To free herself from bondage, On her back the first mark Do the thorns of this rose still Remind her of the weight she carried?

On the ankle, a butterfly Hovering over a daisy. Is this to remember those fields Of the past she had walked through?

A blue crescent moon because She howls as it rises. Do they Meet somehow, some of mine Arcing over the continental sky?

A dragon crouching on the curve Of her spine, it leaps and flares. As she moves. How can one hold Such motion between his arms?

Then metal entwined with skin, Is this to mark those places Where she wants to be kissed Till the softness begins to hurt?

• for Anna

After walking around the semi dark neighborhood on a semi moonlight night, I am here conversing with this machine, which really is my loneliness. Tanhai is what Gulzar calls it in his lyric: Main aur meri tanhai askar bather karthien hai.

I and my loneliness talk once in a while. Today it was walking along the road that bobbed up And down. I said, “Do you wonder if people Living in these quiet houses suffer from This very same disquiet, my friend?”

Loneliness, I guess, is a person who Likes his solitude, so he rarely answers back. But to keep the conversation going I said, “Were you there around the edges On those nights, long time ago on the road

To Hijili, when I walked with a friend?” He nodded as if to say, “You should know better, I have been your steadiest Companion all these years. I saw you through two women, Two continents, five cities even as you were Trying to elude me, escape me.”

We stopped at a creek, the water glistened, He was still not very clear, it was as if he Was more like the creek than a chiseled rock. I said, “Perhaps I had got it all wrong, I was The rough rock over which you have flown.

Now I am smooth, eroded, worn down. Parts of me, the glistening minerals, the poems That washed away in your flow, surround me In sheaves of paper. There is no way I can place them back into me. I have become many.”

He walked off; I stood there for a little longer, And followed his fog like form up the hill. I saw him creep up to the windows, look in And smile to himself, as if he was taking notes Of how much longer he could be kept out.

I said, “So many of us are alone tonight, In those houses and few like me on empty night streets, I know a girl, who said she dived off a wharf, in her mind, again and again to escape from you. What is the ransom we should pay to be freed?”

Again no answer, not that I was seeking an answer. The sweet smell of honey suckle growing wild Along the edges of the road, the trees resting after a day’s Worth of synthesis of blue sky and orange sun Into green sap, adding another ring, another year, to their bodies.

These were the answers. These are the answers.

This sadness is a ruin Whose bricks were put in place By those choices and actions. In the ash, bits of timber remain, Reminders of barbs hurled, complaints made, All those dissonant dissatisfactions.

This Rome was burning since the beginning, We only arrived at Nero’s swan song towards the end In a flash of sleepless nights, which I imagine Raged, beating time with your moans. There wasn’t much They or anyone else could do to fill your needs.

My hands raked with sand, fistfuls Of which I threw at this blaze, are the witnesses. You never even tried to build a simple house. How could you when all your dreams Featured crystal palaces, their shine and dazzle, Grand balls and riotous mocking laughter ?

….

I now stand in a wood, between beams of light, The sun renews out of these old trees A peaceable life. They don’t demand Yet they seem to receive in full, See how they deepen and how they bloom!