#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.