Nemesis

For all I know, you probably never cared much
for love in your lifetime. There's an ease with
which goodbyes roll out of your tongue, casually,
like a favorite word reared to amuse but stings
in its haunting uncertainty of a future encounter.
How often have I longed for a suggestive to break
out of your tongue and its various meanings collapsing
in everything that makes me woman. This has been
the lament. The lament of more than ninety days.
A tendency creeps in now to reduce you to little
circles of red on the calendar to mark the days
I've sat at the dining table writing about you,
to mark all the other days when I tried to
reconstruct your face in poems of odd lines,
and all those nights when I struggled to hold the
vulnerability of your voice captive in words of much
lower stature responding to the dictates of the muse
much like the young girl who keeps a track of the
womb's alchemy lest it catches her unawares
from the sidelines, like a dearest nemesis...


Now Playing:: Hum hain rahi pyaar ke......Kishore K

From the Gutters

On evenings when there's a little wind around
you drag me through vagabond streets
asking for directions to the gutters where men
sit in close circles to gather the city's filth to
hurl it out into the world above, to startle,
to revert the auld order and watch the world
drenched in its own filth. On such a day, you say,
they'll come out of the gutters and stand laughing
at the stinking faces of the high-rises while their
powerful tenants would retaliate with the burning
of flesh and tell their children that it's mere
cigarette wind that chokes the air. Once again
filth would return to the gutters and the children of
grime would continue to persist in its darkness, in
the madness of the gutters...