Poet in the Big City

After three days, the city finally opened itself
to the poet, unfurled its petals like a hesitant blossom
responding to shafts of afternoon light. The poet wandered,
marveling at her footloose days, at fallen leaves, at ruined walls.
The poet spent hours getting lost in the cramped streets of
bookstores, quiet minutes spent with titles like strangers' lives
she would never access. She leafed through verse and prose
until she could taste words blooming on her own hesitant tongue,
could refer to herself in third person, half-amused and half-overwhelmed
by her gloriously human mind, her petty fears, her loves as vast as cities;
and by the city itself, that she encountered anew each day, an insistent lover
she could never learn well enough, a world of strangers and familiar lives.

The poet was still as a wallflower, the words all packed within her but
covered with thin ice. The city expanded and shrunk itself, sometimes
seeming as large as the distance between where the cab picked her up
and where it dropped her off; sometimes as small as the blood-red and
speckled leaf she gathered from the sidewalk to her chest like a gem.
Some days there is enough fear to render her helpless, leave her mind
frantic and desperate, and then aching. Some days the walls of the room
do not seem strong enough to keep the vile world out. It is often hard.
The poet never feels like she belongs, and often confesses how afraid
she is of men on the street: their entitlement, their insistent eyes, their
fearless swagger. The poet has been thinking, but has written nothing
in so many days. She is, as usual, brimming and overfull, preparing
the land for monsoon and then a glorious, sun-yellow harvest.

Today the poet shed off fears like heavy fruit off her branches, let go
of the burdens she didn't need. The poet scrubbed her skin and walked
out in the city, hid only between bookshelves and strangers on the street,
collected moments and sun and dust in the lining of her skin until she
felt as large as love. To be alone in a city is a great adventure, she says.

Later, when the last thin moments of golden light were disappearing
behind vehicles and footsteps, she walked away from her solitude,
skillfully navigated a road full of frantic vehicles momentarily stilled,
weaved through scooters and buses like a small animal in the wilderness.
From the safety of the sidewalk, she marveled at her own swagger through
the city now, her heart swollen and glad, her footsteps racing towards a
kind lover. Her bag was filled with thin books like slices of the moon,
rare and magnificent, shining when she held them in her reverential palms:
how could the world extend anything but love towards her when she
loved it so fiercely, so fully, when she blossomed out of her own meager skin
like a reluctant caterpillar just so she could belong better, be bigger,
just so she could graze the day with her eager fingertips?

winter

it's not winter until everything falls apart, until the knots in my back form a forest of ache, until the transition from one day to the next can seem like, quite literally, a lifetime. everything is strange, and yes, jaswinder bolina was wise when he said -- how easy to wound, how much easier to be the wounded. my heart is breaking in ways that i never knew existed. for all of the organising, the understanding, the closure i ever wanted -- ha! what i get is this, life drenched in irony and longing, my room so cold i cannot step into it without shivers. sunshine is thin and provides no warmth. oh please let me go through a winter without tears, without death, without a sadness so large it eats into my soul. oh please let me go

in love

It is the strangest, wildest thing to be in love. The things that once made perfect sense seem to mean so little; and everything that was confused, scattered, broken... seems to form a perfect blue sky, the most wholesome sigh in my belly. You leave, and I wave wistfully at you through the gate. You gently kiss my cheek, and I know I will trace the shadow of your lips all day. It is absurd. I feel as vast as an ocean, and so hilariously fragile, so easily breakable -- but whole. Literature always taught me that it wasn't possible to feel whole -- but I do, I feel as though the universe has filled me up from my forehead to my toes and I am billowing in the wind, I am wide and complete and so deeply satisfied, so gentle with the world, so at peace. For the longest time, I forgot how to read love poems. They made no sense, they were too soppy, too personal, too much. One could love other people, but how could one be in love with them like this, how could one ache so desperately to graze their lips or to catch a shaft of sunlight on their cheekbone, how could one know someone intimately enough to hate them, to judge them, and still feel only desire, oceans of it wrapped in one's mouth? I thought it could be true only at 14, only when desire is silly and half-uttered and unrequited. But I am not 14, I am older, old enough to have broken hearts and moved so swift that nobody could touch my receding back -- and here I am, back in this room with my desire as big as a house, as a country, nowhere to go and no wish to leave. I map the stains winter sunlight leaves on the furniture, on the floor, on the walls. I wait for you to come back, simply so I can lie in your arms for hours. It is absurd. It is fiction and film, and so hilariously human, so obvious that I never thought I would feel it again. This is also what literature says, is it not? That these feelings are fleeting, and so important, so real -- they add colour, and scent, and flavour to this whole bare task of living, of going on, of pretending as though you will reach somewhere different from where you already are at the beginning of every day. Suddenly there is meaning, and of course it exists in the trees and the sunlight and the fragmented moments that I collect like a madwoman, like a child -- suddenly there is meaning and it exists also beyond me, it exists in the solid, warm body of a lover, and that knowledge frightens me, aches in my belly, and curiously uplifts me, leaves me afloat on the gentle wind. I trust you, and I trust life, and I am here with trembling fingers and tender skin, I am ready to be broken and remade, smashed against a wall of glass only to be picked up again with loving fingers. It is so human, so human.

my name

It is strange but
suddenly
I cannot imagine
you saying my name:
it would taste so odd
but bitingly precious

in your mouth.

I have spent an afternoon
drenched in poetry and longing
but still I cannot trust my words
the way I trust my fingers
on your skin.

still thinking

"I don't know when I will ever come to terms with the fact that articulation is always a 'squandering', that I am giving away more of my self with every word than I can ever get back, balance out."

sentimental explanations

I spend hours on the silver sliver of my macbook: various and irrelevant musings. I edit old posts. Read about printmaking courses that I will never do. Put on my headphones and lick my lips, wondering what it is that my soul is asking for. Eventually when I put on Damien Rice -- after so many long months -- I smile to myself. There is something to be said for sentimentality, after all.

I sometimes wish I wasn't so easily distracted. I console myself because it's not the I at fault -- it's the whole jingbang of capitalist consumerist culture that wants us to flick our eyes from screen to screen, open-mouthed, and never think deep enough to attack the things that need to be attacked. This, then, is a revolution: to stay with my thoughts, to travel deep inside these musings, and create. To read a book from cover to gorgeous cover. To study all the wildly exciting things that I'm studying. 

