you didn’t look backbut kept drifting aimlesslybeyond the far of beyond your mouth twisted into turbulenceyour gaze speechless moving away,…
Logging out/Error 404
Sometimes I watch youwhen after a long day at workyou log out and snap off the WiFi cable. I try…
Nowhere girl
nowhere girlmutating into moonlightaway, away from love your breasts taste like vinegarunder the whirring motion of the fanon a hot,…
Combustion
blue ossicles of pain spinning combustiontranslates graduallyinto the intimacy of meteors we do not talk of lovelanguage fell off her…
Precipice
The day your voice collapsed bit by bitlike a delirious refrainI was crushed under it. Walking round and roundin involuntary,…
Instant love
When in doubt, you were blinded by the love that kills with the sharpness of an accidental glance. At work,…
Iron cactus
When you flashed your smile on the shop window and disappeared in a blinding glare down the spiralling manifestations of…
Metronome
Sylvia, are you listening to the sound of tired earth breathing? Here seasons change, people fall in and out of…
Poisoned letters
In July, you wrote to me in poisoned letters. Empty letters I had written to you from Paris, Vienna, Kolkata…
Masquerade
You’re growing on me again with the quiet violence that only love can offer. Turning around with an automatic smile,…
Woman burning
Woman burning, the mob spreads from house to house setting bodies on fire. Woman burning, smoke rises from the ruins…
Missed futures
No one ever told you when in school you would obsess over dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s while…
Ritual
The tragedy of the afternoon takes a turn for the worse as the doctor enters the room. With practised indifference,…
Your voice, falling
Your voice falling falling endlessly through shadows of the evening lengthening on teardust like light dripping on windows branching into…
The blood room
Or, Why a poet can never save the world Like a strange afterthought, the X-ray machine in the dark room…
Rain
Like trees violently shaking in the breeze and being torn apart uncontrollably, we drift away. At the bus stop, the…
Aunt Sharmila plans a wedding
Aunt Sharmila returns from New York at midnight and calls my mother. Over a hour and a half, she forgets…
My God does not
My God does not order me to burn people at the stake because our homes, with roofs falling, water gushing…
My friend’s professor
My friend’s professor is a thorough gentleman. I have heard he never misses the early morning lecture at half past…
United’s doggedness puts PSG’s showboating to shame
Angel di Maria is running down the wing, frothing and fuming, like an artistic steam engine on 5000 units of…
A walk across old Chinatown
If you take the turn into Sun Yat-sen Street from Central Avenue on a lazy Sunday morning, you will find…
House of song
No one comes anymore to your house of song. The naked woman rides her melting horses through the breeze. The…
Totem queen
The wind-taxi celebrates the fall of the totem queen. The horse runs with a pistol through rainfall. In a century…
Inside
Inside, inside the flames there is only deep darkness; no movement, no speech that fire cannot quell to dust. The…
Poems on winter
Winter is coming It always feels strange when October comes. I sometimes sit observing the fireflies trapped in…
Ruins: poems on cities and desire
[This is an ongoing project on cities and desire.] Solitude You and I have spent centuries travelling across ruins in…
Lingering
How do you bear spaces that are haunted with refutation, the caprice of foamy sentience perhaps still pebbled with cold…
Death of a poem
The poem always comes to you in moments of crisis. When after the lingering effects of last night’s quarrel, you’ve…
Wind
No more of witch-hunting in gramophone voices. No more of staged distractions and dilapidated laughter. Erasing with a wind compass…
Redemption
Faces grow like petals in a footage of voices wobbling in repetition. I try to unlearn the grammar of her…
Musings on laughter
Anatomy of laughter What is laughter if not borrowed speech dwelling on stolen time which has the lightness of derision…
More dead than dying
When they throw you out at a busy crossing, naked and bleeding, you think, perhaps you might have saved yourself.…
The Ghost triangle
1. Baptism by time -I- rain-sleep in a clock desert, like a thousand kisses on broken glass; or shadows of…
Biography of a photon
There’s nothing but walls, old grey walls, cracked walls, a wall of walls; several layers of cloistered space with damp…
Not you
What lies between you and me, is not you, nor me but something like us, not quite you perhaps,…
Fairytale of matchboxes
Looking down from the window of your twenty-second floor apartment, the slums beside the canal look like frail match-boxes.…
Ghosts
-1- Dead cat that smiled at dinner quietly imagines spaces, soft, uncertain. Slow whimpering along the extinct highway, with painless…
Forgetting
At evening the sky is blazing yellow and you stand at the foot of the staircase wearing your soul on…
Rupture
Rupture -1- They speak, who do not speak hiding their face in a cage of sparrows. Their medusa grin…
Moment
-I- Stare, stare at those figures frozen in motion, the pale splendour of lifeless limbs shivering in the soft ecstasy…
Marina
Marina, let me breathe out into lips of water; spaces of the mind in bright blue sunshine receding quietly…
Black
Calmly forward towards the self away, away from gravity. Defenseless under the darkness of pillows your large black body…
Time
Let us meet in sweet oblivion at the end of this circle, when you have built a church with…
Love song to a stranger
(Title influenced by Joan Baez’s song) -I- Blue sunlight on lotus leaves, leaves and prayer, someone flits across the…
Breath
What’s in a breath that spirals stone from the first miracle of the wet earth? You lie between the night…
Love poem, not again
Travelling with your soul in a suitcase at 4 am in the morning. You know, the winter sun can…
Death of Margaret – the water’s curse
-I- Beneath the shadow of the moon, beneath the fracture of cries, the dreams of the solitary stone. Because you…
Library of Mirrors 