Incense

I remember that even three days after you left me
I could smell you in the indents of my finger tips
I tried rubbing cumin to let you off,
But each time the pungent salt at the back of my tongue hit me
You filled me up like an aftertaste
My skin was several thousand oysters
Waiting to be beaten open with rocks
Until their shells split open to reveal beads of your
Incense.

When Mum and I were discussing
What colour I wanted my room
I told her I didn't need to see my room to know
I offered to sit surrounded by pails
Of fresh paint and dip my fingers thickly
Into blood and lavender and mint and feel them and see them
And smell that they smell all the same
I told her I needed to smell to know
So I asked her if my new room could be a rainbow.

I sometimes think of oysters being sold in markets and how
They carry their sea-smell with them
Laden inside the fish-smell, the blood-smell,
the smell of rust and sun and salt and iron as
Sediments in fate lines.
I am that oyster and every time I am offered for barter
I smell you and remember where I was most at home.

Smell is the strongest sense.
I could smell thunder before I could see it or hear it.
I remember smelling the heat come off of the barks of trees
And flooding away, blackening the water
The steam came off the rocky roads
And I shut the windows and opened my cupboard

I found a vial of perfume, unnamed and purpled with
Its own incense
I broke it out on my wrist and felt it slip into me like
My skin was bottling it up in tiny vials
And my wrists had learnt how to breathe
I called the vestiges of your number
I still remember and told the lady who insisted you did not exist,
'I have found the sea.'

Collective Poetry Reading

My mum cut up onions in the air-conditioned room in the morning
Because she said
it was too hot to cry alone
I was sitting in a corner, waiting for the poem to happen
Onions happened first.

After she left, the onion lingered
Entering crevices I wish were left uninterrupted and challenging me to split open
Like onion was mocking at my poetry.

The wounding is inevitable

I hope you remember that I was wearing a green t-shirt
And maroon tracks and they didn't synchronize
Which tells you what thought I put into my effortlessness.

Put down the phone when I read out self-authored autobiographies and diary entries
And create your own biography  of me and then when we trace
Lines back and forth to each other
Through crackling low connectivity,
I'll watch your name pop up on Google Documents, yellow halo-ed
Erasing my lines, replacing them with your version of mine.

I hope you are archiving this.

It shakes me up, this bracketing off of
Parts we love,
This common touch we have  learned to find in the same lines
The way we identify with a common sense of tearing- up
Tearing apart.

I heard of this play in Normandy
Where audiences pay to watch a woman
Turn on her stomach on a bed on a stage and they wait
Until she cries
The show runs full house and after a point
No one knows who is crying or why they are crying or if
Crying comes with purpose
Smiling comes best without purpose
I bet they leave, their top hats and gloves and walking sticks to match,
Wiping tears from the corners of their eyes.

Poetry reading is its own kind of poetry writing
The immortality isn't in the poet
It is in the flesh wound we carry in our hearts
And her binary fission.

Each time I have lain wounded in battle
Your battle wounds have synchronized to tear up in that very instance,
With the time difference of a text message
And two blue marks
What does it tell you about me, that I want to see you
Hurt how I was, where I was.
What does it tell you about you,
That you want to be hurt
How I was, where I was.

We finger books and leave them marked
In a wild attempt towards immortality
To hope the broken parts repeatedly break in history.
I like dog eared books because have some faith, goddamn you,
Have some faith that I'll loyally find you and
I'll patiently wait until you come back
And get excited when I see
That you have offered me a bone to pick,
Twin Crease Marks.

At some point, when you wait outside
I'll want to open the door and let you in and offer
Tea and cake like your mother used to.
I'll play out our inside joke inside because the doorknob will be broken
because the wind will want not let me
Open
Up
will you wait until I find a book thin enough to slide under the door?

We have lamented that books of poetry
are so expensive and so thin
they are the perfect size
to let you get in.

How It Was And Who We Were

When I did not know that you were sleeping
I imagined you breathing shallow dragon dust
Outside on the door.
Knock, I've told you,
Knock,
I'll let you in.