I have a thousand misgivings about keeping a blog. There is too much, too much I worry about when it comes to the wild forest of the internet, of social media, of easy communication. Some communication cannot be easy. Yet as I scroll down Shinji Moon's blog, or Bhanu Kapil's blog, I am so fucking thankful that these women chose to put up random fragments of their life up on the cruel and vast interwebs for me to read, consume, devour, as it were. The final poetic product is important and often dazzling, but I often want all of it, all of the incomplete and aching words that go into making it before it is made, all the writing that must take place before the writing. Sometimes Shinji's final poem will touch a stutter in my chest, but her vast thoughts and politics pull out that stutter, touch it, force me to travel down the lines of my body until I can unearth it myself. If I can touch somebody in that way someday -- it will be enough. So I write, I reorder, I put up a fragmented biography, a broken archeology of my life. And to be honest, I create temples of posterity whether I am on this blog or off it. All the diaries, all the fragments, all the Evernote notes -- they are all evidence that I am fearful, that I want proof of my existence, that I want to create something I can hold in my hands, or reach back to with a click, and know that it will be safe, like a seed in deep soil. A dead seed, I understand: what is living about the seed is already running in my veins through this conversation; what blossoms in me someday will be a result of the thoughts I think now. So why this, why the obsessive, almost neurotic desire to document, to prove, to hide away? Why this desire for stasis where there can only be river?

What I tell myself today, smilingly, is that we're all looking for ways to stay sane, reasons to hold on and make sense of this vast existence. I could say it subtly or crudely, but here it is. If I could not, did not question, then I would have other reasons to go on -- I could give society all the keys it wanted and play my role as a Good Woman -- I could live day to day because of all the duties and obligations that piled on my back like secret creatures, and I could marry, have children, worry about them. But that's silly, that's not what life would be like today -- I could, I will, I must, have a career! An ambition! I will study, I will get a job, I might choose to marry a lovely man and have children. Worry about them. Watch my body rot away until one day -- poof! -- like a leaf on the wind it will soar beyond my reach. Life is so long, and so hard, and so often it seems so unbearably bare. What keeps you sane? What makes you wake up every day and do all the things you're supposed to? What makes sure you don't curl up into a foetal position and weep yourself to sleep every night? I don't care if it's crude, if it isn't the right philosophical question to be asking, if existentialism is passe -- fuck that, fuck academic sophistication, these are the words that lick my spine and whisper to me with fangs when I am unable to leave the bed. I don't know the big reasons and I am often afraid to touch the big questions -- I don't know how to say them right, how to hold them gently, politely -- and so this is how I stay sane. This here, the temples I build from corners of my life where the lazy afternoon sun burns all edges gold and bronze and a plastic bag flutters in the wind like a poem, where the landscapes of my mind are sometimes solid mountain, and sometimes the uncertain sea. It isn't much (but what is?). I survive (even thrive, sometimes). 

So here I am, as usual, laying out my excuses and escape planes, flyaway bits of paper that hide under my thighs, that I hold down under desperate palms. The words are all I have, most of the time, and I'd always like to do better by them. I hope this means something, I hope I can create some meaning. I am reminded of the things I don't respect enough because they are often the things that matter, that force me to look up, that render me unable to hide. My body is an ocean that I need to tend to, that will wear out and snarl me into acquiescence if I don't pay attention -- listen, hear my stomach growling right this second... I am unable to curl out the twist in my spine, unable to ease out the forest of knots in my aching shoulders. I need to be better to my brown skin and tangled muscles. My mind is a mess, is always a mess, is sometimes bearable, is often interesting.

Meanwhile I remember an old conversation with my wise-and-crazy cousin where he told me -- in all seriousness -- in the middle of an increasingly cynical and nihilistic conversation about politics, relationships, life -- that the only thing that can hold out against the world, that can stay pure, that can change something -- is love. At least that's how I remember this conversation. In my smoky haze I was amused, sceptical. Perhaps he meant it in a more serious and philosophical sense -- right now I am not serious or philosophical. I am sentimental. And the one part of my life I cannot touch with the rough fingers of angst or the bruises of hopelessness is that -- that word, too oversaid by humanity -- the bubble of wholeness I feel erupt in my chest when my body is laid against yours on a bed stained by afternoon light, the laughter over familiar things in which we've built a home for ourselves, a haven. You've punctured my solitude, as Maggie Nelson said, and I've never felt more hopeful about it. I try to work harder, live bigger, feel less drained and bent over under the weight of the world. There is much to be joyful about, much to read, many fragmented conversations to have with so many people. So many sunsets to chase with my silly sentimentality, my disregard for truth, my chest aflame with hope for this life...

moments from mcloedganj

o mother moonface

Trying

I try so hard to search for poetry in all the corners of dreary afternoons, and my head fills with questions like a brimming bowl, too much, too much, too much, all I have are the words and they are too little, too little. Suddenly everything that was compartmentalised comes together in a crashing and toppling, all the separate boxes of desire and fear and anxiety and theory and literature and ache, all of it is here and none of it is here -- the too-much-ness and vacancy of it all -- and I am left both wailing on the ground and also here, on my chair, perfectly still. Well, if you want to know, here are the questions: where does it begin, and where does it end -- this crazy romance with the words -- this wild hope that the words will fix it all, will pin the monsters into little black alphabets and leave me free -- what do I do with this hope, do I believe in it, can I afford not to? Why must my sanity depend on putting everything in a box, on understanding understanding understanding, unravelling knowledge that I can verbalise and somehow control, organise according to date and time and colour? The knowledge of chaos has not permeated through my thick skull -- or perhaps it has, and that is where all the fear stems from? I try to live my life like an exquisite, thick, work of art, layered with detail and craft -- so much to dig through, so much to understand and unravel -- the notebooks, the fragments, the empty boxes, the facebook posts, the pictures, the sequins, the bookmarks and forgotten tickets. I am my own archeologist, memoirist, observer, devotee, biographer -- I am my biggest project. I do this, I live like this, and then I have the gall to ask -- why, why am I so afraid of death?

Afternoon sun lights up fragments of my room, of the corridor, of the grass, in bronze shadows and gold lining -- it is what keeps me hopeful even now, at the onset of winter, when everything seems to be falling apart. The internet confuses me, excites me, leaves me bleeding -- is there anybody out there, listening? Should there be? I write and I write and I write, I craft my life out of my flesh and of the scraps around me -- I hide some of these stories in the folds of my clothes, and I roll some into fragile glass bottles and toss them into this sea, with hardly a second look for the aches that shattered against shadow-black rocks. I scroll and scroll, read something beautiful in the strange forest of the internet, and sigh. I listen to Iqbal Bano and Noor Jahan sing Faiz and I try not to cry, try to hold the vast gaping holes in my chest shut, try to survive it all.

nomenclature

the white sheen of blank paper excites me
until it appears; and then it is only ever
a clenching in my stomach: such an easy
giving up. I give up too easily.

in my dreams, I am still lost, and blurry,
my edges pencilled in like forgotten things
and my feet standing on something soft
and infinitely breakable: somewhere along
the crawling away from death I forgot
what certainty feels like.

