We stood in front of my grandmother’s
Old almirah, facing each other
The peacock feather and empty bags  
Of the square room fell silent all over again,
Like strangers we stood facing each other.

Then they all came, marched in, reflections,
Paraded in like martyrs of Brute’s History.
I knew them all, she knew them too
They came, touched us one by one,
Like strangers we stood facing each other.

She looked confused just like me
Watching life pass by, centuries reuniting
After a very long season break, nations-
Travelled, explorers stood upstairs watching,
Like strangers we stood facing each other.

Streets strapped the coffee cans and middle-
Aged hospitals swallowed wars. Married women
Bend over like animals and in months, unable
To breathe they gave birth to few number plates;
Like strangers we stood facing each other.

The city vomited battles, human heads
And dreams of muted foul slaves. Men and-
Their violent tradition screeched for blue number-
Plates, lean number plates, handsome number plates;
Like strangers we stood facing each other.

Unexploded bombs bounced happy homes,
My brothers, my kids, my mothers
Blew their windows and ran, ran away,
Ran afar without destination;
Like strangers we stood facing each other.

They were all dark, their land was darkness
Or were we all blind?
Like a watchman we preserved darkness,
The vapours that filled their glasses did not speak;
Like strangers we stood facing each other.

We are all reflections, ripples and mirrors
Of men-dead and living.
They all stood outside my almirah, million faces
Inside a mirror. She did recognize them;
Like strangers we stood facing each other.

She did nothing, an unusable empathy rolled in,
The hypocrite did not even cry.
In quiet hours she smelt pain, blood and
History flowing from confronting corners;
Like strangers we stood facing each other.

An insignificant obligation drowned her nerve,
They needed a home, candle flame, cotton and wool.
The land, their land has become unfamiliar
And they stood outside locked gates and laws;
Like strangers we stood facing each other.

They all smelt the same blood, the abused blood,
I tried to kiss them and they kissed me back with-
Their cold lips. I tried to touch them, they touched-
Me back with water in their eyes;
Like strangers we stood facing each other.

In every world you unveil the memories
To remember our deepest longings,
The fortunate accident to grown old
With another soul faultless for you.
The unaccustomed feeling is pure
To disillusion the hate reality,
The empty soul is yet somewhere
Passionate enough to awaken life.
Go get it from the holy basil
Spotless enough to compromise!

I cannot understand
Am I dreaming beneath the living?
Tell me if it’s just a part of my forty winks
Coz I’m rusted by chance when fully awake.
Why are dreams so large and
You forget it in a momentary climb?
The departed stories are so dear
That they never come to pass in life
The impossible happenings with strings
And things I’ll never find are so ideal.
The scars are reasoned and seasoned
But it was perfect when I was asleep.
I was dead to the world, totally ignored
Leaving one earth for a different one
Was so brilliant when I was buried.
But I realize I was not just dreaming
I was stitching them into reality,
Let me catch all my dreams
That they might never happen again!

A muggy dream walked to me
Yesterday night, all roads down
The equator
With the taste of salt and sweat
And the clocks of the world
Stopped for a moment,
I wrote without papers
Of all the things he ever said.

The drama of falling from a cliff
I did not know I was dreaming,
A careful section of love letters
Obscured under leather jackets
Flew with the body, down to the sea.
My red mail box had to wait
For the Orientalist’s stories,
It did wait.

I trawled his journals and poems
Like a desperate lover hunting-
For a vilified unpublished hero.
I didn’t want to be his Halloween-
Horror night or fallen oranges of the dusk,
I wanted to be the cigars he puffed
The rancheras he sung and the clipped
Clothes that hung on his backyard.

The clichéd sappy night fall,
Physical sensation and a tight lipped smile;
I had to write poetry, chew my nails
Chop my hair to fall normal again.
Why did they not teach in schools
To pause poems and eat popcorns
Why did they not tell me
To stop my wiggly sly will?

Lover, I’m drunk in Chaucer
Sea and a monster, now I’m drowning.
Let us paint the house, draw the walls
And say sorry to malicious kids we made
Let us take photographs, hang them on
The walls and make trips back to our sacks
Let us drive the hills, sing songs
Shock the folks and live out of track.

I wrote them, he did not write back,
The walls of the buildings bore his name
and the jammed rhymes swam
at the tip of his pen,
they did not recall his youth
neither did I.

I sat back on the arms of my pillow,
he has become the city, the
restless street and restoring noise
I ran away from. The first grade corner
and kneeling nostalgia rushed
the doorway, vanished.

He absorbed the flames, lifted
the loops around my legs and my
mix matched shoes. The choosy
memory ripped off my rib cage
and filled it with
deep-deep golden moments.

When did he defictionalize my
September?
I never felt his hands or the mind
or his vertebrated little words but
The city, its lights and the marks
and traces
stagnated my baked brain.

Today I feel uninvited,
I miss the way I mused over his
******* youth, the music of
his wine soaked eyes and
the flawless silence he embraced.
Like always
He has become another cotton seed
Lost after my September.

On a foggy florescent triviality
I was coupled down to a pear tree,
Insanity lurking deep inside its woods
I called them noise of my emotions.
Realty became too hard to trust
That I sometimes fell into the
Rustling of the dry drenched leaves
And the emotions made sense
Behind the darkness of my closed eyes.
The sweetest part being locked up in me
Is the emotion being non fictional
That the gentle rain embers into mist
Until I vanish into the uninterrupted dream!

The naked sound of the earth dream of
The stealing wind my mind left long ago,
When it rained after thousand years
Illuminating my heart with
The measureless lure of emptiness,
I danced to the desolation of my life.
I saw life masquerading under the drops
That fell from the shifting citadel above.
I lost the bliss once for my sin
And here comes the rain with my rebirth
To cover me with the desert sand dune
To wake me up in another land.