SWARM

Silence, swarming

upon the high grass

Thrumming the girlheart

dancing the white breath of stars.

Silence, swarming

to rise in smoke at last

because ash never remembers

who it was.

LIKE RUST

Out in the sun on dirt paths-

where life grows lucent

In the dulled ponds grown reedy

in memory of mermaid swims

Absence bloats to a distraction.

A wisp of straw in a prayer book.

A SONG WITHOUT MEMORY IS ALWAYS OUT OF TUNE

Footsteps are disrupting the courtyard

where, with meticulous attention

I have spread the flour

to save a necessary beauty

which has slid past my face

to rest on my door

like a tramp.

Nourish me with your impudence

like the enticing flour itching off my fingernails

slipping slow onto the wet earth

in measured escape.

Your footprints are still on the front steps

How far can you go?

NURSE

Following the body from beginning to end

like the sick boy to notice how darkness falls

and belongs in unlikely bends

How you have been raised

to touch–

the long shadows of your psyche

The ache. Once again, the lights

on porches, windows open wide

in blue air, a greet

in disguise.

Breath pried from lung into vanishing

lessening every moment

the disgrace, the distance between

eyes and thighs.

Enticed.

How you have been raised

to touch–

Sweet humus of old sweat

on fevered forehead

for the wife to wipe.

Cold Band-Aid on clotting bruise

Concealed in fresh-pressed collars.

A concerned morning brimming with the rancor of his retching

A scooter still waiting in the yard.

WE ARE SOON TO BE RELICS

On this day, when the moon’s cleft lip has stuttered

to the black sea,

soft laments are falling

like night upon the delicate filigree

of our decay.

Desire has climbed the spine

Silk shawls

waiting to slip

for show and skin.

I hold you to my chest like a carcanet

In my ears–the suffocation of the words

I dare not say. Your voice is a helpless hover

Rising to end

in the salt of tears.

And all the brazen ways they have been loved.

Impossibly it leaks to the ground.

In the hush of mid-morning, when I lick the nape of your neck sadly,

you wait till the settled pause.

It is nothing, you say.

We are nothing.

The rain is nothing but a weeping cloud.

BEEJAKSHARA

The pretense of language is falling off

Discarding itself in odd places

Like a thatched roof to a monsoon sky

As a native tongue pours and pours

A sacred saliva

wordless tunes to thirsty lips.

IN THE BLUR OF ALL THE STARS

The sink is glorious, always the same

like the painful relief of childbirth

Vulgar like promised flowers

wilting in broken vases.

No matter the heart that bears drumbeats,

no matter the fire, the tiger eyes, the clawing-

the homecoming is to a clogged bathtub, a bed that won't hold two.

The streets are lit by rain.

Elsewhere.

GIRLFRIEND

When I call you by name,

I mean god.

I mean perfect.

I mean proud.

When you call me by name,

I am sand.

Grainy, a little tough to define.

Somber eyed linger.

I am opposite of goddess.

Dark apotheosis, anticlimactic negative.

High-necked and blustering. Innocent sin. White moon bleached bone dry till its urine-yellow. Ugly muse.

Roving mad.

Crass aesthetic, so street. Sarcastic imperative. A quality of intrigue that borders on vagrancy. A certain

distaste that stays, and stays the same.

When you call me by name, I become beloved poison you'd love to conceal in your snake-fang. The brave

misery of beauty lost in all the pleasuring.

SOME SOFT WILD LIVES IN ME

(i) Before

Like writing by the last light of day

I dream of you

in quiet desperation.

(ii) After

The ground still holds

The footprints of our walks together. Sheathed in mud.

Preserved.

(iii) Then

The porous earth swelled to the drip of song

Till our throats turned dry,

And our voice was gone.

Out there, in the grand beyond

Grew hollyhocks, holding on.

(iv) Now

Moonbeams have greyed the sky

Turned my copper body silver

Only shadows watch from the slit in the curtains

The world remains.

SOUTH INDIAN

Dress my brown body

With gold brocades

Gaudy purple

Of reshime

Fill my ears with silver today

My arms are for bangles

of glass. The plait-

Heavy with jasmines

Marigolds ensnared

Plump flowers to praise

Plump woman like clay

Choke my legs in toe rings

Coil of snake.

Divide my skull neatly

Call it baitale

One half like a lover lost

Parted in haste

Cover me in layers

Except the waist

In which I tuck my stories

A little too late.

LIGHT SKIN, DARK SIN.

When radiance wears a wound

it is lightning. Loud is revealing.

even its tantrum is phenomenon.

The dark cloud–

it has to burst, it has to leak, it has to let go. Silent is sacrifice.

and we curse its wretched presence on our shoulders!

GASPING LOVE POEMS IN GASH OF LIGHT

I have a name for the place where it all comes from

The pain, the panic, the anguish and the hubris

You see, a twitch is an earthquake that your palm carries

you are volcanic.

It's pink on your lips and blue in your grip.

If you can’t hear where it has drowned itself

Red, fluid.

bring the remote earthquake to your ribs

and you will know it gasping in

love poems.

FATED

Without you-

The days are not entire

Or entirely tired.

It is like some news has addled them

They keep their eyes shut

Like old men in sanatoriums

Afraid that a rainless day

Will wither the rhododendrons in supplication.

In the mudroom

I am patiently recovering the coat

With a stitch in time

This continues to be a wait for rain

And when you hear it,

Bring your sad mouth to mine

The rain is for kissing

And we should kiss slowly and forever

Into one luminously thoughtful thing.

Hold my hand then.

I want to see our palmlines align

To script a brighter future

Than our poor fates acquiesced.

IN THE AFTERNOON, I GO TO SMELL THE EARTH IN ROSE GARDENS

The copper cups, they stayed

like an ode to a summer of suffering

intense love, like a bite

that leaves no traces.

QUESTIONS

It was the want

The need, the necessity

To know how many miles existed in the seas

In our geography.

To rehearse heartache

till it was another memorized spell.

To feel the sharp aspersion of stars

in a sky so open and cold.

The question of if we were a possibility instead of people.

INTRODUCTION

Amma, this is her.

The one you call 'mistake'.

Amma, this is her.

Flesh and bone and love.

Even my mistake

Has a name.

EMPTY DRIFT

What is your life in the drift of time?

A frog in whirlpool pond syncopating

to half a song.

A wavering conscience.

A story forged on carbon paper.

A yearlong penance left unanswered.

To exist is to endure the danger of being forgotten

But you-

you bemoan the plight of the candle

Burning to its roots

without thought that the soot

extinguished you.

Here you remain,

with lips heavy with prayer

eyes alive and fevered

like a dying devotion that remembers its final deliverance.

KANCHANA LOVES MOIDEEN

The river wears a wound

Whirlpool white

Sudden rain

That cuts and drowns

Lover in wait

Like flooding plains that drag

Virgin soil to sea.

FORGETTING

This is not love, this forgetting, this poetry, this seismograph

It is warning, like what blares and jolts the curvy walls of lighthouses

in screams that announce a sink.

And here we are, calmly beholding the silence over our impending sea

as bubbles rise from the water

and disappear.

UNGODLY LOVER

Tear the air with disappointments

Cleave it in two

Like combing out the lice with careful fingers

When the cling to you like ungodly lovers

Sever the air with dispassions

Crack them open

Like the last peanut on everyday pavement

or the spaces between your teeth

Split the air with love, with hope, with greed.

Let them know.

You ought to scream these things. Till its in the air you breathe.

END