I am trying to remember, and also learn,
what it feels like to write a good poem,
what the balance is in between
casual words
and words that hold the world within them
fiercely. how do I make something sacred?
is it the practised ease or the rioting genius?
is it the straight pencil lines I fill in blindly?

I worry, and I worry about worry.
I am able to call my anxieties
anxieties
but I never want to call my sadness
a bigger word. nomenclature mocks me.
it is only ever self-diagnosis, and so many
kinds of self-doubt, crawling under my spine
like ugly things. I want to be a river of calm,
but sometimes I find a secret snarl at the back
of my throat. I do not know if I can live here.

I want to think of this as practised ease and an
unhesitant beauty, but it is also always just
casual words.
I once told myself I was the only true audience
I would find, and that thought makes me sad today.
I am a terrible, over-thinking, self-validating audience
for myself. perhaps for everybody.

I am learning how to love, and it is as easy as it is
hard. the simple things feel vast, like whole lifetimes
of this moment. the strange uncontainable joy of falling
asleep next to a warm body, knowing that your
fragility is, for once, in the fragile hands of another.
it's all self-destructing, but at least it feels
human, feels like love, feels like a dream.

I am feeling things in tidal waves
this time around: the highs are hopeful and I feel
as though I can blossom in ways that I never knew;
but the lows are snarling and dangerous and feel like
insidious holes that I could slip into like a shadow.
it would be so quiet and comfortable. in a hole,
there would be so much less to worry about.
only the silence, and the sadness
which wraps around you like a shawl.
winter kept us warm, covering
earth in forgetful snow...
new words speak to me each time and tell me
how to map my mind. I am a strange city.

I am afraid of writing
because I know I can do it.
I am afraid of giving myself to this vast world
and I am afraid of its disinterest in my small bones
and trembling fears and pouting silences.
love me, love me harder.
love me until I can find a way out
of a ruined city and a chessboard forest.

I love myself
but it won't do.
you must do it for me.
I will name you
river
and you can carry me through
to an ocean that I will call
only through absence. do it.

once the words are spilled out of me
like ink, they leave no trace. I do not ever
remember writing these stains into my skin.

in Phnom Penh

At the edge of the street where we sat over salad,
three children got in a brawl. A girl with a basket full of trinkets
tied to her waist, and a weeping toddler.
As he howled and kicked, his wire frame full of glass bangles
flew across the sky and scattered fragments
all over the curb. Later, alone, he sat by the tyre of a car
and looked at his empty hands.

The bustling streets of Cambodia had no space for his grief. The riverside
sprawled out like a dirty postcard.

Four days into an unknown country, the inevitable happened:
a man, perhaps drunk, sauntered over
with his eyes on my hesitant naval.
Where are you from, he asked my terrified stomach. Hey, lady. Where are you from.
Walking fiercely down the street, I could hear his footsteps behind me
as sure as his sleazy smile. I wondered
if he ever did this to the white women who visited,
their navels and shoulders and bikini strings carelessly given over to the city.

Even after the music in the open square, the sky blossoming with leftover light,
everything tasted of shattered glass;
the mug of beer with a chipped edge,
the quiet desperation that comes with vulnerability
or love. I filled my mouth with smoke
until my hands shook.

Being Woman

I am angrier than ever about being a woman. I've been trying to write this post for days, but I have too much to say and I'm afraid I won't do it justice. When I was a child, I always assumed that I felt afraid and unsafe when I was alone in most public spaces because public spaces belonged to adults. I'm an adult now, and I still feel afraid and unsafe in public spaces. I was wrong. Public spaces do not belong to adults. Public spaces belong only to men.

I know this shouldn't come as a surprise. We knew this all along. But somehow, it still does. I am shocked and bewildered and angry every day. I am trying to be conscious of all the ways in which I monitor my movements, try to make myself as small and inconspicuous as possible in public spaces. These are all things I never paid as much attention to as a child, because I was always out of the house with what I assumed were all-powerful adults. Since perhaps fifteen or sixteen, all of these things are a reality, and I have dealt with them only by ignoring them. Here goes:

Every time I step out of the house, I change. I make sure I am covered from shoulder to knee in sturdy fabric. Despite this, I also need to clench my jaw and be ready to be stared at. Give angry looks sometimes, but mostly remain silent and look away (read: look down. In shame). Don't really look anyone (read: men) in the eyes on the road. Or in a market. Anywhere. Even from inside a car, where I love looking out and just observing the strange circus of life taking place -- I cannot afford to catch somebody's gaze for too long. Somebody might flash me, or make a lewd expression, or follow my car. It will be my fault. I'm never too loud. Never really show affection in public. Terrified of doing that, of holding somebody's hand or grazing their cheek with a finger. Intellectually I know that these actions do not mean I'm giving a stranger permission to view me as 'easy', but I am still afraid. It will be my fault. My fault. To smoke, or drink, or laugh too loudly in public is scary. Angry eyes follow me. All of these things mean that getting out of the house is hard. The same street that I used to walk on so easily as a child, is totally alien to me. I get out of the house in a car, and now sometimes in a cab. 

I know that I shouldn't be doing any of this. I also know that I'm in a society where if anything ever does happen -- and it does, it has -- then nobody will even need to blame me externally. I will blame myself. I will be too afraid to act. The patriarchy roars in satisfaction, from inside my belly, where it lives now. These days, I am angrier than ever. In a dream where I was being chased and followed by a strange man and my boyfriend and parents weren't taking me seriously, I woke up crying. Not with fear -- I managed to escape, I hit him, I was fierce despite being absurdly helpless -- but with anger. It is unfair. Unfair, that I am twenty, and have not been equal given access to this vast world. I want to travel, and sit in parks, and in marketplaces. I hate coming home to Chandigarh, because I am trapped in these four walls for more time than I am used to. I am used to the privilege of college, of 3am walks and no slutshaming. I am used to Delhi, scary as it is, inhabited by so many kinds of people that there's almost always space for one more. Chandigarh has no space for me. I can go out if there is somebody to visit, or something to buy. Or else I am home. "Of course you are right, it doesn't matter what you wear or how you travel, but you still need to be careful na, you can't invite trouble", my grandmother tells me. She doesn't need to, I tell myself that. So I hide out here, in this safe and equal space.

