Two Poems

touchscream

 

diwali outside, & names smoke on my tongue

with the taste of burning diyas / in the TV’s

 

glitching glow the blue chips packet is passed

around, the remote has a coat of masala magic

 

from our fingers / with a touch, I harvest red

notification blossoms on green whatsapp boughs

 

watch the single tick split into two, then turn

blue under the dotted shade of typing, online

 

typing, last seen, typing… click on clickbaits

to be proven right / like a worm in the damp

 

soil of the internet, hooked onto a promise of

water, however salty, only to come undone in

 

an algorithm of annuli / scroll thumbnails on

pornsites, looking for something the shape of

 

us / but not clicking on it, guilted by what I am

looking for / when a rare torrent finds a firm

 

seed, I feel the world might just get along sharing

touchscreen dreams from broken echochambers

 

in the 3am heat, a hum through a flame of clapping

hands becomes a hymn / apocalyptically lit blue

 

packets of petrol pumps dot my dream like masala

magic fireflies alighting on the branches of a dark

 

country creeping north / I wake up shooting pebbles

across eddying shallows of my mind to roiling blues

 

of my body & trace its descent into the phosphorous

dark while being kneedeep in it myself / I wake up

 

under a blue blanket patterned with leaves fleshing

peach at the tips, burned by fireworks of yesterday

 

 

 

homecome

 

by morning, we arrive & the first thing I see

is the hand pipe planted in the front yard with

 

a hose running all the way to the toilet in the

back fitted with a new western / grandpa gets

 

up from his armchair & looks at us & sinks back

in the last of his skin holding onto his bones with

 

fingers around an inhaler / as he breathes into it

the capsules inside swirl like anchovies / it isn’t

 

as easy as it used to be, he says / we cousins sit in

silence & watch the justcleared sky with a harp of

 

smoke strung by a singing wingspan / come see me

if you want to see me alive for the last time, he had

 

said to his children & his children came, taking us

along / I find the last VHS of my parents’ marriage

 

unspooling quietly in a rotting closet but not

before they salvaged it onto a hard disk / but not

 

without pink & green glitchstains / dad cuts banana

leaves & aunt serves us fish in it that tastes more of

 

earth than water / a single strand of steelwool is then

a memory sitting down crosslegged on the winterfed

 

mosaic floor / a luxury to have made hunger patient

by habit / the children keep forgetting what they came

 

for / their father on his armchair in the verandah, inhaler

to his lips like the beedis in his youth, talking of spirits

 

that have stopped coming because they’re afraid of

electric lines / regrets his career in the electricity board

 

but collects his pension anyway / pointing at spots in the sky

where rainclouds snakecharm peacocks / it thunders like gods

 

cocked a gun into clouds & went bang / a dog takes cover

under a coconut / my cousin on his phone returns a smile

 

that sinks somewhere between us before ebbing again

at the first scent of his ringtone / it isn’t as easy as it

 

used to be / there will be ash on our shuttles as we

homecome / it is purple evening & we have to do

 

something / we shuffle a deck of cards stitched

together from two incomplete sets / a game of

 

donkey becomes the saltburdened mule with each

passing round / the smoke of the kerosene lamp

 

licks my grandma’s portraits in which she was

edited into a sari she never wore with a necklace

 

she never had / to show we already had what we

have gained / at night a whiff of the mat with its

 

fraying weave undoing the palmfuls of effort wished

into it / we resort to grandma’s old saris sunk in mothballs

 

of closeted air / the glitchstained TV is plugged out

to make way for the table fan/ from the stool it scans us

 

like a god’s judgment encrypted in a theory of winds

as we go to take a piss before we go to sleep / it thunders

 

but the tired sky only grumbles with ghosts clouded

in wrinkles / the toilet has a rope so that grandpa can get up

 

by himself / burnt firewood ash meets the ebbing of the water

all the way from the yard pipe / we boys can go in the woods

 

so we go to rain & come back wet / wait for the others to return

& look at grandma’s portrait with a garland shriveled to rosary

 

when everyone has returned we go to sleep under old saris

spirited with windy judgments / I dream of a dog with a spine

 

of sawdust walking through a dam of coconut shells to unbury

a VHS & some pills & a corpse of a fat lizard / by next morning

we depart, waving hands to erase some inevitable unseen shape