Adolecent Refusing Fantasy

I don't need you tonight
Familiar matinee idol
To spring suddenly to life
From a two-dimensional glossy poster
And press yourselves into
My sterile dreams
To rake it up,stir its muddy depths
And then put me to a drugged sleep.
No, tonight let me be fully awake.
And listen to the roar of the great wind outside.
My small closed room
Where life stands still
like stagnant water.

Mortality through Text Message

The text message which flickers late at night
Waking me into a dazed world of alphabets.

It was him…
The untold words between us
Flood the short message
Peeping through the tiny window of the cell-phone

His words are all about his lover
Whom I have never met…
The imminent death which waits the corner
For all of us…but, for her, now.

I let the insistence of his message
Rest for the night.
Not wanting to hear the need behind it
Not knowing what to do if I hear it.

The Body Remembers

The body has ways of remembering.

While massaging oil into your scalp today,
That careless knock on the head
When you bent down yesterday
Resurfaces again,
Surprising you with the memory of a wound long forgotten.

Wiped out by daily life and nagging chores,
The endless cigerettes of loneliness and pain
That you lit long ago,
Breaks into cancerous nodes inside your tongue today
Surprising you with its ferocity in keeping your past.

Time for Myself

This ten minute gap between two rushed buses
Spent in a strange, untended park
Filled with middle-aged morning exercisers
And beedi-smoking homeless young men
of this vast, lonely city.

All Alone!

To go out into a vaccum,
When ringing phones are never picked up,
Where you order a single biriyani
To spend a friday night
And treat yourselves to a single chai in a crowded tea shop.
And top it with a gulabjamun...
All alone!

Haiku

A hurried, stolen drag
From a half smoked cigerrette
In the middle of a lonely, sleepless night.

Evenings in a Single Woman’s Life

Evenings,
I open my dark flat,
Enter the furnitureless rooms
Boil milk (it spoils fast in these tropical summers)
Make a lonely cup of coffee
Light a cigerrette,
See its burning tip nibble the paper endlessly.