leaking

Maybe we don’t really know enough. Maybe all the anger  that oozes out of our corporeal canisters  stems only from the pinhole-visions of wrongfulness  that we have had access to. Maybe our emotions are considered overweight our words, obese and our swords, overdrawn. Maybe our trespasses are not as  big or great or worthy of …

Crowns Molding

The healing won’t begin soon enough. Later, blessings will forget to do their rounds No one really bothers to take note of the night, dew falling like it does,  Aims wordlessly for grass. I remember the tiara the kids made for you  From all the fallen flowers in our backyard  But that gave us only …

Haze

A name frequents  the margins of my notebooks It doesn’t get along too well  with efficient market hypotheses  and fluctuating interest rates  Yet it pushes through my skittish numbers and knocks over my groggy  little Greek alphabets  Like a quarrel from years ago that I can’t quite  seem to remember that I can't quite seem …

I count to ten

1. when did the tradition of hide  and seek resolve  into a prayer for calmness all i want is to write a poem  about my grandmother’s hands 2. until i was sixteen  i loved your rice pudding  from that winter, i tasted it grow sweeter every year until we left too much of it  to …

Of Letting Summer Go

Absent are the hoofbeats of the breeze. I am remembering  in these boughs about meaninglessness and ecstasy The symmetry of the hunger we feel. And drunken yesterdays, When I stomped on pretty flower beds and you plucked my grass.   Abundant is our longing, scrunched up like  Veins of a book-bound leaf that shares  With us …

punctures

I’ve begun to waste away Not in the maggot-caused atrophying of farm pigs Or the septic turning of salve-starved skin.                                                                        …

Abyss

Today was all wrong. The stench of mourning lingered, like unlaundered, unbleached sheets hung out to dry, for passers-by to get a whiff of And from acres of sprawling oak, their thirsty boughs wrinkled like bathtub blues, birds sang for a price Death and Disease- marauders of the modern temperament- razed every house to the …

An estrangement

I find vestiges of poetry inside of me as I grapple to make a sword of a faltering pen, a nib that makes strange motifs on loose, lost pages   My mind, thus far from battle, dons an impenetrable armour   Thoughts are numb. Emotion, though, lurch about like they know of the mind’s brutish silence- …

meaning

I tried so long To figure you out Forgetting in my fancies that Urdu poems are written backwards

saffron lies

I’ve grown up in a world obsessed with geometry:   Lines growing,  proliferating, marking us  as Different from one another.   The railroads on my palms rail to protect every home every place of worship every threatening piece of brick and mortar that they try breaking. There are precipices on my skin. An entire civilisation …

a-trophy

What becomes of the things we cant keep safe Of the words we’re too scared to say Of the forgiveness  we never know to ask for Of the wounds we fail to heal   What becomes  of the love we were once so certain of?