Love in the backyard

Love could have been all those things

that we had planned

Years back when we planted the garden on my backyard

Eyes,smiles,laughter,voices had strolled hand in hand

Brushing arms and wombs

Night caressing the happiness that tingled infected and young

Growing thick in the green curls of leaves and breeze

The rain whispered and hissed

Helplessly melting in the belly of flowers 

Today when I cross the kitchen 

I miss the garden 

Behind the plush curtains 

bought from the neighbourhood sale 

The price seemed just right

Like chopped dreams

Like my sorted and tentative

I do not know if I have begun to accept 

The disquiet of things, dust fastened and hazed 

Lying in the pulpy pages of beseeching springtime 

Sprawling in books 

some men like you and women like me 

Unnerving elephantine and winged

Love could have been all those things 

That I let go when I miss the garden 

Which we planted in my backyard

Forests grow and die

Now I have begun to disappoint you 

Unremittingly so 

I no more play the perfect girl

No more do i shudder inside perfect smiles

Where i dissembled and died

I have perfected this art of dying 

Without you ever noticing my deaths

How many times I died and heard voices whispering over my grave 

To be woken up by mornings and birds that cry

I do not know what frightens you more

My beaked shrill 

Or the memory of loyalty that you will behold no more

Now that you too have begun to disappoint me

Let us practice abandonment 

from the sound of calm footsteps that fade and return

Till forests grow and die

They killed him

They killed him.
Tonight he will be lying in the morgue
Like so many anonymous men
Who had no history
No relatives
No friends
No men who were kind
I heard they killed him in the evening
He was wandering naked in the streets
Trying to enter shops and begging for alms.
Each of them threw him out
The restaurants across the street where they serve meatballs to the rich
And the restaurant just beside it Where the band comes alive at night
And the traffic police just across the street whose pockets are full of bribes
They eat money these days
They have desolate rooms in their homes
Full of conscience that money can buy.
They murder significance
insignificance and echoes of remembrance,
They offer empathy and syphilis
They have mastered the art to be blind
Rolling in my bed tonight
I promised myself there will be no sleepless nights
The CCTV camera was wide awake
It registers fucks, tenderness,humorous voices and cruelty.
No, we do not rise
No one checks cameras
No one sees homeless madmen with amiable eyes
I heard the shopkeepers beat him black and blue
When he lay whimpering on the road
the city ran by
Spaced with apathy and the human fear of being hassled
But then who killed him?
Everybody has that coward in their bellies
Weeping their weakness and growing shrill mountains in their minds
I didn't kill him
I wanted to hurt the men who hurt him
I had run down when I heard the story
There were closed shops unprecedented emotions,
silent trees and misty darkness.
An upraised situation has been knocked into a morgue
Somewhere in some part of the city
to forgetfulness
There will be no sleepless nights
Why is it then I weep for madmen, long nights,and faithful ghosts?
My childhood beliefs have been torn down
I know the real is different from poems
And poems are catharsis
And we are all there lying across the city
Tossing and turning tonight
And we are all so lonesome
Smashed by the palpable, the cruel and the absurd.

Nobody knows about the pit that's been dug

The night was shining in the glass
Perhaps it was dreading extinction
She is beginning to know of nights
that bloom and creep through key holes
pools around her bed
even forgets to fade when mornings come early

Incredible as it may seem
she was carrying nights all dappled in folds
to work, to concerts and 9 o'clock dinners
Shrill chimes hung so gladly to the languid hours and lurking thoughts
that often came wafting amidst sounds and sights
Don't permit the thought, she would whisper silently
But knowing eyes grazed beneath her day

The library would remind her of the sparrow by the window
mornings brought
She and he had shared her mind and pleasant pastures
She had been this fool travelling to stories of tender men, airy castles,
heartbreaks, a white chapel and to freshly poured odes.
They had both been uplifted by whims and dreams.
The sparrow still flies and feeds her chicks.

Who knew cassock clad Bishops can roll out nights?
She thought they held hymns, mornings and minds
The night took them all
even the morning wind that floated in her soul
The faith that held an alter
preached to cramped silence,the Sunday heaves and silent seats
Resting on Madonna's breast is that beautiful baby boy
Even Mary had these nights but a saviour came by
Incredible as it may seem
there are tiny graves in the neighbouring cemetery
Nobody knows of a pit that's been dug.
Night's been resting in it.
The same night that pooled around her bed.

Flights

I want you to sing to the aged bird
In me I shelter skeleton and beliefs
You promised me
You will take me kite flying with the neighbourhood boys
Boys that glisten of dust and sand
with sparkling eyes
I want to be a girl of breeze and happy scars
My eyes must acquire landslides when the game ends
So that back home
My little bruises must invoke memories
of multitudinous flights

Till the end

Then you could have loved me
Like I love you
With all your introversion
With all that would murmur
Faithful and endless
I wish you could have loved me like flights of fantasy
Worldless and drowned in the insignificant darkness of dreams
I wish we bonded around impure darkness
and tombs that birth wild flowers and blades

I wish you could have just loved me a little
I would have resisted all your women and notions of love
I would have rinsed all that's raised and decomposed
I would have smothered all those wounded  nights and their shadows in closets unknown
I would have wandered in ignorance
To die of wizened love

If only you loved me
Like I love you
We could have played at coming and going
Till the end