Poetry | For the Dark Times | Sutputra Radheye

Nepali Boy

The end

           I kill you

Today is your last day

(Nepali Boy)

-         Taken from  a wall in Delhi

Kill me

          hang me

                 in your universities

                     and mohallas

                      like garlands

of mustaches

Bury in your soil

             my face

                   my skin

                        my accent

                       my dress

              my voice

my identity

           and the map

                      you’ve drawn

                                     as India, ever since.

I am an Indian

I am an Indian

I’ve always been since the time when Radcliffe drew his line

I’ve swam across the Brahmaputra

I’ve danced in the rain of Sohra

I’ve woken to the sunrise of Arunachal

I’ve heard the singing of the Hornbill

I’ve played Yubi Lakpi when I was a kid

I’ve held the bamboo staves in Cheraw

I’ve prayed in the temple of Unakoti

And in the Rumtek monastery

I’ve fought the white colonizers

I’ve celebrated the tri-colour

My body is as Indian as yours.

 Priyotoma

(1)

There will be fire

and blood-sheet

when you'll walk

across the street

to meet me, Priyotoma.

(2)

When you come

leave your identity behind

throw your gods away

and be naked

like a soul in time stream

dear Priyotoma.

(3)

I shall wait, in nudity,

wearing no chord

that obstructs

my heart to embrace you

in the colour of your tongue

my honey- my Priyotoma.

(4)

Jaapi and roshogollas-

let them fight

like scavengers

and we shall love

like cuckoos         

in kamdeva's gate,

my lips singing

in your language

and yours

in mine,

a language

of waves

beloved Priyotoma.

Haiku

a bangal

      in the protest

beaten.

      and a miyah

                died in the queue

  of NRC

       alongside an axomiya

                          whose papers were eaten

   by the Brahmaputra.

              

Poetry | Manic is My Favourite Colour | Indira Prasad

Manic is my favourite colour

Ten beats a second, super fuelled

With the fire from a hundred cigars

Transcendent, invincible

There’s a sludge-quake in my small intestine,                             
Can you feel it?

Pin prick

Insulin spikes

Sugar

Pleasure
Not so hungry anymore

The demons have eaten my liver

Manic is my favourite colour

Crawling about like a sick dog

Under the Fluoxetine rainbow,

I am a god.


                                                                                 

The Devil's House

He’s awake

Standing by the window

Smoking cigarettes, turning dials, making strange sounds

He is a black hole

With ropes for hair

And a hook crook nose

He gives me something evil to smoke

And I want to go home

But I have no home

There are demons outside, making a racket 
Synthetic machines and brass instruments

My head is reeling

The devil lies beside me

Listening to Jazz, discordant, awful, piercing

He smells like rot, like dirt

His acrid breath brushes my cheek

Warm death on a sunny day

A million miles from home

There is no comfort in his body

His mouth makes a strange O

My mouth gasps for air and water

My body is desperate for England.

Change in the weather

I can see my breath

Small frozen drops hanging in the air

The weather is in my bones

I can’t feel my feet

My hands ache

My mouth won’t open

Slow death in January

There are never enough quilts

Who has opened the window?

Do you want me to die? 

I thought I would love the heat

But my insides have turned to resin 

All the water’s escaped my swollen body

Ran off down my back, across my neck

Hangovers are hell, here in the inferno

Sleepless nights cook my brain inside my skull

And the people; I am bewildered

Truth is; I don’t want to go home

There is no such thing as home.

                                                                              

Maybe I am loved 

Malign in the moonlight,

I think I can see the moon

In the coal pit of his eye

Eye-line a downward dagger

A glance shared with half the world.

But I’m riding in his car,

So maybe I am loved.

Static barbs fly

And I taste the vitriol rolling off his tongue.

Razor blade violin shriek.

Words which turn asbestos to ash

He doesn’t like folks like me                                                                     

But he buys me all of my drinks

So maybe I am loved.

It’s not his fault, it’s mine.

For not understanding I am blessed.

And he will screw his way through 200 years of colonialism

I couldn’t understand

Why he would never take me home

But he took me to a backstreet hotel

So maybe I am loved.

