Two people

can share a seat on the metro
and remain in worlds entirely separate 

how many worlds can a compartment hold 

before the lines collapse under their weight? 

RAINY WEATHER IS THE MOST POETIC

There’s that moment before the sky falls down: 

wait and watch the clouds swell
And then, like explorers from another world
tentative, the drops begin to fall,
It sounds like cities being destroyed in the sky.
I listen to the water trickle in, sly
from an upstairs window; across the road
a woman carries in clothes hung to dry
In a slum, worldly possessions are soaked. 

Rainy mornings are the freshest to wake to; 

rising, I step outside and meet
the scent of earth, soaking wet
the clean sky, laundered and left to air
the paper – so drenched I can hardly read
the news of fifty farmers’ deaths. 

On hearing about the lawsuit against Led Zeppelin

Jimmy, 

you built me a stairway to heaven, for someone 
who never thought it a place worth going, you built it
in guitar riffs that twist insides, that lift to the sky that
crush you under the weight of the spell, 
you built a stairway to heaven that didn’t have to be climbed, but float, 
left on top stranded soaring, the fall like angelwings, 
Robert, you carved it with the star grit of voice, summoned like with burning knives
heaven is your hair in the limelight, no angel
ever had such a halo, no angel made a sound like what stirs from your torso when you grip 
the mic and howl like from the depths of a hell where you were cast down 
but you built a stairway to heaven out: 
in a dim lit basement in industrial Gurgaon, 
in dark rooms world over, built stairways to epiphany,  
connecting souls, the soundtrack of lives, over forty years, 
through grips of death, love beginning, through heartbreak and loss, lives 
changed forever, I can’t count how many stairways you built, 
how many heavens you spun, can’t measure what you did to me
the first time I truly heard the sound of 
heaven 
is not
a place
but a song, and I thought I heard it 
in you:
and now
I almost cannot believe 
that everything bright and beautiful and true boiled down becomes 
something else, becomes another dissection, a lawyer’s defence, 
becomes a dead man’s estate splitting profits in half, they found ways 
to measure what seemed an infinite stairway– brought down to earth,
an inconceivable crash, and now the only sound I hear 
is of breaking. 

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.