Prayers

How lovely it is to be in my little provincial town
No worries, rigmaroles, no politburo meetings

To seek the autumn sun, slowly fading into winter
To smell the fallen flowers in their radiant miasma

How often do I seek words in places like this-
Ghazal words, a failed life behind, Ghazal dreams
In Ajmer the blue train enters the station-
Two days in the sleeper class, no sleep-
I dream of you.

You are still beautiful; old age didn’t cripple you
Like Durga itself, you stay a while, you fake a smile

In this abandoned museum of dreams and bamboo;
The caregivers are lifers, they don’t speak my language-

I wake up in an empty town ravaged by the plague.

How lovely it is to die where you were twice born. 

Space is a cold place.

In a dishevelled room somewhere the serpent king bemoans the silence of the warm afternoon. 

The crows are angry at the falcon who never leaves leftovers of their hunt, they chase her, all of them, only to fly so high in the stratosphere that their wings freeze and they fall like bombs in an air raid. 

One day he will understand what these silent afternoons meant, now he is only  too young, mindful in the melancholy that expectations bring. He pulls up his buttons and turns a pillow, shuts out that daylight, turns his head over and remembers that he must wait till the night comes on. 

Space is a cold place full of possibilities. So am I.

Nocturnes

I

If you have ever been on an island

that had a volcano, spewing up 

noxious gases, I am sure you would

know what it means to grow up in

my kind of a family, except its not true.

I was born in Old Atlantis, or that's what I was told,

before it went down to the sea. Whose blood did they

spill? All the lonely animals in the abattoir-

whose birth and death were forecasted,

whose existence was a daily act of violence-

in whose name we drifted melancholy prayers.

To the wind and to the sea we are all equal.

II

Where I grew up, there were mayflowers, 

and meandering rivers.  

I sometimes wonder if you and I would make an island,

one where we would raise grey wolves and teach them

to eat the living beasts out of people; where a volcano

would lie dormant and Prometheus would hide his fire; 

we would sleep beneath  starry skies, and the tropical 

palms will reflect moonlight far into the

 window of an apollo astronaut-

we would know that this life that we share is 

not an ounce of rice, bread and wine-

but all the things that we are too little to comprehend. 

There would be no war here, no justice, 

no heroes or villains, we would just be, won't we? 

Two mandolin bound

dreamers painting hieroglyphics 

for the new world.