Fuck that. I want to own this city, and every city I am in. I am angry that I am twenty and fierce and intelligent and yet bound up in a history and a place that is refusing to give me my fair share. Here it is: I will go crazy if I am kept in these four walls. My prison is beautiful and full of lovely people, but I need to see sky. This TEDx talk is wonderful and articulate, and yes, yes, yes, we need to loiter, we need to spend hours and days on roadsides and in parks doing nothing in particular, but sure as hell that we belong there. It is unfair that the fight is so hard, but here it is, and it must be fought. My boyfriend is kind and wise and wonderful, but when he tells me, "we must not compromise", he is wrong. Every movement of mine in a public space is a compromise, and it has been that way as long as I remember. I am still afraid, and anxious, and dream about strange men who laugh as they harass me -- I am not going to stop compromising. I do not know how to, yet. But I'd like to think I'm getting there, that we're all getting somewhere with the awareness and discourse and conversation. He changes it to, "we must compromise as little as we can". Yes. We must. It's going to be a fight every day, and it is. To reclaim public spaces for our vast and wide and skinny selves, and to change a status quo which suffocates more people than it liberates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlgGNv5t92A&app=desktop

insides of my head

over the summer

edge

there is a certain hard look
                              that I wear on my face.

I wish I didn't.

there is a blade of truth
                               that hides under my tongue.

someday, I will get angrier
                                        at you
                                              than you will allow me to.

here, on the edge of things,
                                    it is slippery.
                                             the blade cracks like glass.
                                                      the sky shatters.

from the terrace

rainy evening I

you woke me up, and

we’re here now. I write poetry

in the damp insides of my mouth

and try not to break your

overfull heart.

the sky shudders and darkens. I hide

behind a bower in the mango tree, and smoke

a lonesome cigarette. the smoke is a silver thread

the wind pulls out of my mouth. like a secret poem.

listen, I still don’t know

whether I’m living okay. but I have words

like loose change in my pockets, and dreams

the size of cities. light slants onto my 

fingers and paints them gold.

my mother and I are listening

to the music you sent me. some of it

leaves me billowing, larger than the frame

of my little bones. a rag left in the wind

that expands to the size of a sea.

in the distance, I hear a train rumble.

the sky is quiet now, it has spent its fury.

everything is dewdrops and damp skin and light.

the lost birds start to call to me again. I tell them

to wait. to go on. to find me again.

on coming home

April 30: Closure

This time
I will be satisfied even
with no ending lines,
no last conversations
in my mind. I know
I am difficult to love.

This time, I am ready
to leave without asking
for the world. I am ready
to walk out to sea and taste
the salty air the seagulls
fly in. I am ready to fly it.

I try to be softer, kinder,
less insistent. I forget how
to love, every day, like a
language that peels off
my tongue and hangs
in the ancient rooms.

I need no names
for the trees. No names
for the different kinds of
breeze. No names for the
oceans my body meets and
falls in love with, no names
for the love I own and disown.

It is only ever endings,
and not even
in a tragic way. It is only ever
sunbirds on a terrace building
a nest that cannot last. It is
only ever lamplight and ache.

Like A, I want the good work,
the hearty meal, the tired eyes.
I want the long journeys and
I want new learnings, sunsets
that taste of rose and gold,
intimacy that curls my toes
and hurts my lungs
in happy ways.

It is only ever endings;
I am satisfied with my lot.

April 29: weight

the unbearable weight
of still feeling these
things, of feeling the
pain of a stranger's
voice scorching
your skin, of
misspelling
important words
when you thought
you never would.

my bed is full
of pieces of my life
i thought i threw away,
hid in ashtrays or tossed
out the third-floor window.

they come back in the form
of small things that itch, scratch.

the words still make me tender,
still make me ache, still hold me
underwater and naked and slick.

my body is a warzone
from a country i never saw.
i try to hold this alien grief
slow, gentle, in my palms.

i hold all the weight of
sky and forgotten dreams
on my shoulders, in my
eyes and in the words.

April 28: Waiting

I miss the particular
texture of my longing
when waiting would
taste of hope.

Waiting tastes now
of old food, familiar
sheets, an old sky.

It is too early
for waking, for
metaphors, for
summer rain.

The way home is through
cities of smoke with nothing
to lose. The way home is
a highway that looks like
a slow death. The way home
feels nothing like a home,
never will. Yet I go.

These new textures
are sweet in new ways:
honey in the hollows
of my collarbones
when my neck isn't
knotted up with ache.

I expect nothing.
I go.

April 27: Loss

Somehow, I watched
myself let go of old grief
like a swollen rose.

It is torture
to tear these petals
off my skin, these
bruises like birthmarks,
these cities of loss.

My ancient cries
hide in corners
of the house, still.
Underneath cobwebs
and drawers of junk.

You can hear
all the names
I have hidden
under my skin.

Somehow, everything
passes over into river;
gurgle and movement,
fresh awakening, dawn.
All stagnation reworks
itself as a morning.

All tragedies
mask themselves as
life, call my soul
to the stage
so I can pray
for a miracle.

April 26: big feelings

endings
don't feel like loss anymore,
just like
beginnings
don't feel like love.

growing up is a lot of pain,
not a lot of learning. there's nothing
called learning. there's only making
the same mistakes over again until
you move on to newer pastures,
easier ways to break to heart
or lose a key in the grass.

all the big feelings
come out sometimes,
when i listen to music
in the bus, or watch
the shadows and light
dance like lovers.

the rest of the time
i have learnt (reached)
to live without big feelings:
no big sadnesses, no expansive
sunlit joys, no grief that calls
to the stars. it's alright, it is.

i hide my tongue
in a secret place,
and water my soul
like a tender thing.
better days arrive
like majestic birds.

April 25: Other Languages

Translation
feels a lot like love.

The same kind of tender compromise,
sense of urgency, hollow regret. The
feeling you don't own your mouth.

There are a hundred reasons
I will never feel whole; one
of them is that I am split
right through my voice
like an overripe fruit,
my syllables torn in two
like rotting flesh on seed.

With vowels that came
to me as easy as love,
I was pulled in
to a universe that sank
under my skin and named
my teeth its own. This language
owns my soul, owns the cities
in my belly, writes the laws that
govern the streets of my voice.

