I. Advice

Let the wind blow through
Let the light in, you say

But this I cannot do.

My poems are heavy, dark shawls
Huddled in them, every season,

I’m obscure as a sibyl.

             The hailstone syllables

                                                 Clatter

                                                     And melt.


II. Reprisal

I, who have never known
Violence, see at nights
This – the moon-thugs
Finishing off a woman.

Mostly she is eyes
Minus the other marks
That make up a face. And
Her sari, winding red, tears
Audibly.

All my childhood, I slept
With a knife tucked under
Two pillows, for safety.
And that crescent still glistens

Maleficent.


III. Blocking Off the Light

They have built a room next door
Where last week was only veranda

So when the watchman’s cane at four a.m.
Smashes up my sleep, and morning rises

Ghostly, from the other end of the world

I try to imagine, as is only natural
The shuttered beginnings of life

Before the emergence into woman’s sex
Filling up what used to be open space

Now an airless veranda, hung about
With purdahs, blocking off the light

Being blocked off from the light.


IV. Margins, ma(i)nstream

A woman is a thing apart.
She is bracketed off, a
Comma, semi-colon, at most
A lower-case letter, lost.

In the literate circus
She is just a striptease
Artist, but when she speaks
Her poems bite, ferocious.

Rhyme and shape, primitive
Beasts, come tamed to her
Endangered species, they
Recognise her desperation.

She wants, she badly wants
Not a fresh lover, strongman
Or clown, but a new language
In which to hold her own.


V. Sentence

Witheringly,
Glances uncover
What they shouldn’t.
The five lyrics,
Thirty-five verses,
And one-three-five
Previous lines
Witness
A crime passionel!
Neatness strangling art
In my case,
Which is genitive,
And (as in Hindi)
Oblique.

Another tragic flaw
Is garrulousness.
Premodifiers (e.g.
Determiners) and
Convoluted post-
Positions take
(But naturally!)
The place of sex,
Revealing not just
The world’s essential
Thinginess (on which
All words depend), but
Reflexively displaying –
Myself.