Flying over buildings

makes you think about their insides,
the way being below them
makes them disappear into sky. 

there’s a moment 

between
construction and destruction
where they could be either,
balanced on the threshold
between half-worlds.
they might stay there
forever, or
you never know
how long they have already stood
like that. 

– and they might not be 

as barren as they seem,
I bet there’s a group
of old men in one corner
chewing paan in a circle
passing hours and bets.
or in the cool shade
a pack of dogs
you hear howling those nights
when the thunder comes. 

And this moment 

a businessman dirties his shoes–
cement-dust clouding Italian leather–
stepping out of his car
to inspect if the builders
have managed to build him
his dreams, yet.
–(forty rupees for theirs
at one day’s end) 

they start from 

right where the mountains were beat down,
where trees themselves
can hardly grow.
settlement upon settlement house upon house
grow into glitzy modern towers
(slums sprawl beside, closer to ground) 

what does an earthquake in the Hindukush look like? 

ranges buckling like breaking a back with bricks?
If mountains cannot withstand
earth’s fits of rage
nothing can.
we ought to own up. 

T I M E

You’ve tried this one before–
it’s late and the lights are bright
In front of you are eyes, bleary, upon themselves
half-shut against confrontation,
face to face with your reflection
It’s just you in the mirror
same as you always are,
familiar face in a familiar place 
You’ve looked at it often enough,
though your description would be least accurate of all
the way that strangers sometimes see you best– 
but we should know by now, right?  
and it all starts to shift like candlewax,
swirling subtly, strangely–
you’ve looked a little too long,
it sharpens like stone into faces of gargoyles on tower walls,
and now the eyes that you look out of
seem unreal
Shardlike, they pierce through
the fabric
of your dimension.

snap
        out

you start, and the room returns
settling down, so very still
that it starts to sink through itself
and things begin to slip
before your very eyes, 
transforming, distorting– 

Time makes everything  u  n  c  e  r  t  a  i  n 

like 

when you were so sure of the path
that was laid out for you, not by something abstract like life –
you didn’t need to know what
because it was a simple series of steps, school college work
that you’d take more easily than your legs had yet learned.
At some point the train seemed to be derailing
because the tracks had all flown into the sky
but then you realised it’s more like an ocean, anyway
With an imaginary shore. 

Sometimes

at least,
time tells  

like 

meeting someone that seems just right
you could maybe write a whole novel
and with every little bit they give you,
the pages wilt –
hardcover biography, to paperback, to magazine
in which the images are all pretend, and dead leaves on the roadside
say more than those words could ever mean
if you don’t step on them first –
because the closer you get, the further you drift
and with every door you open,
another world chasms between you
voids you’ll never bridge. 

but that’s alright, 

because by now you already know
that it gets harder the longer you hold on,
it’s easy to say
get a grip
to your reflection in the middle of the night, 
catch the catatonia before it catches you
you might have to say it
several times before I hear you,
get a grip
get a grip
get

        a
  
                     g
                                r
                                           i
                                                       p




But say it too many times 
and the words won’t make sense anymore. 

Reminder for poets

Remember 

that even the best
have ripped out their hair in frustration.
Thrown out or hidden with shame
the unworthy, half-born carcasses
that turned out
too ugly to ever be revealed. 

I wonder how deep they had to dig 

till they found
a poem worth keeping.
if there were fifty
or five hundred others
that paved or blocked its way  
if there was a rarer gem
disguised in dirt or blood
that got discarded too, 
like flowers dried to stones
wilting
before they could bloom. 

Not every poem 

will be iridescent, I know,
when it feels like all I can spin
is apathy
masquerading as poems– 
I know I should not forget.
but I just can’t imagine 
if Bukowski’s worst work
looked anything like this,  
how long
he waited or wrote
till something good came along.
maybe
he never thought it did. 
maybe
you never 

do. 

“I am searching for the person in this photograph”

It is worn, tattered on the corners: a drawing 

silhouette of pen-strokes, looking over
its shoulder. Face lost in the artscapes of stories- too many, lined up like a century of wrinkles, that almost obscure. Turning around mid-walk as if called, looking back, but never intending to stop. 

“But this is a drawing” 

–No doubt about that, the paper is rough 

to touch, no glossy film
of photographic prints– like the scraping sand of a familiar beard.
you can feel the indentations left by the pen-tip
where they make an impression from the artist’s hand
that left no fingerprints but perhaps something else
too raw – a stain of soul. which once spilled,
has no remedy to be rid of it – something like mango
but not yellow like that. only children are that colour,
when they start out. 

“I know 

but can’t you trace the shutterspeed
in all the moments that got trapped in it? 

“see here 

a ghost of the flash that went out
an exposure set just a little too low
enough to capture the realness of it. 

“and the frame 

of this mind this second this place–
captured. The most beautiful portraits
are the ones where the eyes
open into the soul. a kind of a
raw vulnerability
caught unprotected, comes out off guard,
sharper than daggers
to you who views.  

“That is what I am searching for” 

History

It’s not as revealing as it should be,
holding history in your hands–
There’s something that pages and pages
of tiny black and white print can’t tell,
can’t quite convey the essence of it, like
if I tried to explain a person to you by showing you their bones–
it’s not a novel, after all.  
There are numbers, though, to help you
paint a picture inside your head,
names, photographs of leaders, and which side
claimed more dead. But it’s not a picture that paints
the blood that truly did flow,
the realness of exploding bombs when they say
the air force was involved,
How easy to write that a movement began–
less so to begin it, to find
that dissenting feeling among thousands,
voice it, bring it out, and embark
upon a fight to death to defend it?
Sometimes the year is a clue–
I try to place people, my parents,
grandfather; that uncle that lived in the hills
when the insurgence began.
Sometimes they have stories, like
walking two hours through a silent city
to reach home after an assassination–
that was when I understood what they meant
when they say the country came to a halt that night.
I try to grasp the enormity
of the words I must remember,
infiltration, rebellion, independence
when it was a dream to die for, and not the title of a day.
And then I think of when tomorrow’s children will ask
what happened to Palestine, and
where did all those refugees end up,
and of the time when the word secular was a guarantee
And I wonder what they will have to hear.