I write only that poetry
which I can fit in the confines
of this language, in its particular
lilt, in the silences between
black alphabets that tell me
they don't belong in this
humid tragedy. I write
only those words which
this language lets me own.
I write a syntax of desire
and living, bruising and
falling, trying and loving.
I write only the words
I can call my own.
Even those words
sometimes slip through
my fingers and mock
my little brown voice.

Other languages hang around in
the air, a distant memory, a short
forgetting. Other languages are
hesitant on my tongue, in my mouth
that tastes of a ruined empire. I try
to tell them they can own me too,
hold me tender in the sounds of
their words and their weeping.
Other languages know parts
of me that I have hidden away,
buried under soil and tried to
forget. Other languages know
the blood that runs through
my voice, the archeology
of my expression, the way
I might never know.

I don't know whether they
are jealous, of this mistress
that scratches my voice
when I try to let it go.
I don't know whether
they want me, like I
think I want them.

Translation
feels like looking
at myself in the dark.
Like counting the colours
of my shadows. Like taking
the shortest way home in a
monsoon that smells of a
different life. Translation
feels like violation, feels
sacred, feels like drowning.

I unveil a secret
that knows my name.
I hang somewhere
between my voice
and my soul that
smells of centuries
in the sun, here,
here where you
see the roads and
towers now, here.
Here, where I lived
before I lived, where
the soil dreamed me
up like a secret, the
secret I unveil;

I secret I veil.

April 24: heart

i hide my thumb
in the hollow of my throat
and feel the gentle throbbing.
my heart is big enough to
hold a city, douse a fire.

life seems stranger these days,
entirely misunderstood, so wonderfully
incomprehensible. i do not ache to know
now, i do not weep water or dreams.

i blossom
gently
and forgive the world, get mad
at the things i must get mad about,
and smile all the way from ear to ear,
from dilli to the sea, just for the feat
of surviving these long and absurd days,
this lifetime, a carnival, a madhouse, fragile.

April 23: laughter and secrets

a rush of expectations
slides out the door
smells of rot and
a sky too large to bear.

in conversations with A,
i unveil corners of myself
i am proud to own.

my skin smells of laughter.
i have shed the taste of
whiskey and smoke.
some nights
are too long to call home.

these days
i laugh a lot:
everything is absurd,
this crazy carnival
gets crazier, and
the inside of my mind
is a fit place for a madwoman.
i laugh, snort, chuckle to myself.

i used to be full to brimming
with wonder at the world.
wonder is rarer now,
tastes like raw gold.

i can own this: these crazy nights,
the aching back, the fragmentation,
the forgettings and relearnings.
i can own this sky and my mistakes.

laughter is good, cleanses
my mind of clutter. sometimes
there is guilt -- the world is too serious
too painful too hollow too cruel to laugh at.
but most days i see the humour now. i see
the jokes so large they look like truth.
the holes in strangers eyes. the physics
behind magic, the cruel tricks, the madness.
i see i must survive all this, and more.

part of the secret is
creating as much silence
as voice. the empty spaces
are where the conversations live.
the hollows are where blossoms grow,
where words becomes cities and sing.

part of it is a happy forgetting, an acceptance
so large it looks like death, a joy so rich it tastes
of aged wine and ancient wisdom, like the trees.

April 22: reading poetry online

all of a sudden
the straight clean lines
and the corporate shine
of my little macbook
gets blurred:

the internet is a crazy
city, a gust of wind,
a hidden empire.
some days
i move out of
large streets and
seedy bylanes
and find little meadows,
corners and cafes and
afternoon light painted
rose. it is nothing like
finding a book in a
bookshop or on
the pavement:

but it is
something else,
the swelling in my
chest like i swallowed
the moon, the knowledge
of hundreds of poets
hiding behind this veil,
not eliot or wordsworth
or anything i can find in
a Crossword bookstore
in the mall, something
else, something other;

something happening
now, this minute, this
year, hundreds of women
unfolding their skin and
sculpting words that
taste of wine and
magic (there are
hardly ever men),
from all over the
world (they are
hardly ever white),

and the internet
becomes, for a while,
a table i can share with
these women, a street
that leads to a quiet
riverside, a blossoming;

a place where these voices
can echo and reach the stars,
tremble off mountains and
into my skin, a place where
these voices are strong and
alive and are heard, are heard,
are heard, can be heard, are not
hidden behind bestsellers or
classics, are not forgotten,
are not put behind, are heard,
are strong and alive and exist
in a street lit up with stars
and whispers, conversations
that sing of an awakening,
words that pave these
streets in my mind.

all of a sudden
i can take out
the stones from
my mouth

and fill it
with stars

April 21: Sunbirds

I am trying to tie all these
different strings together --
the sheepish smile that lights up
my sister's face; or a home that
does not smell like a stranger's
land this time; or the summer
light that falls in shafts on the
lizards that grow fatter and more
translucent; or the chirping of
sunbirds - incessantly, untiringly,
doggedly, relentlessly, fiercely
flying back to my balcony with
a single twig or thread or rag
in arched beak each time, to
build a little nest on a bent
branch on a crippled tree.

I don't know whether I
feel too much or too little
these days - things that would
have made me weep or clench
my fists or swell up in emotion
now leave me quiet, peaceful.
But other things, newer things
still leave me aching, covered
in a sadness less sad but still
tasting of fresh melancholy.

My grandfather sits in warm
lamplight, older than ever,
and trembles as he talks of
Meer's poems on Delhi, how
it decayed and frayed and
died a hundred deaths. I can
see the tears, hear the quaver
in his familiar voice. I watch
partly from afar, and partly
from his side. We both glance
at my grandmother's smiling
picture on the wall when we
can - it is still a gaping wound
in the skin of our lives. We
cannot heal. We ache fiercely.

I try not to cry, do not
understand how I have
let go of so much, realise
that I will someday let go
of this too. Like all else.

Meanwhile the sunbirds
carry on, purposeful and
quiet, single-minded in
their task. I see the little
nest, see it sway on the
branch, ragged and poor,
half-built, out of thatch
and string and pieces of
mid-day sun. I see how
fragile the little object
is, how easily it would
crack into dust, and I
try not to weep at us
all, fighting this long
and meaningless fight
as the day wears on.

The sunbirds chirp
and quiver blue and
black, hear nothing
of my sad discourse,
weave among vines
and garden plants like
dancers, disappear
in a second when
I come too close.

