Summertime Sadness

I had a glass of sunshine for breakfast today.
Warm and lethargic, it unfurled 
like velvet down my throat.
This season distills our days
into effete parodies.
The mornings are eagles,
gliding by like prozac on wings.
By afternoon the sun grows wrathful,
falls on a city of fevered lanes. 
We kneel on rice and pray for rain,
as the summer staggers under
the burden of its own legacy!
Much like the men in our country,
it has been taught to be stern
and intractable. To shoot down
birds from the sky, and
snatch ponds from frogs.
To batter everything with severity.
To move all that stands in its path.
So the frogs move into mud,
and wares move under 
the shade of awnings.
And we move into ourselves.
Recede into the dark and cool
of the mind, to wait.
Everything waits on a summer afternoon.
The Mandevilla waits for 
the miracle of the window grills.
The piled clothes on the chair
wait for the baptism of the machine.
The patient lowlands wait
through millenia for orogeny. 
This planet waits for entropy…
We reach absently for the drug of 
midday naps. The futility of the 
interregnum, not lost on us.
Nothing will have changed when
we wake up, and we’ve only ever slept
in fitful pockets of disturbed dreams 
and changed sides!
At the edge of your bed,
the doorframe slices into
the horizon, and unravels a reality.
And as such, you should know
that all fact holds the power to
become fiction, when poured through
the alembic of your mind.
On some afternoons we brew
Kalboishakhi in our teacups. 
It ploughs through the living room
scattering our sadness. 
On those days your body
refuses to remember its 
alluvial origins, and your skin
becomes an unyielding soil.
Sometimes an absence will move into
empty spaces, growing larger & larger
until there’s no air left for 
you to breathe! And the medullary,
ubiquitous heat of it all, 
strapped across our chests like 
an unputdownable burden
is a reminder that death is
the only kindness that time
will offer us. But we must wait,
patient, subservient, like everything else.

***

Rush Hour On A Friday Evening

Friday traffic at six, cracks the city into deltas,
sluices it of sentience. 
Lazy tributaries of frustration, 
punctuated by concrete. 
Bikes meander recklessly by,
self-assured in the assumed immortality
of their two wheels.
There’s anger in the sounds of a city
at rush hour. An anger that has 
so little to do with people,
and so much to do with helplessness! 
We’ve all rushed out of the slow-burn
of our offices and homes, and joined the fray,
drained from drip-feeding droplets of 
our lives to jobs, rents, parents, and children.
Years of living, surrendered to responsibilities.
We clutch our silences close to
our chests amid the blaring of horns
and the opera of headlights.
This standstill is the only one
this city will afford you. Here, 
even breathing has a price,
and you’ve paid dearly for every cup
of tea at the shanty, every drag of 
cigarette in a fire-escape landing,
every snatched conversation between
an endless life of commute and commotion. 
You’ve paid for looking up at the sky
and longing… longing, even if for a moment,
for anything more alive than this 
brick & mortar existence of routines!
And all the syzygy of the stars cannot 
deliver you from the claustrophobia
of your cubicles, the haunting gloom
of the room, and the squalor of the 
traffic signals that pass through you,
as you pass through them. 
And what can you say about the 
stifling within, that has made you
reach out deftly and unstitch the sun
until it bled into the evening sky!
Just like the rest of us, harangued 
dwellers of flimsy flats and creaking
elevators – residents of a rotting 
metropolis – you too have taken to the 
streets in search of respite.
We, who can’t stand still behind 
our eyes. We the people, who press
our faces against the cool of plexiglass,
and horde our life’s trash in balconies,
We’ve inherited our fears through osmosis.
Tonight, we’re all moths in this city
drawn to the seduction of neon and halogen
in clamorous rooms with darkened walls. 
We trudge on, inch by inch, in this
glacial traffic, hoping to drown
our emptiness in raucous laughter
that rings through the night, and clinking 
glasses of liquid, amber lies,
while this city devours us slowly
one dream at a time.

***

This Is Not a Poem About Love

Can anyone escape the war in this era?
This war won’t stop moving.
It follows you. 
Hangs heavy in your air,
even if you aren’t in the warzone.
Go away cats buried in rubble, 
bodies bereft of life, wailing people,
and shell-shocked children…
I have nothing useful to offer you,
except solidarity – and that’s hardly much!
And my tears won’t quench your thirst.
I can tell you that there’s 
no paradise to run to. 
They’ve all been burnt to the ground,
by a civilization that moves
towards war for the sake of peace.
But the battered keep coming back, again
and again, shuffling through upturned soil.
This war won’t stop moving.
I turn off the news, and it
enters my phone screen!
A million dichotomous opinions
on where our sympathies should lie.
I switch off the phone, and 
it slithers into cafes and living rooms.
Dark, serpentine, spreading hood.
People discussing bombings and 
body counts, over breadsticks and soup.
I lock myself indoors, but
the debris of the aftermath
floats into my bedroom, dragging in
cracked asphalt, and broken concrete.
Dotting everything with 
misplaced slippers, and jutting rafters,
shattered glass, and severed limbs.
Remnants from the lives of 
those who couldn’t outrun the war.
I shut my eyes, and 
the ghosts of dead children 
enter my mind,
asking for a safe space to hide.
If you ask the bereft,
they’ll tell you that the smallest coffins
are the heaviest to carry. And all the
“observed moments of silence” in the world,
cannot bring the dead back to life.
So, I no longer care for your 
educated opinions. I don’t give 
a damn about your “complex narratives”
and “there are two sides”.
There are children 
paying for the ambitions of adults
with the small currency of their lives!
In no world can that be alright!

And how can we go on like this?
How can life fall into
its mundane rhythms, when the 
jolt of collapsing buildings 
wakes up a city?
How can I move into
the cocoon of my own mind, 
when bullets move to find home
in the soft of human flesh?
How can I wake up each morning,
and brew coffee, cook eggs?
How can I look at art and 
listen to music, when 
there are children becoming
history with every sonic boom?
How can I write poems on love, 
when there’s none 
left in this world anymore.
***