you didn’t look backbut kept drifting aimlesslybeyond the far of beyond your mouth twisted into turbulenceyour gaze speechless moving away, … More
Author: Deeptesh
Logging out/Error 404
Sometimes I watch youwhen after a long day at workyou log out and snap off the WiFi cable. I try … More
Nowhere girl
nowhere girlmutating into moonlightaway, away from love your breasts taste like vinegarunder the whirring motion of the fanon a hot, … More
Combustion
blue ossicles of pain spinning combustiontranslates graduallyinto the intimacy of meteors we do not talk of lovelanguage fell off her … More
Precipice
The day your voice collapsed bit by bitlike a delirious refrainI was crushed under it. Walking round and roundin involuntary, … More
Instant love
When in doubt, you were blinded by the love that kills with the sharpness of an accidental glance. At work, … More
Iron cactus
When you flashed your smile on the shop window and disappeared in a blinding glare down the spiralling manifestations of … More
Metronome
Sylvia, are you listening to the sound of tired earth breathing? Here seasons change, people fall in and out of … More
Poisoned letters
In July, you wrote to me in poisoned letters. Empty letters I had written to you from Paris, Vienna, Kolkata … More
Masquerade
You’re growing on me again with the quiet violence that only love can offer. Turning around with an automatic smile, … More
Woman burning
Woman burning, the mob spreads from house to house setting bodies on fire. Woman burning, smoke rises from the ruins … More
Missed futures
No one ever told you when in school you would obsess over dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s while … More
Ritual
The tragedy of the afternoon takes a turn for the worse as the doctor enters the room. With practised indifference, … More
Your voice, falling
Your voice falling falling endlessly through shadows of the evening lengthening on teardust like light dripping on windows branching into … More
The blood room
Or, Why a poet can never save the world Like a strange afterthought, the X-ray machine in the dark room … More
Rain
Like trees violently shaking in the breeze and being torn apart uncontrollably, we drift away. At the bus stop, the … More
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 … More
My God does not
My God does not order me to burn people at the stake because our homes, with roofs falling, water gushing … More
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 … More
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 … More
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 … More
House of song
No one comes anymore to your house of song. The naked woman rides her melting horses through the breeze. The … More
Totem queen
The wind-taxi celebrates the fall of the totem queen. The horse runs with a pistol through rainfall. In a century … More
Inside
Inside, inside the flames there is only deep darkness; no movement, no speech that fire cannot quell to dust. The … More
Poems on winter
Winter is coming It always feels strange when October comes. I sometimes sit observing the fireflies trapped in … More
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 … More
Lingering
How do you bear spaces that are haunted with refutation, the caprice of foamy sentience perhaps still pebbled with cold … More
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 … More
Wind
No more of witch-hunting in gramophone voices. No more of staged distractions and dilapidated laughter. Erasing with a wind compass … More
Redemption
Faces grow like petals in a footage of voices wobbling in repetition. I try to unlearn the grammar of her … More
Musings on laughter
Anatomy of laughter What is laughter if not borrowed speech dwelling on stolen time which has the lightness of derision … More
More dead than dying
When they throw you out at a busy crossing, naked and bleeding, you think, perhaps you might have saved yourself. … More
The Ghost triangle
1. Baptism by time -I- rain-sleep in a clock desert, like a thousand kisses on broken glass; or shadows of … More
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 … More
Not you
What lies between you and me, is not you, nor me but something like us, not quite you perhaps, … More
Fairytale of matchboxes
Looking down from the window of your twenty-second floor apartment, the slums beside the canal look like frail match-boxes. … More
Ghosts
-1- Dead cat that smiled at dinner quietly imagines spaces, soft, uncertain. Slow whimpering along the extinct highway, with painless … More
Forgetting
At evening the sky is blazing yellow and you stand at the foot of the staircase wearing your soul on … More
Rupture
Rupture -1- They speak, who do not speak hiding their face in a cage of sparrows. Their medusa grin … More
Moment
-I- Stare, stare at those figures frozen in motion, the pale splendour of lifeless limbs shivering in the soft ecstasy … More
Marina
Marina, let me breathe out into lips of water; spaces of the mind in bright blue sunshine receding quietly … More
Black
Calmly forward towards the self away, away from gravity. Defenseless under the darkness of pillows your large black body … More
Time
Let us meet in sweet oblivion at the end of this circle, when you have built a church with … More
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 … More
Breath
What’s in a breath that spirals stone from the first miracle of the wet earth? You lie between the night … More
Love poem, not again
Travelling with your soul in a suitcase at 4 am in the morning. You know, the winter sun can … More
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 … More
Library of Mirrors 