April 20: to A

if life was a little less hard
you and i would not be
continents apart.

we would wake at dawn
in a forest smelling of sun

our legs would always be
smeared with paint

the distance between our arms
would be where blossoms grow.

i have collected lovers like beads
for a necklace i would never wear;
but no shoulders weaved with muscle
could hold the weight of my sadness
like your oceanic curls of hair.

i say the word often, to many
different people, but i remember
what it means sometimes only after
a crackling phone call with you.
i can taste your particular silence.
hold onto your laugh for a lifetime.

here's a poem to add to our little pile,
another leaf of longing. we will row
a little rowboat across oceans that
have thawed, and we will wear
dried palash flowers in our hair.
we have two long journeys ahead,
we might meet only in our dreams.
i will celebrate that even as i weep.

April 19: desire

"desire is the kind of thing that
eats you
and
leaves you starving."
(nayyirah waheed)

and here i am.
i am writing
for myself
an alternate
syntax of desire.

i am learning
a story that needs
no end. a love
that knows its
own end. a life
that demands
less, gives more.

i am finding
hollows in my
skin, that have
lived here for
years. i am
watering the
voids. feeding
them sun. living
with a sense of
fragility and loss.
yet living.
yet living.

i am writing for myself
a new kind of living.
a less sad sadness.

i am weaving
a certain lightness
into my bones.

i am singing
the happiest song
of despair
that ever was wrote.

April 18: Delusions

More and more
I am thinking about
what it means to
a) Make art, and
b) Be with people.

More and more
I am coming to believe
that the two are more about
delusion than I thought.
More and more I am finding
parts of myself I did not know.

To make art, I must believe
that it will change the world,
change somebody's life, that
somebody will read it or see it
and understand all the thorny
bushes and desertscapes I am
coming from, somebody will
rise out of their own sadness
like a flower blossoming, and
it will be significant. It will
touch another. It will unfold
the folds of a stranger's heart.

To be with people, I must believe
that it will fill up the empty spaces
within me, that everything will
hurt less, that the ability to love
will cleanse me of all other sin.

More and more,
I can see myself
in these various mirrors
made of glass, and I can see
that in a sense, I am alone
here, these days are long
and lonely, and nobody
will be wholesome and
a savior for my fragile
heart. It is only I. My art
will only ever belong to
me, will only ever fold
and unfold the creases
of my skin the way I
want it to. The empty
spaces will remain, will
be cruel sometimes, will
ache desperately sometimes,
but will remain. No friend
or lover or parent or stranger
can wrench my voids away
from my bones or soul.

To know this
is to be wise, perhaps
even independant. But
to know this, must also be
to be kind. I must not demand
a wholesome life from lovers
or strangers or readers. I must
give one to myself; yet be kind,
yet create, yet hope, yet learn
to live in this crazy world
with all the rest of them.

April 17: sometimes the sadness

sometimes the sadness
fits into teacups, isn't
loud or desperate or
aching, is just
slow

is just
a hurt in a throat;
or a realisation
that the nest the sunbirds are making
will inevitably break, will not last.

sometimes the sadness
is just about fragility.
is lilting music on a
cloudy morning.

is not desperate.
feels less loudly.

is the colour of
the ravines on
somebody's face.

sometimes the sadness
is a river, is not rain.

April 16: this poem

breathe in, and out:
this poem is a reflection
on my unsteady mind,
a conversation in my
heady head, a plea
to myself to breathe
and relax, search
for peace but also
relax, when I find it.

this poem is the hum
of air conditioning,
the shine on the glass
in this desolate grey
Haryana landscape.
it is the birdsong.
the grime. the dust.
the cigarette stubs
and withering greens.

this poem is my
quiet, the burn
at the back
of my throat.
it is the sad
smile of life
and a blue sky
all rolled into
one.

April 15: eating words

here I am, again,
in an empty-fan-whirring-room
in the silence of almost noon

tip-toeing around myself

feeling quiet. dazed. remembering
that there will be days which are not
horribly sad, or even terribly happy;
there will be days and nights and hours
when I just am, when I just lie
in bed and try not to let my aching toe
touch the wall, when I just want to sleep
but cannot, when I just want to feel, but
I will have to force myself to. so I don't.

here again, I am, it is nearly noon

I keep trying to feed my rumbling stomach
words, expecting it to acquiesce, stop sounding
like a thunderstorm brewing under my ribs.

here again, these late and silly realisations:
words are not food. words are not love.
words are not air, or memory-water.
words are  w o r d s .

I could romanticise anything.
thank goodness for my body
and its aches and mutterings
and its terrible concrete reality
that I cannot wish away.

I am in a daze. the sounds outside
come in tides and waves. the fan
continues with its insistent noise
of summer. P once asked me
why I talk about it so much;
perhaps my fan is noisier
than most. perhaps my mind
is not quiet enough. perhaps

I should eat and stop reading,
bathe and stop thinking,
let everything smell
of whiskey and charcoal-fixative,
slow and meaningless mornings.

my mind is in a landscape of
snow at every edge - but my body
is here, in this sweltering heat, these
long days, these moments that hang
in my throat and quiver expectantly.

my skin is aching and finds it
hard enough to cover my own
meager bones; here I am,
trying to wrap a whole world
in it, stitch the seams with words
and sun, hold in the light as if
I own it. I do not, I do not.

April 14: Celebration

It is one of those days
when the internet feels
like a miracle

instead of a disease.

Alone, with the whirring
of the fan and the slow ache
of my spine as it bends over
in this rust-coloured chair,
I wish desperately
that my tongue
could have
the magic
of
Nayyirah Waheed
Warsan Shire
Shinji Moon
Fatima Asghar
Yrsa Daley-Ward
Tishani Doshi

but my tongue
insistently refuses;

at least it lets me
taste the magic of
another's words,
of feeling like
I exist, after days
of hiding in, of
music that sounds
like a celebration,
of giggles under
my breath and joy
that grazes over
like a feather.

April 13: Owning the Poem

Perhaps I feel like
if I can save the poem
hide it somewhere
I will be able to
own it

it will be stamped
onto my soul

like the bruises
on my hips, or
the scratch on
S's knee.

If I can own it
perhaps
it will sing me
to sleep
when the darkness
isn't enough;

perhaps it will be
a blue-gold sky
for my sadness.

Perhaps it will drown me.
Perhaps it will show me
my own little face
in a hundred pennies
that I will end up
losing

only to find
something that smells
like cinnamon and rain
in the rush of wind.

