where is a poem?

I always thought a poem was in

the thick gold of afternoon sun

and how it fell briefly upon the world 

like a passing lover

I thought you could find a poem 

if you travelled outwards

or looked at the world

in the right

light

But recently I am coming 

to the conclusion that a poem

is a sturdy thing

it can survive all kinds of light

I think it lives 

in the fleshy heart of my mouth

the usual

the scent of you lingers on my skin for hours
after you leave. I have lain in bed with you so long
it feels like I am still there.

it is all about comfort, you assured me,
and we laughed a golden laughter
in a new room.

I am trying to write poetry that is wild
but well-contained, sharpened like a weapon,
extra metal all peeled off the sides
and scrubbed so well
I can see blue skies
reflected in silver.

love and poetry always find their place
on my tongue at the same time.

Rain Time

These days, the only measure
of time
is between when the rain stops
and starts again. My ear is always
waiting, it seems, for the murmur
of drizzle on mango leaves outside
my window, or the incessant gunshots
of hard rain thundering on the roof.

In the garden, the roses try not to drown.
The wind rushes through the bougainvillea,
the bottlebrush, the amaltas, the mango trees.
Plants fly off our terrace. The rain hits our house
like a war, and I cannot hear my parents talk.

The days are long and empty, and I never
wear a watch. Darkness gathers in all rooms.
A limp light fills and empties the house
as and when it wants. There is no measure
and no reason to measure, time collects
at the bottom of shallow pools on the road
and makes no demands. Time is off on
summer vacation, on monsoon break.

A strange freedom lines the air.
Sometimes the sun emerges suddenly
and everything outside becomes
muddy and gold

Defiant

It is strange to know that my grandmother

is still dead

even after all this time — just because

she died then. Like it is strange to know

that I will always

be woman

just because I am one.

It is not like I can imagine it any other way.

Yet sometimes it is hard to accept that this

is unending — this skin that is mined for meaning

until I am ready to shed it and hand it over

to the next man who looks.

If there is a wish, let it be this:

if I must be woman, let me

at least

be defiant.

Let me stand on the streets 

like a man — not graceless,

but with a swagger to

shake nations.

a quickie

as always, I write only
in desperate times.

when my literature teacher asks us
with a smirk - do you miss me
when I am not here? the right
answer (we learn partly) is that
we miss her even when she is
here. we miss each other all the time.

not in a purple or hazy or sentimental way,
although that too. she means it about words
and angles and reflections, how we look
to each other like flowers aching for sun,
but find nothing. no solace, no meaning.

another literature teacher from the past
was kinder. but she too told me, face
lined with compassion - no two people
are ever having the same conversation.
so i wonder - do we all always
just bounce off each other
like badly angled lighting
on a strange stage?

oh, words, words, words.
we hit and we miss, and hit again.
I give up trying to make sense
of conversations, and let my essay
breathe like a fresh puddle in rain,
all muddied and muddy. we are not
reaching anywhere today. nor tomorrow.

Sentences

After J. Estanislao Lopez

“All you can offer anyone suffering in the world is a sentence,
which is more often than not not enough” — of course, of course
this is true, but still it wrenches my gut every time, a rusted punch
right where it hurts. My mind is a strange ocean, and the more I learn
the deeper I swim. Language is the deep blue water I travel in:
there is no way of escaping it. This much I have learnt. My debts
to the world shall be paid in an economy of words, with sentences
I will build like monuments. It is all I have to my name, to my self.
The words create whole landscapes, and it is where I always return
to search for that most elusive dream in a human life: meaning.
The words are all I have to understand my small body and this
vast world, they are all I can offer to the small gods in prayer.
I want the words I write to be the shining lights of a harbour
for a stranger’s faltering boat, I want the words to carry me, to
save a drowning lover. The sentences I carve should be some kind
of solace, should be lamps of comfort for somebody, somewhere.
I have nothing else to give of myself but these strings of words.
O poet, do not tell me about my predestined failure in your words
sharpened like swords, do not reveal my helplessness to me
in the very language of my hope.

summer and a boy

the strange sound and light show of summer returning to the world: the sudden heat of sun on my arms, or a breeze that doesn't sting, or the rustling of new leaves, or the aching blue of the sky.

I think I am less afraid to write even if nobody is listening.

part of it has to do with smiling at strangers, and part of it has to do with the way I want to hold his hand when he trembles in his sleep. I am finding more and more poetry hidden in the lining of his skin, and something about his grace overwhelms me, like when he is driving so effortlessly, absentmindedly biting his lip, a faraway look in his ocean eyes.

he is listening even when he is not listening, and the beauty of it all makes me want to rejoice.

summer is coming, and winter did not choke me. I am running at the world with open arms, trying to love it harder and harder, trying to rediscover childish joy in whatever ways I can. the pebbles, the sunsets, the sea. it is all glorious.

a note after everything

the days are long and strange, and writing is strange because it sounds the same even though everything is different, the words are stale but the world is entirely new. it is a quieter world. joy is very quiet, like a mouse hiding somewhere in the house, its small and furry breath held. i think it is coming back though; i'd like to think i can hear its gentle scurryings in the walls sometimes.

i wrote a story in the second person so i could hold down my strange experience in my hands like a fluttering bird and pass it on to somebody else, so somebody else could keep the memory in their throats instead of me. although it does not bother me anymore, the memory has a silent existence in my life. i am trying to write fiction, and it is both new and very, very old: it feels as though i have always been writing fiction. as though the voice in my head is familiar with it, with creating from the images around me. does this mean i am a liar, a dreamer, or just confused?

theory threatens to bring down the house, yet U. and i manage somehow to keep this space of intimacy between us like a secret ball full of light, we are gentle with it and kind to it but we do not believe anymore that it will shatter like glass. perhaps it is thin and transparent, but it is not brittle. we whisper to each other in the mornings, and we are sad we cannot wake up next to each others shining backs and arms. yet the words make it okay, they travel through and sometimes we can meet, or even hear the silly lilt of each others voices on the phone, and it is enough. for some time. love is greedy, but it is so wise. i don't know if theory agrees; it scares me that theory cares only about breaking us but not about putting us back together. life must be, can only be, about putting us back together, about the vast project of tracing gold along our fractures and fissures and finding some way to stay whole despite all the breaking.

everything seems different, and some moments i find it hard to recognise myself, but also i have stopped trying. things are hurting less, but for some reason, right now, i am afraid of joy and joy is afraid of me (it skitters into holes in the ground, it falters at my footstep). i want to feel joy like a hurricane in the house rather than a secret presence. i do not want to be a ghost.

i think a lot, but i want also to privilege the mind of my body, i want to know what my ribs say to me when i am asleep. i want to feel the vast giddiness in my chest when i write poetry in the night, or read something glorious, or see a sunset of pink blossoms, or find a leaf the colour of sun. i am doing well after a workshop class on somatics and a talk by a fabulous trans activist about loving, hoping, growing, in ways that academics finds hard to say. i am trying to be less afraid of people, and smile at them widely, and think less, and talk more, and not hide. i think i am progressing. i am not a wonderful friend, but i am taking small steps: i am not stagnating.

perhaps everything will change again, a hundred times. i do not think i will remember this time sharply. it is a blurry time. my emotional landscape seems bland and unpredictable, not even very interesting to trace the curves of. perhaps i will be able to write good fiction. i hope i can write myself well.

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