Real imagination

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Hurting things.

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I peel oranges for the smell of hunger to keep us alive. You cut your nails over them because you don't want to snag on edgy things. Show me how many distances have passed between us by exchanging glances like a misplaced ellipse in the stanza of our lives. These haunting smokes, bringing the worst out of us. These cigarette ends glow garish red before we press them against the broken porcelains. Should we be thankful to god just because few things chose to break outside of us? Our lovely daughter. Our lovely daughter who runs across her dark room holds the first object her hands meet. Her head thrown back, her neck swinging like an axe giving mouthwash to a log, her laughter, a biography of coughs. Look at her, her waist swirling violently as if she wants to tear apart the night and wrap it around the orbit of her favourite orange gown. She stands in the doorframe to face us. To erase us. You witness a few birds throwing themselves against our cold window glass. Smashed to pieces. How badly they want to come inside. Enter us before our daughter rubs her body into the sky. Dear me, what a sparrow must have gone through to drop her freedom in exchange for a survival like this?

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It's like you are writing an apology for the future. It's like you have decided not to be gentle because seasons refused to change when you popped out balloons in the search of Dylan Thomas. It's like you are the violence of the frying pan smashed against your chest. It's like you are standing over the top of a police van gripping a plastic gun and shooting out bottles in your head. It's like you are biking with your mother on the opposite side of the road to defeat patriarchy. It's like you are levitating your exes to crucify them with stars. It's like you are rolling over the mud to wash your undergarments. It's like you are an old record leaking Leonard Cohen on the wedding day. It's like you are the Nike shorts revealing snake tattoos on the thigh. It's like you are the sweat giving birth to a 500 pound horse. It's like you are the stubborn hair trapped in the bathtub drain. It's like you are the wild mushroom making sickness into a festival. It's like you are the toothpick making love to the goat meat. It's like you are the white rabbit biting the magician's ear to teach him, 'anything that is made to hide, bites.' It's like your daughter will never write anything back to you.

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YQ is my unfinished home and may be every unfinished thing is a collection of a few coughs, a failed cure and a bookshelf named after Keats.


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To cut a mango into 13 slices and wonder why no two of them look alike. To assemble them on a tray and wonder why it is the tiniest yellow shawl. With the fork in my mouth, I want to believe the first person who saw the moving cloud could foresee the future. But he held back what he chose to reveal.

To complain about the dead is as easy as forgiving the living ones. My grandfather never talked with me much. He never told me about rain. But he taught me how to break a brick with a palm. And he could spill a lie easily like straining a muscle in an exercise. He did that to protect himself. And boy, didn't he need protection. Once he took a piece of clothing with him and didn't come out of his room the whole night. Perhaps, he was flexing his neck.

What's the use of another love poem this July? Aren't you sick of them? Or am I sick for them? To be besotted with the breeze even if they rip apart my Health Insurance Policy. I mean why? Who decides to open windows? When did l confess your eyes are claiming to be the godfather to all the Lightning bugs? When did l vision a shawl blowing in the wind, wrapped around your throat, like a set of 12 pigeons, giggling, aiming at the sky?

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How much we rebelled for our handmade freedoms and dared to cut only our sleeves as we still needed fingers to blame someone else for our future wreckage. And thus our ancestors pointed at the tree under which they hid their treasures. But all we wanted was a sovereign, not anything shining. Not their gold. Nothing buried because our manicured nails didn't believe in healing by digging. Did we plan to learn this from our women who taught us if we keep praying to the wrong gods, our eyes become stones? Did we stretch our map to be a country where they ran to the hillside carrying salts inside their ankles, crushing ants under their feet and plucking out exotic flowers and pointed twigs to create a potion for their dying men who lost their hair to the radioactive villains living inside their veins? Oh the irony. But look at us now, falling in love to climb up the ladder of self-assurance. Aren't we thirsty monsters sucking the glue between the pole and the missing-person notice? This person is a planet blowing sand into our faces to make sure we are not ghosts, not yet. Melting bitumen on roads, this mad weather, this bad weather, whipping leather, snatching away the sky from birds.

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It was magical. It was beautiful. It was a visual wave of Coldplay's Yellow. It was the bruised knees lifting the sword with drooling delight. It was John Wick partying all night. It was the organic blush of the eyes while reading three worded letters. It was me floating in the distance of celebration that outlasts the time of joy. It was a grammar teacher poking elbows at the blackboard to slice open all the bubbles of future heartbreaks. It was a rugby match inside the museum of the sleeping body. It was an honest anarchy of the blood veins. It was a notorious jungle tree blowing away the clothes of a scandalous affair. It was a water filled jar splashing 'I'll be damned' to the sand of Thar. It was the laughter of my throat. It was fathers slugging beer and dancing in the boat. It was mothers smoking matchsticks to discuss fire that caused revolution in the Ice Age. It was the desire to defeat exhaustion of the rage. It was the madness of a sunflower that didn't know what to do with the longings of the sun. It was the recalibration of the cheat day. It was the softest declaration I-told-you-so in the midnight call making its way.

It was the heart finally being just a heart.

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You challenge the cat to a staring contest in summer. You give away your pen to strangers in the bank with a smiling face that says, "please don't return." You make curd in a steel tiffin and feel you have cheated bournvita. You check instagram just to make sure no one has liked your post. You think the only difference between stars and flowers is: one is the proper way to decay and the other knows the proper way to forgive. You are afraid of trucks sprinting at full speed. You are afraid that everything will work out in the end. You do pushups to punish your heart. You like to whistle carrying an empty grocery cart. You love babies because you are sure they won't remember you. You don't know what happens on a prom night. You suck at writing breathtaking poems. You twirl your hair to think straight. You make paper boats and ask your mother what it takes to last just one rain. You suck in oxygen before a group photo shoot. You are hellbent to never make a fist to teach your child the number of days in a month. You pretend to shut your eyes when anyone enters your room. You hate umbrellas. You don't hurt anyone twice a week. But then you kissed a girl and cried the whole summer.

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My words, l abandoned them for the sake of stubbornness and they failed to pray to me in return. Fair play. But look at the weather today, flushing with fragments of cold breeze, pollen grains, spheres of rain, sparrows, dog's whiskers and everything that can be smashed against the windshield. I'm sitting on a government bench. A set of two wooden planks which could have been instead used to nail Jesus on the Church wall before he breaks free to free those men who don't cry when they are dragged by their long filthy hair to a cage. A giant shiwalik avatar and the sun behind me, a mango tree in front of me, and I want to spill the secret about everything. Like that hill is the fucked-up nose of a priest who wanted his blind son to smell the sky. Like your memories jingle inside those leaves and my shadow is a disfigured chlorophyll beneath that tree. My creation is in your fall. 200 metres away in an empty playfield, a child on his own, bends down to tie his red shoes. To die eight times and still discard human loneliness...what a tragic coward cat is. Sorry, l must go now. Okay? Convince me that rain falling down and my father sleeping on the terrace are two different things.

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