Nostrils

I breathe;
And a part of you dies.
You breathe:
And I'm alive again.

Sex

What a beautiful romance it must be
For two people to give birth to words.

Tuber

The lone French fry sizzled on its bed of wood and make believe.
With one guilt-laden prong, she pierced its deep fried flesh
And looked down at the massacre that decorated her plate:
Bits of charred lettuce locked in an awkward embrace with yielding
Discs of orange. And a thick pool of blood
From the guts of a naked man.
Oily palms thumped him, abused him and gave up.
Sadly, all he coughed out was a smidgen of red.
The strip of yellow was taken for a waltz in the battlefield.
Soaked in blood, it made its way into her mouth.
Somewhere between the clockwork of spittle and teeth, it died.
She gulped on some cola and swallowed it.
In the pits of her stomach, it would be ambushed,
Beaten to a pulp and turned into an ugly spool of nothing.
It would rush through her thighs when she was with him.
It would memorize her every crevice and cobweb,
It would remember her every bruise and fall.
It would.

He saw her under the warm glow of a 30-watt bulb,
Took a gulp of his beer and sighed.
He knew the scent of her strawberry hair.
He could locate the scar on her chin in the dark.
He had met all the freckles on her milky skin.
But he had lost.
That French fry, that amputated tuber,
Knew more about her than he ever would.

Ink Slinger

He wasn’t a man of many faces.
His mouth, like the paper he wrecked, was crisp
And lacked the comforting curve of a smile.
On Sundays, he misplaced commas.
And on Mondays, he juggled apostrophes between
Two sips of whiskey.
He wound blue circles around unsuspecting words
Like “yclept,” “wampum,” and “skoptsy.”
And when they crushed under his pincers of steel,
He mocked their weakness.

While he dreamed of ravaged cities in Technicolor,
Clusters of his words were being printed by men wearing
Bloodshot eyes over their trousers,
In black and white.

She forced his adjectives into a bag of ferozi plastic one Thursday afternoon.
She wanted something to read on her flight.
“Tintinnabulation,” he whispered. And the words jingled in her ear,
Like coins in a barren pocket.
She carried him in the constellation of her hair till Mississippi.
He didn’t know.
He was still asleep in Hyderabad.

The Reluctant Poet

Your stubby fingers dance over the alpha and the beta,
They waltz and make love out of words.
Your spit them out like watermelon seeds from your yielding mouth -
One syllable, sometimes three.
Your mind races and the feet on your palms try to catch up.
They fail. Usually.
Your words are clones, sometimes.
Two or three that sprout from the same genes.
Sometimes, fatherless bastards.
Incomplete and naked without the shadow of an adjective.
They are born in the cobbled streets of your mind.
Born when you're sipping sunshine outside the Louvre.
Born when you're canonized in the Ganges.
Born when you no longer want to breathe.
But they are yours.
All yours.

The Weight of an Inside Joke

Between creases of stark white mulmul
That cocoon my stark white being,
I find a strand of burnt sienna that once
Made your hostile scalp its home.

That woolen bastard.
That ungrateful truant.
It abandoned you
And made an awkward landing on my skin.

I carry on my shoulders
The uneasy weight of you.
Your family.
Your ancestors.
Your blood.

It will
Take off
As easily as it
LandED.

I laugh. And it laughs along.

Pip

She gnawed on the spoon,
And smirked when she saw tiny
Drops of red nuzzle against the nape
Of its cold, silver-grey neck.
The blue flames from the television screen
Danced the Bharatanatyam on
The hunched back of pearly shine.
What once lived in pools of
Pickle-flavoured oil
Would now be her weapon of choice.
She scooped your insides out;
Perfect crescent moon shaped bits
Of your gut.
She left out the pith and the pips,
And placed you in her mouth.
You were nothing but a sour aftertaste.
A citrus punch, at best.

You were found later that day,
Filled with heaps of nothing.
Who would fill you up now?