*artwork by the poet 

Poetry | For the Dark Times | Hamraaz

Security Personnel man the streets of Srinagar, Kashmir during the Lockdown,  via Dawn 

Abrogated

Changing the rules without consent: the true aim of development?

Political gain or property grab, in the name of development?

Lock up the kids before they hurl stones in protest or anger.

Preventive detention: just a move in this game of development?

Jail the leaders, shutter the press: speech and sight are dangerous—

lead pellets rip through retinas and fan flames of ‘development’.

Markets are closed and, friends, I’ve heard, freedom is now an outlawed word;

do dreams deferred wilt or explode in the shame of development?

Healing old wounds takes time and care; tear gas obscures the things we share—

brothers and sisters, please beware of false claims of development.

You say, Hamraaz, you’re so naive; it’s more complex than you perceive!

But we won’t right wrongs by hanging them in warped frames of development.

On the Day of the Verdict

-November 9, 2019

My barber closes the door and says,

He has everything in his hands now:  

the parliament, army, and courts; 

his wish is our command, now.

In the Beginning 

I kept hearing people say 

the same words over and over

wherever I went— 

sometimes in greeting

or farewell,

sometimes in prayer— 

the neighbor downstairs,

the electrician in the market,

the man who cleans 

the toilet in the park.

The more it happened,

the more anxious I felt.

When I mentioned it to the chemist,

he lowered his voice and said,

Yes, it’s no longer just

a greeting or a prayer,

it’s become a celebration— 

and a challenge. 

Hard Fruit

This morning, when I told you 

that I’d dreamt 

the theocracy had been declared—  

and the internet was down

and it was no longer safe 

to say ‘freedom’

in a song or slogan,

or even on the phone— 

you just nodded 

and said  you’d woken, 

sweating and shaking, 

after dreaming of breaking 

all your front teeth on a hard,

red apple from Kashmir.

It’s Important to Note She’s a Muslim, Hamraaz

The police are investigating 

an AMU professor 

for a Facebook post 

about separation, sadness, 

a failed moonshot,

and a cold northern region

which I shall refrain 

from naming.

Late in the night, 

smoke presses down 

on the city, 

and the Chowkidar’s

tap and whistle 

disrupts my dreams again.

Three Poems | Robin S Ngangom

Street Life

I’ve had decadence forced on me.

I let the rain waste my day, and arriving

at streets that do not even know my name

I take off just like that, waving to silhouettes,

buying drinks for anyone, even primates

for whom I have no great regard, hating the houses

which warn of dogs instead of welcoming me.

I allow the rain to flay desire’s skin

after falling in lust with an assortment of women,

pursued by an obstinate heat, and an old nose for adultery.

I covet the well-groomed bodies of vehicles

which thread through the eyes of the street,

before darting in and out of shops interspersed like snares,

choosing clothes and shoes which the manly discarded, and

even perfumes to throw off my real self.

Reaching barbers’s hideouts

I spend hours there in a trade union

with men who deal in a hairy business,

watching fingers that pick noses and

teeth in disgusting turn.

I let them fondle my head for a long time.

Until I reached the blind alley of night, and

I slowly uncovered myself

observing shops murdered before they were born,

listening to the dead orchestra of the street.

Genesis’s End

Khyrim woman, by the presage of this dark wind

wracking the breast of the hill,

the leaves kindling, it is autumn again and

the passes of summer

no longer carry our missives.

Your dying laughter withers the rock’s lip,

pines possessed by your eyes,

after you changed into an unearthly desire,

and the moons inhabit only the observatory of stone

though I plaited dreams in your once-woman hair.

Wedged between the stones of origin

your mute cry wanders the slopes

while we search for days on end,

in rains of memory, holding a solitary flower,

scanning monoliths standing in the mist.

Moons ago, lured from your cautious cave

you permitted the sun and rain

to undo your blind coiffure,

and allowed your opaline heart

to be doused by waters of home and hearth.

You also hummed ballads of freedom

and wrote on suntanned granite

the genealogy of your people

and your man-wounded heart.

Stone you were

stone you were sung to be and

I kissed you to begin my dying.

