Cold Tea

Cold tea for me despite every convention.

Cold tea leaves tell you the future in suspension.

Cold tea, born in the cup, dies in the microwave,

Gets resurrected and awaits its ascension.

Cold tea, with milk skin cobwebs to choke on makes me

Ditch milk if only to make it to my pension.

Cold tea, stale gossip, always the last one to know.

No notification, no DM, no mention.

Cold tea, old tea, like ardour taken for granted,

A burnt-out argument in the fourth dimension.

Cold tea, not iced tea, just room temperature and bland.

Like Sameer's words, not deserving much attention.

Hope

I let hope grow in my heart.

This hope concealed from me its start

And made you into something odd,

Some demigoddess or demigod.

It made me think you'd right my wrongs

And smith my teardrops into songs.

But, like a tragedy, I missed

The mark and so I kissed

This image I have made of you

Farewell and flung it far from view.

For hope, when grown with furtive seed,

Yields bitter fruit. It is a weed.

Special

As I sit in this coffee shop, I can’t help but look. I look at the smudges and sticky rings on the tables and counters. I look at the yellow tube lights and smile at the warm glow they give off. I look at the month’s specials scrawled in a large, legible, loopy hand on the chalkboard. I wonder who takes the time to make that sign.

I picture a young, underpaid barista clocking in for an early shift. It’s her job to open the store, turn on all the lights, rearrange the chairs, turn on the coffee machine, perhaps. She wipes everything down with a moist sponge, erasing what little dust would have coated the furniture overnight. Is she the one who draws the vines and flower petals that frame the day’s specials?

I picture her stretching to draw the higher parts of the image, juggling sticks of chalk, each one a different hue. In one hand, she holds a glossy flyer that lists the specials of the month. She looks down, wrinkles her brow, and then focuses on the board. She pauses to imagine what the final product would look like. The first time the manager asked her to do it, she had been given an outline and told to memorise it. At first, she had to keep glancing at it to make sure she wasn’t deviating from the prescribed design. She needn’t have bothered. Her manager never noticed her mistakes except for this one time when she’d lost the pink chalk. She decided to use blue instead for the vague, unidentifiable berries that grew on the vines just above the large capital “S” in “Specials”. Her manager had stared at the board for a few seconds, frowning—then turned and gave her a hard stare, saying nothing. She apologized, staring at her shoelaces the whole time, and got a curt nod in response. And that was it. Still, she was a people-pleaser. She made sure never to repeat the same mistake twice.

When she quit her job because her family was moving out of the city, she had expected some kind of goodbye. Nothing much, but at least some kind of acknowledgement. All she received were bored, half-distracted instructions to teach her replacement how to write the specials on the board.

In the New Year

The leaves of fresh progress grow green in the new year.

The flabby folds of dreams grow lean in the new year.

 

My handwriting sticks together at winter’s end.

Its ample curves are so obscene in the new year.

 

Streams of black ink flow down politicians’ brows.

How shamelessly they shine and preen in the new year!

 

Demagogues turned real estate agents burn down mosques

And squat on peacock thrones, serene in the new year.

 

The émigré turns to Bharat like it’s Mecca.

The slums he remembers are clean in the new year.

 

All my socks have holes as big as exercise shoes.

I swear, such voids will not be seen in the new year.

 

Metacognitive pundits meditate out loud.

They count breaths in cups of caffeine in the new year.

 

Aged Merlin, they say you live life in reverse.

Tell me, where have your whiskers been in the new year?

 

My selfish heart saw need and looked the other way.

It will beat for all now…I mean… in the new year!

 

The next revolution will not be televised.

It will be streamed on your phone screen in the new year.

 

The dove flies in circles in its gilded birdcage.

Even Chaplin turns into Wayne in the new year.

 

Sameer—come, come—you must turn over a new leaf!

Your glasses must boast a new sheen in the new year.

Image

Like watercolours fading with time,

My imagery has dried up.

The sights and sounds of my imagination

Are closed for repairs.

Now, only stillness remains--

Like light shining from an old photograph

That you pinned to my corkboard

Before you were gone.

Hard Water

Hard water makes my hair lose its natural shine.

Its curls, like tendrils on the vine,

become like straw that crunches as I comb

the kinks out, hurl them out to roam

the granite floor like punctuation

or bored bits of annotation

drifting off my page until,

as doodles, they begin to spill

and pool upon the granite floor

until, like some industrial shore,

my doodles lap my toes like dogs.

Obese, they wheeze like feral hogs,

Gilette spines gleaming--fevered dream

that haunts me even as the gleam

of light inside my pupil pulses,

keeping time with my impulses.

This is what hard water does:

Replaces locks with lifeless fuzz.

Five-Minute Poem

Five-minute poem, your tyranny of time

Demands I make every consecutive line rhyme.

