Aesthetic Nativity

That was the day
My body capsized
Into the tumultuous sea of your love.

You ask me
How I remember?

That's the day
Poetry started swimming with words.

Life as a Darkroom

I hang your memories
On the string of emotions,
as if they are wet photographs.
Rescued from drowning
In the waters of oblivion.

In some,
You laugh like a mad person.
In some,
You weep like a mad person.
While as,
Some just hang there in your absence.

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.