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"