Here the gates are wrought of iron and
If we built this story a few centuries ago
The Dragon would have melted it And you would have walked over the hot, steaming, mess, triumphant.
You would have walked across two cities, ridden horseback
And they scars and welts that the journey gave you
Would be implied.
That would be your greatness, that is how our story would end.

Here, the gates are wrought of plastic curtains
And you need to blow to make them move,
You don't have to rap your fingers
Against the shadow dance it creates on the floor
But you are the dragon anyway.
You want to some things to catch fire
Anyway.

The hot steaming mess is implied
The scars and welts on your calves and thighs
And ring fingers are for me to find
But when I open you up against the desk
And attempt to find meaning in your
Sweet savage lines,
These are the parts I will bracket off
And mark in neat letters
'f-o-r-e-s-h-a-d-o-w-i-n-g'.

It will never matter how we lived
And how inwardly our dungeons are placed
Or that we do not need fences in this city
When it will be remembered,
The polite knocks will be written over
In a hot, steaming mess.

It's Not Even Been a Year. It Feels Like Forever.

Something about 10:30 PM,
Standing in a towel watching water dry off
The edges of pineapple eyed hair ,
Scrolling up and down, changing keywords asking Google
How does it feel?
How does it *feel*?
Lay the emphasis on any of those four words,
The keywords are the same.

How do I save the Tea Like Goldilocks Likes It
That created temporary testimonies:
The graffiti of our presence
In Khuranaji's mostly alone spaces?
How do I explain I like the irregularity of your teeth
Because I guess your parents got prescient enough
To see that teeth help make words and they
Didn't want to let your words muffle even temporarily.
You get your spirit from them.

How do I explain, with syntactic perfection, that
I only ever captured you laughing
Because I'd like you made permanent like that.
(Except do you see
the irony in capturing)

How do I explain we've built history on history when we've written word on word on word
In classes
And I never throw notebooks away
But I hope to make paper planes out of those pages
Because why must something so beautiful not see the light of the day?

That day, we wanted the twilight to remain.
Except it isn't really THAT day,
Because there have been so many of them.

Penumbra

You send me photos of irises enlarged
I see points of absences
And slipping light and
that is how I have learnt myself

The light has fallen in so many shapes
Father offering water to the sun

Practically naked

The light has split into fingers and lit
Up your skin marking all the
Off-limit places.

I wrote you little poems on postcards
In my head
I imagined little bullets
In your head
Either way I wanted
The same response anyway.

Practically naked

Reflections where our eyes meet, Recognising flecks of desperation
'Do you wear lenses
Your eyes reflect too much:

Practically naked'

Of course I broke glasses and pushed little cups off
China when no one else was looking
Of course I wanted light to shine
And break against my feet
Because no one was looking
Of course I made little ceremonies

Of Leaving blankets
Blanketed in mirror shards
Because that is how we will remain
Limb on limb,
Practically naked

And yes the light on the wall
Is the trophy I award myself
Because the only other time I ever see light splitting like that
Is in reverse,
Reflecting chain-link fences

And how do you unbecome?

I am trying to make
The last verse
The worst
Happen.

This is the moment
That we capture the sky
This is the moment
We will later eulogize:
sky
Fell into tatters put on a strip show maybe the sky isn't
All about light.

Mapping the Self: Three Points Around Which I Walked to Understand Myself Better

1. Graffiti, Zamrudpur (picture above)

Do you know what a quarter is? 

Currency, ek chauthai, part of a grapefruit 

-Mausumbi- 

Haan malum hai. 

Papa ke paan ke dokaan ke bagal mein raat mein bolte Hain 

'Quarter, quarter' 

Sniggers from four corners

This is a joke created out of the spaces 

Of why they would always sit opposite me, 

Not next to me. 

An eight year old learnt fractions with alcohol quantities

An eighteen year old spelled out

In the retreat of the evening

How he thought it was 

what he thought I was 

When I didn't know what they were talking about 

when they said knowingly,

Papa ke paan ke dokaan ke bagal mein raat mein bolte Hain 

'Quarter, quarter'. 

