Painting by Sri Mahadeb

Field Glass Vision

While travelling on a train
at night time a lightning strike

splits the sky into long slits
of red hued remnants of the day.

Each schism an open blind
from which peeps the lorgnette eyes

of women of the other worlds,
seen only for a moment.

And then all turns back to black,
like flickers turning into ash.

In field-glass vision past present,
and then the thunder rolling in.

Autotrophic

Today I try to undo
the night of a tired day.
I wipe out the stars
with the mop of my mind
and take away the thin
slice of the moon
from the middle of the sky.

The night gets undone
and there is a vacuum
between the brink of now
and the day yet to come.

In this empty space
I float with my thoughts
like a phytoplankton
in an aquatic ecosystem,
drifting and manufacturing
a new universe
in every drop of time.

Sense of an Ageing

What if some parts of my old days
become a body again
like the Ship of Theseus?

What if that body confronts me
one day in existential dread
in some Arctic Alpine snow?

Some old days hang on clothesline
of windows by the train lines
dangling in a body-less sway.

Some hoary arms of age once filled
those sleeves of vest hung out to dry
on railings of ancient balconies.

Some talks of old days loiter
beside a standing deity
inside an ageless temple.

Old days carried by young mothers
in crooks of their cradled arms
around suburban station towns.

There the black hair of young girls,
Bonya or Bonolota or Ananya,
were illumined by bright lights.

A mofussil of histories
fills up with zero gravity
to leach into an underpass.

At the bigoted junction between
Chuchura and Cinchura
old days start to fall apart.

I collect them all in this relic
quilt that hides ossified bones,
whose cotton grows old in secret.

But unknown to me they rejoin
and become a body again
like the Ship of Theseus.

The body walks past abandoned
sheds and market lanes in rallies
like the many lives of others. Shouting Zindabad! Zindabad!
Calling for a change of guard
in the nausea of my being.