,
In streets, and villages, and colleges before;
Our jails raise the klaxon sound of hope
As saffron hues bleed into red.

Can you look away and not see red?
I bite my tongue as you silence a million mouths.
How dare you seek to dream and hope
For a tranquil state, calm and still?
Gagged silences never lasted before,
A million rise for every spine you break.

Every system falls, every institution breaks
And leaves a wake of truth untold, unread.
The fourth pillar bows and bends before
Lives, and lies traded for by word-of-mouth
Turn immolations into funerals, and still
You smile at the end of the month, and say there's hope.

The voices you stifle continue to hope
To be heard some day, even as they break.
But you ask the courts and cameras to stay still,
While they scream to be heard, tongues bleeding red.
Caste and rape are dirty words in your mouth,
'Equality thrives', you say, 'like never before.'

Where do we seek hope, when streets run red
With the laws you break to silence our mouths?
We stand still, and vow to remember, just as we did before. 

#36: Spring Cleaning

May whatever Gods you believe 

In bless the forgetfulness that has

Let me live through this year

And the one before that

And maybe the last one, too, I forget

The shape of your smile, and your voice

Has lost its sweet saccharine- I hear

Old addictions seem repulsive after a while.

34, feels like 43, in degrees

26, feels like I should have held on to

Semblances of happiness that we were allowed to imitate

Are all forgotten, I clear out

Shelf after shelf of space 

In memories, in memoriam.

You were nice, mister-i-forget-your-face.

It must have been nicer to leave that day, I suppose. 

#35: Love Is A God From Hell

What is it about drunkenness that

Sets us so wide apart, Charlie?

Your inebriation was foggy,

Soggy three-day-old-newspaper charm

And mine is the sad silence of a sadder hotel room.

I spilt water on 

My favourite book and

I thought of the man that gifted me it

And his smile is getting harder to remember each day.

You, you and I,

We held on to the loosest of threads.

Our palms grew sweaty with

Fear and maybe we still have to

Learn what love is.

Is selfishness really that bad, Mr B?

Is it okay for me to want adoration

Even if it is sexist, objectifying, shameless

Mirthless adoration? 

Loneliness feels like a dead spider's home

Collecting dust in a corner 

I can't quite reach yet.

What is it about laughter that

Makes its remembrance so sad? 

#34: Of

Of everything you 

Took it was my words

That have been the worst

It's hard to write with what

I've had to unsteal from you,

Letter by painstaking 

Letter, rummaging through the

Offal that was. 

Some days, I got entire 

Sentences to free you from.

Sentences you were free of

Ran into each other,

Clinical clanging doesn't make up

For your absence.

We keep looking at empty

Spaces we think are better filled.

Words and music and haze and days

Try and take a you-shaped outline.

The edges remain jagged. They

Stick in my throat.