*

2. The Waxing Lady's Tale, GK1

She's seen her legs the way you wouldn't imagine them.

If you've crossed LSR in February there are flowers that fade 

Come April 

After the flower has been seen.

She is the gardener. 

Pull, tug, tear down, border off, landscape 

Limit wilderness to where you might find it beautiful enough to award it a token of appreciation:

A cup, for example. 

Drink her in slow, 

Because she spent three hours on achieving that glow 

That you're going to give a cursory glance to. 

She's doing it for a filter less selfie 

That she's going to drown in filter anyway 

(Even the golden honey instafair instaremoval nohairdontcare can says 

Valencia)

But just so you know 

She touched her there and there and went down south 

To strip down the Amazon basin

Before you even found your Brazil. 

The difference is, she stopped to question 

Why the basin had rivulets in red 

And knows enough about blades To say 

'Ma'am, aage se mat kariyega.

Yeh toh bada dark ho gaya.' 

*

3. Cosmetic Surgery, Amar Colony 

I bought Whisper 

She decided to stay free 

By choosing an alternative for (a) good foundation-

What you must skip on a menu card

But pause and consider in a cosmetics shop-

Soufflé. 

Each poster said natural, natural, natural 

I remember the ice cream company 

and vanilla and chocolate and 

Placing my arm on my friend's and 

Making chocolate and vanilla ice cream, naturally. 

Woman, subtle woman, smart woman, cool woman, 

saleswoman,

Considerate enough to stop and look from friend to me 

To consider skin colour before 

Choosing what was an appropriate foundation. 

Naturally. 

Vanilla soufflé on skin, 

mixing so perfectly that you

wouldn't even know it was there.

But it was. 

The foundation was always there. 

When asked what was better: 

a fair or a natural foundation, 

She said, 

'Natural, naturally. 

You have to make the foundation look natural.'

Two Days

(For 21/2/16)

Today was a really good day. I mean it. I went around the LSR Campus taking photos as an evidence of spring happening. Later, I explained spring happening to a friend of mine who can't see. Photographs aren't evidence enough, so I made her feel the flowers in the pictures- those whose names I knew. I also told her about my favourite flower, camellia. They break really easily.

Last year, after reading The Narrow Road To the Deep North before boards, a friend of mine and I had become obsessed with the flower. We had a camellia bush in school, which shed flowers everyday, as though to incentivize me to not leave. I gave a flower to everyone I loved then. They break really easily.

My friend promised me she'd tell me when the bush bloomed again.

I got this today.

So I wrote this:

Two Days.

30/3/15
When I offer you camellias,
Hold them like you would hold
yourself
When in the absolute fear of breaking.
Camellias break with touch,
And I give them to you as a metaphor for
Bigger Things
They will come apart, whorl by whorl
But on early mornings, in the middle of boards,
They are drops of blood scattered on
mirrors that ripple with a touch,
The ground rippling with the need
To hold something as delicate as a camellia,
Resorting to its oldest trick:
Gravity.

If impossible is an absolute
And it is impossible to preserve a camellia,
Tell me you'll love me absolutely.

21/2/16
How do you explain colours to someone who is blind?
You describe.
Draw shut your wrist, I'll colour it red with my fingers
Sketching circles with the pad of my thumbs
Can you feel it? My delicate camellia?
The sun looks like this, like my Palm opening into your Palm
The world may feel blue, but it is green,
Green as in you can walk uninhibited,
Green as in the earth opened its Palm into the Sun.
And that's a bougainvillea that I have put against your cheek
It feels like leaves, but I bet you haven't felt leaves
On your cheek at least.
Pinecones are prayer-shaped, like my prayer on top of yours
And the serrations of our fingers
Is what our prayers have to offer.

Think innocence for light,
Think fifteen and in love for the first time.
Think passion for deep,
Think fifteen and out of love for the first time.
Think light and dark heart-shaped drops
Which will come apart
Whorl by whorl.
Can you see it? My delicate camellia?