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Wednesday 31 October 2018

Singularity

On an average
It is said that
Humans take
Two hundred crore
Photos each day.

What astounds me is that
You are in one of them.
Only.

Only one.

Friday 19 October 2018

Wages of the Fall

It was raining leaves
by the roadside and

All she could think of were
the exorbitant expenses
Of the coming winter.

Sunday 14 October 2018

Somewhere in Between

There are days when I read poems
And then don't talk to people for months.

Then there are days
When I talk and don't read anything for months.

Somewhere in between
Lies the difference
Between the world and me.

Sunday 7 October 2018

A Poem was quite Easy Earlier


A translation of Nida Fazli's Poem 'Nazm Bahut Aasaan Thi Pehle'


A poem was quite easy earlier.
In front of the house
While tittuping over the branches of Peepal
Coming and going out from children’s bags
Fusing into the chirping of the birds
When a poem used to come to my house,
It used to write itself complete
Swiftly with my pen.

Everything has changed now.
From the narrow crossroads
Broad routes have erupted out.
New markets have gulped down
Old lanes and mohallas.
Between me and the poem
is a distance of miles.
And in between these miles
Somewhere suddenly
A bomb explodes.
Sleeping babies are slayed
inside the wombs of their mothers.
Religion and Politics both
Prattle new slogans.
From many cities
Innumerable countries
Whenever a poem walks into my house
It gets so tired that
It leaves the pages on my writing table
completely blank,
then resigns for the footpath
And sleeps in the eyes
Of the city’s oldest person
Like tears.

Wednesday 19 September 2018

On Turning 30

A wise man once said
that the truth about life
is making it to thirty or fifty
without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

Unless people do the shooting for you
Was the part he skipped.
That's another truth about life.

Thursday 13 September 2018

In Arabic

Whenever we have a toothache
Abuji writes invisible duas in Arabic
With his broken finger
On our cheeks
As if we are pages.

I wonder
How many broken fingers
Would be needed to write on Kashmir.

Or
Would it work on multitude of toothaches?

Saturday 8 September 2018

Empathy

Our pantry guy
talks to himself.
Smiles most of the times.
Blabbers
Makes sounds.
Shares jokes with himself.

Unlike me
He doesn't need
People, books, television, mobile phones
To fight loneliness.
He is his own company.

Sometimes
When I see him
Half dead
Snoring on the sofa
I wonder how much life he has taken in.
How much is still left.

Just the other day
To top it all
Someone joked:
Let him sleep full time
He's been working here since 20 years
On a temporary basis and
Lives alone in the suburbs.

How I interpreted that
Is still a mystery but
Since that day
I am able to understand all his self-incurred smiles and sounds.
I get all his jokes now on a regular basis.

It seems the poet was right after all
"the world has failed us both"

Monday 27 August 2018

Knuckle Cracking

It takes time
To learn the art of
Knuckle cracking.
A little too pressure and
The whole day is spent caressing the fingers.
Too less a pressure and you end up with nothing.
One has to learn the right amount.

It takes time
To learn the art of
Knuckle cracking

It takes time to learn that
There's still life inside.
It takes time to learn that
This dead wood body
Needs fire to crackle.

Saturday 25 August 2018

A John Doe Poem

Some call it a unicorn.
They are optimists.
Rest of them don't say anything at all.

A twenty-first century
Introvert poet
does not exist.

Wednesday 8 August 2018

The Architecture of Love

You often ask:
What are we in this 
architectonically trivial world of someone's?

Listen:
I am an open window
That creaks when moved
The frame of which has lost it color
is rough and bug ridden
With ant-houses at corners.

You
My love
Are its curtain
With disparate hand designs on it
Crafted with nothing but love
by a small scale factory worker
In the wee hours of rainy morning
Fluttering away from the frame and
Sometimes coming too close.

Our love is someone's favourite spot
To forget the world.

We are that insignificant.

Monday 6 August 2018

CASO

Hegel would understand it better.
The example I mean
of the conflation
of the political and the personal.

My mom calls me on my phone
and a military man picks up.

Buy milk for home
He says.
How many packets
I ask.

He doesn't reply.

Friday 3 August 2018

Hardwork

We had thought "love you"
Would be replaced by "go to hell"
We'd thought "I'll never leave you"
Would be replaced by "this is not going anywhere"
We'd thought "we are so similar"
Would be replaced by "why am I with you?"
We'd thought
One of us would forget to call each other
At least for a day.
We'd thought one of us
Would some year by mistake forget each other's birthday.

But nothing like that happened
Nothing ever went our way
All our plans kept failing.

Then one day someone
I don't even remember who
Out of the blue said
If love seems like hard-work
One should concentrate on the hard-work
Love can wait
That's its best quality.

And everything fell into place.

Tuesday 12 June 2018

Museum of Broken Relationships

What would you leave
In the Museum of Broken Relationships?
She enquires

Probably
Another Museum of Broken Relationships.

Nothing less.

Wednesday 23 May 2018

Notes on a Travelogue


We travel through each other
In this flat world
To discover ourselves.
At times bodies seem like beaches
One hasn't visited yet
But speculate somehow
That the sea would be waiting
For visitors to come
If not for the foam.

We are all travellers
Travelling with borrowed money
Trying to understand
The worth of our heels.

Tuesday 22 May 2018

Misquoted

Shakespeare said
Kashmir is a fiction held up to nature.

Voltaire said
If Kashmir did not exist it would've
Been necessary to invent it.

Nietzsche said
There are no kashmiris only interpretations.

We are
What we misquote.

Wednesday 2 May 2018

Don't

Don't read books.
Don't watch movies.
Don't travel.
Don't socialise.

If you miss someone
Don't do all this.

Stay alone
Waste time.

Weep.

Saturday 24 March 2018

Long Take

Something too real to be true!
So much beauty around.
Such scintillating scenes.

Sometimes
I wonder
Even God knows
How to make successful
Big budget movies.

At times
However
The CGI sets don't work
The green walls come down
And blood creeps in.

Tuesday 13 February 2018

For Alejandro Zambra

Sometimes
I feel
As if
You and me are
Inside this enormous Zambra novel
(Enormous obviously being a pun here)
Where I'm busy pruning the bonsai
While waiting for you to come back from your art class.

This however happens sometimes only.

Rest of the times
We are inside this world.