April 12: In & Out of Time

Today began with
Lacan;
my head ached and
brimmed over with
yearning, I wanted
to know and yet
understand that I
could not know;

I grazed the receding edge
of my desire as it skimmed
the horizon; I blossomed
with a hundred realisations
and a hundred brand new
mistranslations;

I was glad,
all in a rush,
to be here, to be
learning these things

that left me at the edge of my seat
full to bursting with the world.

I felt like I feel after conversations
that shake me up, inside and out,
and warm me up like a sea in sun;
conversations with A or with P that
traverse the serrated teeth of my mind
and teach me more things than I can
tie down in language or in image;

I felt like I do after P
plays the surbahar for me
and my skin is at the edge
of an unfamiliar raga
aching and breathing
and feeling as though
I exist, but not here;

as if this time is irrelevant,
as if I could have these conversations
or listen to the tides of this music
at any point in human history,
and feel this same immense
sense of being
alive.

~

Today ended with
me collecting a jarful
of tears that I could not cry
because they were not mine:
listening to Himanshu ji talk
about the plight of the tribals
in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh;

I felt as though my body
were afloat; how could
any of these facts be
real, how could this
reality occupy the same
time and space as I do?

All of a sudden my throat
was aflame, my eyes in pain,
my heart too full with guilt
to feel any other thing.
How to balance these
various stories, these
joys and these realities,
these worlds that exist
at cross-edges and margins
and always push too hard
and feel too far;

how can I live this life
when too much of me
will always be made
of guilt and privilege
that I could not earn
if I tried?

My head aches and
brims over with
yearning. My
conversations
are fragmented
and fierce.

I am suddenly
deeply aware
of being here,
now, the flies
quivering on the
table and the sun
setting in a quiet
arc; my body, here
scripted in so many
lines that I can only
try to read; myself,
now, as real and
alive in this
very time;
as aware,
as fierce
as I can
be.

April 11: Windy Days

Trying to remind myself
I exist, even if no one
knows I'm here;
alone
in this bright yellow classroom
silver laptop poised as if there is
something important to say;
some essay or the other
to write
again.

Today in my therapist's office
the wind wailed against windows
and I thought about how pained
it sounded; and how fiercely
joyful it used to sound
when it thundered
through the
forest

(like me?).

This concrete and glass
is no good for my soul.

Trying to remind myself
of everything I veiled
in order to stay sane:
the long years
of childhood
spent in grey corridors
and grey tunics and grey
moments; before I found
my forest. Trying to
remind myself that
it's okay to forget
the things that ache.

Trying to remind myself, also,
that this wind is an ocean and my
body is a miracle that speaks to me
in the language of skin; every day
is long and arduous but if I wake
and don't feel like dying, it is
reason enough to celebrate.

Trying to breathe in
this summer air
and tie the wind
in a scarf around
my head, fluttering.

If nobody asks about my day,
did it really happen? And if
language is only ever public,
how does it make sense that
only conversations with me
leave me sane anymore,
not dripping

with longing
I can never
overcome?

Without conversations
or the illusion of love,
can I still graze the wind
with the yearning too big
for my fragile frame?

April 10: Why?

Because I wanted to see
if I had the guts to do it;
because it's more
comfortable
than I knew I could be
with myself.

Because the wind rushing
over my bald head feels
more like heaven
than anything society
can sanction for me;
and sometimes when
I wash my face, I forget
where my face ends and
where my head begins.
Who knew?

Also, who knew
how terrifying it would be
to walk the grimy streets of
Dilli, and know I am being
watched for my refusal to
behave, spelled out clear
in the summer grass on
my bold head? So, why?

Because I'm trying so hard
to shed everything
unnecessary.

Because it gives me less
to hide behind. Less to
worry about. Less to do.

Because I want to be
so much less afraid
of androgyny
and also
of having to look
at my own unadorned
face.

Because I refuse
markers of gender
on the ocean of my skin.
I am fluid. I smell like
water. I do not need to be
woman.

Because it forces me
to be the person
I want to be.

April 9: Summerfeelings

And all of a sudden
one windy afternoon

summer slips through the glass
and dances in the library

(the music is a hundred kinds
of happy, and bright, and loud)

and I'm hiding a hundred secrets
under my billowing skirt, and
watching S walking and the wind
rushing through her hair as if it
could blow her right off her
little feet;

again, that rush bubbling
in the centre of my chest:
the feeling that the world
is too large for me to touch
and too small for me to eat
and there is so much to do,
so many places to go, so
very many smiles to smile;

the moon is the smallest
sliver it could be in the sky
every evening, and the stars
are shining fiercely, like me.

The days are long and windy.
My skin is slowly translating
my feelings and looking less
like cardboard or fiberglass.
Slowly some days I look
in the mirror and see
what I feel:
a shining
like sun

April 8: Scent of a Mango

I watch the contours

of my mind, touch

the hollows of my

mouth while I wait.

Eventually, the words

blossom up in me like

bruises, swell my eager

tongue, and rush out

like a river. 

The metaphors

hang heavy

as if

off a mango tree.

I remember the sight

of morning light

as it danced through 

quivering leaves,

peeling the image

raw.

All day today

I carried around

a mango

as if it were

a secret.

Finally,

in the dark,

I took it out of

the white packet.

Let the silence

throb in my ears.

Held it in my

aching palms

as if it were precious.

Sliced off amber skin,

as the notes of a raga

danced to the sliver

of moon that hung in

the dark sky; delicate
as a feather, fine as a lie.

The knife cut sharply

into firm flesh, spilled

summer sun all over

my hands. Like blood,

or egg yolk, or the sea.

My mouth was the colour

of sun. My hands beaming

with light. Orange skin

lay limp on the wet plate.

Later, I realised the scent

had laced my hands like smoke.

I remembered light and shadow

on the mango tree at dawn.

I wondered if it smelt the same:

of mornings, of flesh, of summer, 

of childhood, loss and heady love.

April 7: Learning Love

"whether with a lover or none.

i reek of love.

i stink of love."

(nayyirah waheed)

I am learning

that to live without love

is the greatest sin.

It is harder to learn

that the intoxication

of another's neck, or

the comfort of arms,

or the shiver and smile,

the tremble and touch, 

the anticipation of love

is not 

love.

It is hard to learn

to be alone, to know

that my life is mine alone.

It is hard to forgo the easy

rush of learning another's lips

like a new language. Hard to

not travel into spaces of intimacy

far too soon, with too little caution.