In the snowstorm of composition, tiny ants take a trek—

Flotsam-jetsam rising slowly from my imagination’s wreck.

 

The warmth of the central heating is a muffler on my arm—

Incongruous, mysterious, doing less good than harm—

And yet I tied it myself in my turtleneck sweater

To make the suffocation of paranoid window-shopping better.

 

Leach from my bones every crystal of salt!

Don’t blame me for the taste; it isn’t my fault

That in my serene body, not a salty bone lies;

The soil will be fertile upon my demise.

Ghazal by and for Kartik

Man, I feel like a cat: cold.

Don't want to be no bat cold. 

The purpose of meaning is trying.

Please assist Matt Cold. 

I broke up with her on her birthday.

She told me, "Man, you didn't need to be that cold."

I overthrew the King but have a poor memory for names.

My favourite musician is the great Nat Cold. 

I found the body of the martyr 

Upon which the populace spat cold. 

I found the ivory tower

In which the hunters sat cold. 

I wandered for years in search of religion.

I arrived at the steps of Angkor Wat cold. 

I played with my American breakfast.

I left that plateful of fat cold. 

The body arrived, before the doctor could yell,

"Get the defibrillator, stat!" cold. 

Kartik gifted Sameer this thread.

Had Sameer not stitched it into a hat? Cold.

Link

I thought of you today.

I wanted to send you a poem I found,

A poem about Googling yourself,

And about names.

With horror, I realised:

I had forgotten your name.

Has it been so long since last we spoke?

Have we met in silence but not looked up from our phones?

Have we passed each other on the street,

Locked in conversation 

With other friends and other lovers

In our lives?

I searched for you on my phone.

What can two thumbs type 

When searching for the forgotten?

Not where we first met,

Nor what you do for a living.

Just a surname,

And surnames are useless things

When the name that lives in our heart

Has slipped away 

When we weren't looking.

At last, I searched for other poems,

The words "podcast" 

Then "poetry" 

Then "poem" 

Then "here"

And there you were.

Our red thread was intangible,

But not unknowable--

A string of blue characters.

URL.

My Red

Red is the crystals of sugar that fall

From Sour Punk strands as I slide them out

Of their crinkly plastic wrapping.

You're my red, coating my fingers in you.

Red is lip balm, strawberry-flavoured, buttery smooth,

Shared between us with a kiss,

My lips still shiny after

Days have passed.

You're my red, your memory lingers on my lips.

Red is blood drawn from my lips 

By nibbling, nervous teeth.

Dry skin gives way, opening the floodgates

As that sharp, almost salty taste 

Dances on my teeth

And on my tongue.

You're my red, always there when I'm in pain.

Awe

I live in awe of the lightning storm.

White pillars, built by mad men,

Falling faster than Babel from

The marble firmament.

Explosions rock this tiny world

And suns are born to die in eye-blinks

Leaving behind some pale after-image--

A ghost that haunts your retinal wall.

I never cowered but tried to comfort

My dog as she would whimper

Deep beneath the divan in

The drawing room, poor thing, helpless.

So, I crawled in 

There beside her 

(I was smaller then than I was now)

And sought to hold her close to me.

She started, then she snarled;

A low growl to warn me off,

And silence as I crawled back out--

Her cave was not for sharing.

The rain came down in punctuations,

Sheets of commas, inverted, doubled--

The sky is quoting space and time

And I am witnessing

The birth of something new

Yet older than us all--

The bathing of the newborn Earth.

Emerging from the mud,

Scarred by spades and slick with tar,

It shivers and it gasps.

But babies are born despite their sighs.

And so go on forever

The lightning and the storm

And the Earth and the space between

And the suns and the babies,

But not my dog.

She died at two years old.

She stopped as the world moved on

In narrower ellipses...

When sleep protrudes beyond my eyes...

When sleep protrudes beyond my eyes,

It blurs the waking world I see.

It causes me to fantasize

And in the world, I cease to be

Much more than motes upon the breeze,

Some solar particles so small

They come and go just when they please

And no one notices at all.

This sleep, it makes me seem a fool.

It deadens all my words and wit.

It bids my fevered mind to cool.

I must confess, I'm glad that it

Is ever by my waking side,

A hand upon my shoulder blades

To call me when my day has died

And pull me from my empty grades.

To sleep has been a luxury

Not meant for you nor meant for me

But for the world to find its rest

In silence and in loneliness.

Hunger

The enzyme churns and flows; hunger

Hurts the one who knows hunger.

In weakness, spent, I lie here staring.

My battle's silent and my foe's hunger.

Pasta, pizza, mozzarella:

On rolling steel balls, temptation shows hunger. 

Summer's sun spurs spinal sweat.

As droplets fell, furious arose hunger. 

Sameer's brain is on power-saving mode.

This is as far as goes "Hunger".