‘Now, my dreams make sense and it bothers me’ & Other Poems

I once dreamt about an ant in glossy blue headphones,

ridiculous with its tongue stuck at the sun

and robbing the fridge of some leftovers

I chased a monster in an upside-down

that looked a lot like the bastard

that had said yes to my moaning cousin

A pageantry of don’ts would have me wet my bed

All night, I licked my shame dry

I was a cloud giving free advice and haircuts

to birds that don’t nest you

I thought, like the night sky,

some stars and a moon would complete me

but someone always turned the lights on

Once, my sister and I overboiled milk

That night I saw the milk people cry

Living in my grandfather’s fishy tank,

I grew jealous of bubbles that disappeared

sheepishly, yet everybody heard

the day’s gossip about five wooing four at the multiplication table

The first time I learned about immiscible mixtures

was the last time I stopped looking at chocolate chip cookies

as if they were made of only two things

Nothing was no longer what it appeared to be

I would pendulum my head on the edge of the crib,

lost in a reel of people who would later unlove me

My dreams wouldn’t ever be in frame,

they were always a little

too left

and

a

little

too

tall

The caterpillar sold his feet on a Friday

which is when my father does not

leave for office until it’s 3:00 p.m.

So, I stay homeless, cone my hair on waferhead

ungirl myself with a gawky walk into the can of worms

outside my college; chew on my lips

till the kiss disappears and I forget

the geometry of you,

and you

and you

And I forget the ease of it,

and it

and it

I look for comfort noise

in Anarkali Bazaar; her crowd unprepared for the truth

and my ripening ass;

at the bend of the street,

the fleshy man sells both veils and ogles,

bras and panties, hung like executed prisoners

in the middle of men who smell like egg salad

To me, the zebra crossing is as good

as dead skin cells; a seismic pressure tells me

someone, today, is going to resist my bargain

Plodding through beheaded mannequins

as old as dust and danger;

Flashy jewellery, I waste my time wisely

on jhumkas — tiny chandeliers if you aren’t familiar

My lover adores me in them — his Bollywood fantasy

delicately roaming in blinding sparks;

I take advantage of my feline movements,

to grab myself the most stylish pair of khussas

that will later wrinkle my toes; still, a fair trade –

This is the liveliest cesspool that goes unexplained

under the spell of its cheap Calvin Klein cologne shops

that would otherwise knock before entering the whorehouse

The tiny dhabas brewing tea in huge cooking pots

remind me of home

What if someone sees me uninhibited

in the land of posters that gawk with

their extravagant art and strong message

Scandalous

I take my jhumkas off and put them in my bag

Women they like to take care of

sit with their legs branched from the same cider — crooked

Women they like to nest with

hum holy anecdotes with their plain, thick lips

and ask for permission before their nipples can well up with lechery

Women they like to hold

drown into their marrows of endless love

Mistakes are the only babies she can neither birth nor rear

She is a lone house, in a dead-end street, silly to let him in

Then he locks all the doors and assumes he lives there now

Women they like to cherish are never ugly

They sell art from their bodies as if they could

replace false bones of beauty in other women

They dream at noon and then disappear

as sweat on their wide foreheads;

they love the sky even when she is not wet and open

The ones with eyes like little windows on a casket

grateful for what he lets her see

Women they like to romance are often the ones

who are either graves or wombs,

who are either new or dead,

the kind who can steal gold out of the devil’s teeth

and please his guilt of not knowing any better

Women they like to take care of

bribe shipwrecks

for wrought ocean antiques,

and loose themselves in the arms of pirates who promise more

and they listen — always listen

while docking the breathless ocean on their coastal breasts

Men like women who can take care

of several men in them

I blow on the dust in your lungs,

send careless seeds floating in your skin

to find your languid arms off to a sacred orgy —

bone-dry for belonging

A cart of women, axes and dreams,

creaks down your cobblestone spine

I hold onto them as if stairs to my dune lighthouse

Your smile, when you wash your face,

comes off in your hand

Your watchful laughter, a stray cat,

unsettles the sloth of alleys reeking of murder

Your chin, the wrong end of a tail,

clenches onto your wrinkles like bulbous roots

Your eyes, the shape of water,

pull onto your rowing lashes to wear their shore slippers

Maybe if I get home early one day,

I can catch you abandon the city lights at the harbour

when the night, in a rush, leaves her clothes on the horizon

You are the arm of an army deployed

to make better trades with the dead of the sea

Like a river jumping at every stone in its way

You learnt that ships shouldn’t make oceans their enemies

I leave the weather outside our door

And go silent at the convergence of my legs

like death when men quietly smoke in a corner

or like rain eating away at joy,

and try to read your manual on life that is in

easy handwriting but difficult jargon

I know you have to travel and speak to suns

conserving Juliet waters for bushfires

that invite themselves over when you’re gone too long

I think to myself, what will I do with all this youth

silting out of my pores

I, too, will learn to hold myself

just like you held everything but yourself