Painting by Debashish Saha

Hanuman’s Wife

Milk fills my skin’s nostrils
bright green god, mine,
the way a beetle
possesses the contours
of its jungle house.

Secrets brood
inside your earrings,
so many secrets
that I have come here
to give your incarnations
stains I have dropped
on all my lives.

One day I will unleash
the gold dangling
from your lobes, ripe from
the transmuted world, one day
these secrets will be mine
the way a monkey possesses
its own tail.

Not even for myself have I sprouted
but for the hand on my back.
We are in love: for the ways I have unloved you
I discover eruptions are the screams
of love to come back, come back, come
back into the soup of forms
the ten thousand things in which
you are.

Like everything, I was born alone.

Years later, I have won
the freedom
to love outside of solitude
back into your solitude.

I have lived too much not to forgive,
too long not to forget
to sit at the feet
of your flood.

Milk pours from your handcrafted body.
May we always drown.

Dear Kali

When fire roams
 like children forgotten
 by hands that made them,
 when from poisoned

romance all black things
 fight for space,
 screams disturb the ocean
 inside Shiva’s throat,

 You come

 jiggling in the emergency,
 pitting opposites

into design.

 Love is rage,
 a raga.

 Collapse is your stage,
 dancing lady, stotram lady,
 roaring in the potential of night
 poison is swallowed.

 No shame in screaming,
 you scream, no shame
 in pain, no shame
 in being children
 in being the child
 of the hands that made me,
 from the inked throat
 of your husband,
 your target hauls babies,
 tears, wails of the living
 and their forgivenness.

 Your child
 in fury, in trembling
 uselessness,
 lost, secure, alive,
 I am,  I am.

Endings Don’t Exist

Our bodies know
what incarnations have kept,
a burn here, a vortex there,
from lungs to genitals to
eye-radiation.
Endings don’t exist
where lamps go off
alive like fruit lusted
into fermentation.
We are preserved in debris
someone had in a dream
of one green galaxy.
Meanwhile, love is a stubborn
odour in the lines between death
and its glow.

Our bodies are loved-back, they exceed
 luminous geometries
they worry about nothing
not the lion bloated

ith the purity of the wild
and its rot, charming our cavemothers
into continuous wide-open surrender.

We’re going, lamps outshining
the little things:
panthers, wild boars, pickled time.
This must be love.

Bird-Time

 A bird left its home
 lying angled outside
 our home,
 feathered babies gone free,
 grown up in bird-time,
 that is to say, the time
 it takes for us to paint
 pictures of you
 in our poets’ mind,
 our own wild young.

 We place you in a nest
 hanging on the brink
 of land you’ll enter
 and spill yourself on.

 They say the world is
 bleak, death sleeps
 with one eye open
 outside its door, but we are
 birthing you from bird-time,
 where birds pop
 and crack eggs,
 no need for faith,
 the doing is enough,
 we are safe,

 just feather-love,
 just bird-heat,
 just love of this, that, this,
 tails, beaks, wings,
 in bird-time.

 It’s a matchless fight
 against the wind
 to assert:
 we are here, we carry on,
 our songs meld with leaves
 and windshield wipers,
 our babies are vital,
 as vital as our heritage
 of bones and bark.

 And so you are,
 And so you are,
 our little one
 inspired by birds
 broken open by hybrid love, 
 our baby in a nest
 borrowed from life,
 forged in poets’ minds,
 peeling out in fury, in glory,
 from image to flesh.