Discolored

And she stood there, watching,
as the faeries raped my colors.

She looked like she ate
strained turnips at every meal –
severe, spare and squally.

Her prim lips
squeezed into a face high
on economy, emerald eyes
with no reason to sparkle.

She held my vocal cords
twined around her little finger,
my brown eyes squished under
her bunny slippers.

Fleet-footed with shimmering
wings, the faeries danced across
the silhouette of a sunset
from the Iron Age.

Multihued creatures tumbled out
of her ancestral hat, a fat rabbit
out of its witch’s pointy end.

She swallowed my silence
like castor oil.

My heart doing the salsa
against my chest – it might
even have been
seductive.

My spirit in every butterfly
that ever flew in the sunshine

My mind splattered
in a thousand letters across
a page in a poet’s mind.

My body at a pinnacle
where pain married orgasms
in technicolor.

The daisies later rescued my
shades and laid them at my tomb
when it was found.

My tomb – the body
my soul resides in today.

I met her the other day.
Apparently,

All she can conjure now
is a night only she can see.

The night she killed Me.
The night, the faeries
were raping me.
The night I lost Faith.

(Untitled)

(a work in progress)

Galvanized bodies, flying sweat, doorways
too small for four but holding six.
Sighing mass of exhaustion crammed
armpit to armpit, stale perfume mingling
with perspiration and flowers falling
from gajra's in loosened chotis.

Spacelessness comes at a premium – space is
as outdated as handsewn clothes on a baby.

Assembly lines for families silhouetted
against a sky the color of an old bruise.

Indifferent little stations with straggly passengers,
a family of Rottweiler-ish street dogs.

Important stations with milling crowds,
yelling vendors, haggling customers,
the all-pervading smell of illegal fish
fresh from the Arabian Sea.

Bombil, prawn, lobster, crab -
all nourished on your own effluent
and the occasional oil spill.

Tired voices in the cacophony of
tonight's menu, nagging schools,
chilren's artwork, not-too-healthy parents-in-law,
loss of pay leave, new sarees,
flying dupattas, irregular periods, wedding plans.

Taking turns on the one available seat,
a group of working mothers.
A baby sung to sleep in a collegian's lap
while her mother relieves her tired arms.

A group of women passing out small
bottles of water to everyone. A young girl
learning to knit from her neighbor.
A drab lost-in-the-crowd face brightening up at
her first sale for the day.

Girls poring over notes on the journey home,
group study on the move, making space
for a pregnant lady, an arthritic nani-ma,
a breathless asthmatic.

The essence of humanness reaffirmed
with the only thing that counts - One Heart.