recess

what madness stung
the hearts of boys,
sick with playing nice,

what thirst pressed heavy
on the bone thrilled them to
break a hundred homes,
cackling in delight?

the bees are dying, boys - what madness
stings the hearts of men?

the kids want bollywood

The kids want Bollywood
something more North and more West

glittering cloth, bouncing bare hips
praise of lips
on national TV

not so much the kitha-dom of me

------

back home
they learn to point their toes,
the redde is lowered,
hatte bejewled,
mandiya straightened out.

they loosen their palms and step lightly.

we say, it's very indian, it's very western, it's pretty and also
it's very necessary.

the beravas have been dying a long time.

------

I work with a lady who says
give me just a flavour of "Senegalese"

I lean in with a stifled wince: I
crush me beneath a hundred cultures, I
grind me to spiced dust, scatter me.

------

no one knows that
I think of you

in my curled arms
draped across this curving waist,

seeking to see yourself
in half-dropped eyes,

find yourself on
half-laugh mouth.

I think of you in the
tharikita-kun-dath-

I even think of you in the
thah

your body rigid, you gasp me in.

------

#WhatItsLikeToBeADesiGirl
am I a desi girl?

#WhatItsLikeToBeADesiGirl
to be pressed into an even tone

------

the kids want Bollywood, I try to be what they want me to be

------

wish

I cannot smile with the other children;
I have no pearl-bright teeth.
I cannot sing along with them;
My heart does not agree.

Let me be with the shadow forms
who dance on naked feet.
Let me be myself, and glad,
on the dark periphery.

the quest, essentially.

If I find a stream
that tastes like mud and the restless feet
of naked people - if I find trees
old and wild, brooding over a shade no cunning eye has seen
and torn - if I find an unknown place,
would I find a space in me
unfilled, a bit of
mind still free?

after a dream where i couldn't say no

I was an
I-negated self:
my body the medium of
artists who
drove instruments into my legs,
fondled me like clay
then burnt me through to hold my shape
my voice driven to my gut, throat packed
with tracks - quiet laughs and
empty conversations with girls
I might have loved. and when my mouth
was visited by a fleshy worm
i kept it shut and closed my eyes
and lay me back
a statue of a lovely sleeping naked lady
or a lonely man's doll.

i had a dream where a woman demanded
"did he tell you the lie? did he tell you the worst lie?"

My growing up was no-less,
stripped to silence,
but it rattled in my belly and
rose like a gulping scream against a pillow
pressed to my face and now
I bellow! now
I wail! now I
guffaw!

some days the pebbles lying in the sun like dead fish, smoothened
down by the beating waves
will scorch the feet of those who walk on them

and one day we won't be pebbles but mountains, strong and firm and full of
echoes of words we could never say before.

Madame Popova

**Based on the life of Madame Alexe Popova, a serial killer for hire whose sympathies lay with wives of brutes. She committed some 300 murders of husbands in the span of 30 years, until she was reported by a repentant wife to the police, to whom she remorselessly confessed her crimes, claiming that she'd freed "unhappy wives from their tyrants." She was executed in 1909.**


Madame Popova heard, 
with heart breaking 
beneath a rigid-faced guise,
the woman before her who spoke
through tears, aching 
of bruises and swollen black eyes.

When her tale was all told, Madame Popova rose;
with pity and fury she said,
"No more will you hurt. Take courage, dear lady!
Your troubles will lie with the dead!"

Madame Popova invited the lady
and her "troubles" to an afternoon tea,
and into the cup of the latter 
she slipped 
several drops 
of arsenic.
Then the lady thanked god to be free!

Three hundred such incidents, three decades later,
blindfolded, face turned to the sky,
said Madame Popova, "I do not regret
the liberty of any tyrannized wife."


Thus, guiltless she passed from waking to rest.
The firing squad put a hole in her breast
and she breathed
not again; that was
the end
of the Madame Popova's life. 

To us!

where is our substance?

when we chant the cat is not
le chat n'est pas
el gato no es,
om for the religiously apathetic
cloistered in wide open-to-the-heavens skulls,

what matters lacks reference.

what matters, lacking reference?
all speech becomes
an emphatic stutter: N - N - N!!!

Does it come to this, friends,
this double-sided coin, our god, revolving
on a pedestal, winking
like a sleepy eye watching coals,

and us wrenching something to call poetry
from the nothing we call all,
from the - the - the -

Fridays

Friday nights, downtown
detonates with
the laughter of
women wobbling on heels
to fall head over
and there’s something defiant in
their hemlines high up the thigh,
skin glaring over necklines, assertion
in the tipsy stupidity of these
bodies between bodies
ricocheting. How tight
they’ve been wound up, I think,
how desperate their escape
every Friday night
like clockwork
on dynamite.

Woman Before the Rising Sun

Inspired by Woman Before the Rising Sun by Friedrich (1818-20)

The evening star is
an aphrodisiac of amour
de soi.
In its primal glow, the woman knows
her darkness, and her beauty, and
de-lights,
wings cra
cking through her marble shell, the
breaking of a spell
man-cast. She
lives. But too soon

owls roost; wisdom sleeps.
Today quits the cradle of humanity.
Morning casts its curse anew and
the woman is contorted into

expectation, a grotesque form
encased in stone, her heart

seems not

to beat. But

the woman merely sleeps.