Revolutionaries

I

Before they used terror when things were beginning

to go out of control and people showed aberrant

behaviour, revolutionaries had asked poets in their

lower ranks to compose patriotic songs for a country

which cannot be found on any map. They would coerce

nocturnal drivers of interstate buses to play tapes of

one-act plays which are designed to make unsuspecting

passengers weep with patriotic shame. I know this for

real, I grew up with revolutionaries. They had even

asked me to translate a press release over the phone.

Before he became the sharpshooter of a revolutionary

band my childhood friend smelled of straw and cattle,

and then one day he bridled a horse and rode it hard

through a busy marketplace scattering customers and

traders alike like straw in a gale. I was told that he

buried a pistol at my cousin’s backyard just before he

went under the ground. Only after he came over ground

with the venerable title ‘teacher’, because Chinese

masters trained him, did I meet him on the street and

he smelled of designer clothes. He now keeps himself

occupied with work contracted out by the public works

department and once asked me if I were married. He

has two wives, one of them an actor.

Before the crackling fire of revolution which warms the

hearts of boys we sat in a circle and talked endlessly about

oppressors and life in the jungle. Friends brought stories

of the ordained, who survived on roots and eggshells. We

looked at Che’s hammock with longing and even mixed

his cocktail but had no idea of when to dig a tank pit.

When little books with a star and red skins appeared it

was too late for me. I had fallen in love, and although it

broke my heart, my father sent me to another land with

gentle hills, so that I can read other books which will

make me stand on my bourgeois feet.

II

When they are not around they become butts of fun.

The roving story then was of a wastrel who went home

after midnight because he had wasted all his time with

his layabout friends around a fire one winter night. He

had to cross a walled house guarded by fierce dogs to

reach his home. When the owner of the house who was

woken up by the dogs asked ‘Who goes there?’ the

wastrel found his wits and replied, ‘In the service of the

motherland’ in a solemn voice as one would expect a

revolutionary to reply.

When they became arbiters when someone’s duck was

stolen or two women were fighting over one man I

stopped being furious with them.

You should write when you can still laugh at yourself

and the world, before you give yourself up to

revolution’s despair.

Poetry| Motorcycle Sutras | Tanika Attrewa

Motorcycle Sutras

The chrome sees wind

          mist its voice

three times, with flaws

          the color of air.

[Chrome does not really see wind. Wind lends its lightness to chrome. Its voice is mist-like, but chrome itself cannot have a voice and one cannot see voice. Voice can be the color of air, but like wind, we do not know what air is. Air must be flawed because it makes chrome into something else.]

                                 ***

         

Chipped paint at the edge,

an invisible trace 

          in itself

like spots of blood 

          after a fight.

[Since the trace is invisible – we can assume that people are painted. Or, maybe it is the painted people from whom the color chips. If it is invisible, then it is only a figment. One can mistrust the “f” in figment and replace is with a “p.” Then meaning that is violent becomes peaceful.]

                              ***

          Dust

in grease, grease

on chain      chain

in cog             make it go.

[Dust makes it go.]

              ***    

In sleep, like a pillow

between legs – 

a shiver of sex,

feathers flake in air.

[This is a dream. It is possible to sleep with a pillow between legs. The pillow is not a pillow. The sutra does not mean that. This annotation tells you what it means. The sutras and the annotations are not written by the same person. Sex like feathers flies.]

            ***      

A reflection of him

         

self on the biology of 

an engine, a heart

bolted to the crank.

[If the heart is a piston, he is a machine stuck in the chest. He does not know reflection. It could have been the monk’s face before he went on a long ride. Buddhists who do certain things are called monks. There are others who do certain things but are called different things. The reference to monks is a generalization. If you notice, this does not indicate their individual levels of enlightenment.]

            ***

          The pliant rubber 

makes way for pebbles

          that stick like grit, 

between tread and teeth. 

[Travel is messy.]

        ***

         

A throttle tugs at wire and valve

like marionettes in a village play.

[The word “play” is used only as a symptom of ignorance. Puppets imply control, which is also a symptom of ignorance. Throttle also means to choke. Valves prevent backflow.]

(image courtesy: Wikimedia commons)