I wish I could be a book
I could send myself to you
in envelops and postcards
over a laconic lifetime
rungs of ladder climbed
waded through like the push
of legs in the water, over sand
chewing on the words you sent.

We, are a family now,
some privileged in the boundaries
of grandiloquent bags and pouches,
some forgotten in the drawers
before relocations,
versions of a person’s state of mind
over time, we make history books
capturing people in the making
of an indistinct next moment

sometimes we carry our own praises
outsourced by the wits of our writers
like love they did find not in the other
but their own selves, blind still.

Does your reader pause too?
basks in the glory of an empty wall
staring at nothing in particular?
I wish we had will and means
to write ourselves on ourselves
so that we could reach other and do that.

Instead like our creators, we are
dilapidated ruins of yellow bodies,
left to live and die on dirt and air
once they are gone, aren’t you scared
of death?

Seeking Reply
Letter A

I was looking for a friend,
when you tapped my shoulder
from the back and
I was confused how to
respond back to a recognition
from a person
that was not mutual.

Last time this happened
I was in a hall
trying to remember something
about microprocessors
so that I could at least pass,
when the invigilator stood
on top of me,
just staring me, writing.

Cold sweat droplets
started racing on my face,
assumption: he was
from my department.
When he finally spoke
he asked which exam
was I writing, and in
absolute bewilderment
I forgot, the name
of the exam I was giving!

You girl with an accent,
I had watched your poems,
writing you on stage
like the broad nip ink pen
that road trips with blue ink.
I just forgot,
in the sun burst of your face,
standing in front of me,
as if you knew me
for eternity.

Amazing, curve of an arm,
wave of a hand speed breaking
over the stretch marks on lower back
feeling the lines like the habit
of taking corners of clothes and sheets
pressing in between the gaps
of *******, a pleasure
no one else ever even sees.

Wrap of an arm, making the back
and front the ancient interior China,
the arm, the great wall of China,
protecting from sadness
and occasional loneliness.

Curve of the legs fitting the other
like they were two rods under thermal stress.
The vastness of the *** comforting the lack
of it on most days, when my body hair
is as natural to you as blinking,
I miss how two bodies become void
In the shape of night’s silence, the arc

Cockroaches, I can understand that
if you had our ears, you would
run at the screams of my little sister,
who screams like she had seen a monster
crawling on the walls of the washroom
when instead she had just seen you
strolling in the late evening
basking the glory of tubelight.

But me, I come from peace,
I’m not disgusted by your existence.
I do not get flabbergasted by your
occasional flying skills. Infact I,
say hi to you when I come to brush.

But you, you go haywire in fear.
Do you sweat? Is there something
equivalent to that, that you do?
You needn’t, I wish I could talk
and tell you that I love you, and that
I do not want to **** you.

The bond cow
was strutting in the night
the wind,
the bond movies' audio.

The bond cow
alone, with a blue hue
around the bones that
shaped the flesh in between,
in the orange of streetlights

The bond cow
unlike the lazy cows
huddles on sideroads
and mid roads, mud roads,
clean roads, ***-holed roads,
what the hell were you doing
up at that time.

on the prompt "Falling in Love (more than once)"

I thought about
this prompt you gave me.
A ******* a train,
I had fallen in love with,
Silhouette of her hair
border lining the darkness of eventide
towards Bangalore.

We met in a ground a year later,
no intermittent contact held,
like quantum-entangled electrons do,
dumbfounded how it'd happened.
And again on the road in Bangalore
three years later.

A direct line to the eye's sight,
first time, under a morning seeming streetlight.
A latch bolded in the color of the eyes,
I longed to deep dive in.

Words finding silence at the wrong time,
so they resorted to not all things
and happenings having reasons
and fear of consoling a needy
in a fear of an upside down going failure.

And like between life and death are only breaths,
the silence between the sentences
was filled with ours
and death by chocolate,
and thoughts of silences
of the other's mind, unheard of,
aware only of an unbeknownst wind
of familiarity of an unknown kind.

I had fallen in love multiple times,
which is to say I'd sifted through
the earth to the other side
and started rising, from it, in it.

Following down the gushes of time
sinking and rising sensations
of guilty pleasures in the chest, insinuating
that the thing of beauty is a joy forever
but only when not possessed.

                           ***

There's an old man, my mother's father
not loved by anyone, angry all the time
illogically unnecessarily hurting others,
drunk trashing long hair and glasses,
rusted in the smell of decay.

I make me fall in love with him,
again and again and again,
so that he knows he's not alone,
always.