The black ghazal
I fail my behaviour's test tonight
Hell is a hole in my chest tonight
Words meaning less and less
In hallucinations I invest in tonight
You've vanished casually from the scene
Like a rickshaw in Goregaon West tonight
My libido plays Snakes and Ladders
In the alley between your breasts tonight
I hard-sell other women to myself
Like a salt-containing toothpaste tonight
I cut straight lines on life's chessboard
But the knight's moving its wildest tonight
I reduce you to a zip file in my brain
How proactively you decompress tonight
Nosy ifs and what-ifs interrogate the day
The Richter scale reads its highest tonight
As you've scrubbed us off your palm lines
How will Mihir figure the rest tonight?
***
A walk to Chalal
The morning dances in the hilly spaces
Like a small-town girl in a Bombay club
The river stream reflects a you, you last saw
In some ancient sleep and the donkeys
Mock your determined walk by the pines
Dense and hazy like a motion photograph
We sit down and breathe and dream
We chuckle under the sky's inverted stage
To an audience translating our history
Into a palpable green, brushing
The teeth of this craggy, long trudge
You start one way, end the other
But Chalal doesn't bother to judge