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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Museum of Broken Relationships

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

Probably
Another Museum of Broken Relationships.

Nothing less.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.