I am learning to reclaim

my body for myself, learning

to live in this country of skin

and cage of bones, this map 

of longing and restlessness.

I am learning love

in the insistence of my eyes,

in the hollows of my mouth.

I am learning to fall in love

with the days of sun when 

there is meaning and joy

simply in watching the sun light up

the amber edges of a stranger's hair, 

or in the easy stillness of a fly 

resting on a table, or in catching

myself laughing

while walking alone

from some corridor to another.

April 6: Tasting memory

(today's prompt is to write a
food poem)

Nothing calls
nostalgia
like scent and taste:

sometimes, walking
down library shelves,
I catch a whiff of
perfume
and am transported
to the neck and arms
of somebody long
almost-forgotten.

Sometimes something
tastes of boiled-fried
potatoes, the kind
that will only ever
remind me of two
long months in
South Africa,
aching for home
while learning
the world for
the first time.

Cold beer will always taste of
leisurely evenings at home.
Wine, of coffee mugs and
college room lit gently warm.

Tasting
never seems to remind me
of the torture years of early
youth, when food was just
an ugly necessity.
Instead, I remember
when I learnt to love it:
a gangly teenager in
mother's arms, eating
yellow dal and aloo beans
out of her soft and lovely hands.

And sometimes, a wandering fragrance, even
unfamiliar beer, or cheap wine; remembering
fresh tomato mozzarella salad in warm shade,
blueberries in paper cups, cocktails brimming,
gelatos carved like gloriously petalled roses;

the stray memory of salivating
at something new, whilst
a river tidily thundered past,
or a sea sat lazily in the sand;
the gleaming sunloved cafes
of new cities that we, greedy,
memorized and tried to call
our own;

so much takes me back to
backpack and exhilaration;
a summer with the mother
a few lifetimes long.

April 5: Quiet Poems

I cannot seem
to write
quick poems
anymore:

there is tenderness
under my skin, and
words I have been
gathering, yes, but

it is harder to find abundance
and easy grace, joy is more
of a struggle than it ever was;

although somehow
it is more precious
for it. Bitingly so.

There are quiet poems
in how I grieve

quiet rhythms
to my words
and dreams -

how I watch them
burn
my cold-skinned
grandmother, how
everything changed
and how hard it is
to forget

how learning a new script
is exhilarating, and also
how it is breaking my heart

to be so close
and so far
(from
myself)

how everything makes
less sense, but seems
to be falling into place
anyway.

My stories
have become
more crisp

I can taste
autumn leaves
scattered like gems
on a forest floor.

I am more silent now,
but every time I worry
I have nothing to say

my body proves me wrong.

I languish in blank white
and rewrite words for days
until I rush onto paper
like a river, like dawn.
Here is a
quick
poem.
Here is
quiet.

April 4: He Who Talks of Borges

He was right --
it does get better

then
h a r d
again,

but hard
in a different way

with me grown better,
more aware

(I am finding new spaces
of peace in my body, some kind
of kindness and quiet grace that
I am discovering; I have learnt
to listen, I can hear my own silence

and my weeping without tears,
the stories my spine is writing,
the shuddering of my tired teeth,
and the weary words of my bones).

He was right --
when joy returns
after this long grieving,
this dull dispossession,
this journey of loss --
when joy returns
it does become
rich
like aged wine

; a texture that I
would never
have known.

I must just
keep my head
above water.
Must be kind
to myself
despite these
tired limbs.

His Kafka and Kundera
and practical-ways-to-face
this sadness the size of a sun
slip under my skin
when I am not
paying attention.

He thinks he
has committed
Borges' sin;
so have I.
We have not been
Happy. These shadows
follow us through time.

He thinks Borges
was born with some
primordial wonder.

So was he. And me,
I hope I can rewrite
this grieving, this
intellect that mouths
words while my heart
withers in its cage --
I hope I can find some
primordial, cardinal
wonder of my own.

I know now I will not
be able to keep it safe
within the confines
of words - but I hope
I can find it
again and
again,

hope I can live it
so fully
it never
leaves.

In a way.

April 3: On Reading Fiction

Going back to reading
feels like submerging myself in the sea
after years of a desert life.

Every sense is on edge;
I had forgotten
I could feel so much at once
from the narrow confines of my skin.

Here is where I find myself:
awake in somebody else's story.
The countries of my body
in a hundred places at once.
The scents of streets I cannot name.
The sounds of cities I have not seen.

Fiction is the kind of truth
or the kind of contradiction
you can feel in your flesh
instead of in your mind;
or in your mind instead of
in somebody else's words.
Fiction owns none of the
disharmonies of theory.

Here is where I find myself:
remembering a child who touched books
with the hands of a lover, kept words in a little mouth
like prayers, and held onto stories until they became
whispers, or dreams, or forgotten histories.

Here is where I find myself:
realizing that nothing really changes
even when nothing is the same.
Realizing my joy or my sorrow
or my skin stretched tight across
this cage of bleached bones
is not my own.
Only borrowed.

April 2: Faiz sahab

Faiz sahab,

How do I not grieve?

It was my intention to learn the secrets of your verses,

but I forgive you. I found only

darkness and a muddy sky. I forgive you.

The colour of your words is my inheritance.

This tongue is as sweet as it is strange to me.

However separated I might feel from the metaphors,

I feel as attached, united with, the tone of this language.

If Urdu is my beloved, it is also my rival.

I feel now a rift, a chasm with english too. 

Faiz sahab,

You are forgiven for it all.

Your poems perhaps found me the shore

of a new language in every vein of mine.

Found me a new face;

also made a stranger out of a neighbour, a shadow-sharer.

Faiz sahab,

my one hope is that this
may be a harmless miracle.

(Faiz sahab,

Gham kaise na karun?

Israr-e-ashar jaan ne ka tavqat tha

lekin maaf kiya. Mili sirf

tadiqi aur gida falak. Maaf kiya.

Aapke alfaazon ka ranjh meri virasat hai.

Zubaan jitni ajeeb hai, utni hi pyaari.

Muradi se jitna firaq hai, lahze se utna vasal.

Urdu mashuq hai toh raqib bhi.

Ab toh angrezi se bhi darar si lagti hai.

Faiz sahab,

aapko sab maaf kiya.

Aapki nazmon ne shayad har rag mai

nayi zubaan ka saahil dhoonda hai.

Naya chehra dhoonda hai.

Hamsaya ko paraya bhi banaya hai.

Faiz sahab,

aarzuu toh yahi hai
ki bezarar karamat ho.)