Dear Chandra,

-

April is a thankless thanksgiving
of december in summers.
Scorched gloves welcome,
My arms are stones.
I have a green book
Like her~ she says rules are green
Like traffic lights. Good to go
No novel. No poem. No story.
I teach students spring and april.
Even fools too. To fools too.
I approach to teach poem only
To them who are in queue,
yet to see through my eyes
Their bags are full of garbage.
And all the dustbins are filled
With their innocence.

-

•Rat Race•

Everyone is gifted
Some get flowers
Some get thorns
And for some God
Left leaves on
Barren land—
A woman I saw the
Other day was gifted
With nothing;
God must have said
To her, while leaving
"I'm coming in a jiffy".

Not all flowers're fragrant always
Not all thorns prick always
Not all leaves fall in Autumn:
Their rat race doesn't end.
And that woman has flowers
and thorns and leaves on her bed
Of afternoon which fell from Pipal,
she has no palms to see
if God was really in hurry.

-

If I would have a balcony

-

Let us rewind this year before 2024
It is time to welcome the fresh year in 2024.

Lessons are like heavy fog of these days
You reach close and the picture is clear in 2024.

My wrist watch is changed but time is same
I hope titan will not tear in 2024.

Shards of unacceptence lying on my bed
decorate expected storms that I will hear in 2024.

How you thought life is equal to how it is
'This equation should make sense' in ear in 2024.

Why this? Why that? Will you stop asking khushbu?
You would have to make a journey without fear in 2024.

-

उसमें एक मकां देखा
बंद दरवाज़े जब देखे उसके
तो खिड़की से उसे शान से देखा।

-

Life was in chaos.
We never loved
We express it always
With the life
We live.

-

On a sheet of her grief
She is writing paragraphs
Of her parents—
Off shore they scolded her
About the brinjal she carried,

It's her innocence or mine?
Did I seem to her an inch part
Of her sheet?
Did she look into my eyes?
Did she read my sheet too?

-

Love without loving

Into the corner it all started
Where is the sapling
It grew up;
You have a corner
In your heart
I have a room to fit
Into that corner.

-

Faces

I met with my tired eyes
to their celebrated faces;
From a place they belong;
They looked like their faces.

-