KILLING THE SHAMBUKA
(Inspired by a famous poem on black lynching)
Jim Crow segregated hostel rooms
Ceiling fans bear a strange fruit,
Blood on books and blood on papers,
A black body swinging in mute silence,
Strange fruit hanging from tridents.
This poem draws is inspiration from the poem STRANGE FRUIT(1937) by ABEL MEEROPOL and is on suicides of Dalit-Bahujan students in institutions of higher education in India. RohithVemula is one of the recent victims (Jan 17 2016).
THE IMMIGRANT WORD
The immigrant experience for
A word in a poem
Is like being subjected to numerous enunciations
At poetry slams
To rhyme with rest of the poem.
The immigrant experience for
A word in a poem
Is to sound like ‘Prufrock’,
To be conspicuous
Like fly in the buttermilk.
The immigrant experience for
A word in a poem
Is to be accompanied with a footnote
Like the entire poem has a GPS tag
On one of its ankles.
The immigrant experience for
A word in a poem
Is to be a paper boat on the
High tide of strife—
Washed ashore like the corpse of a toddler.
The immigrant experience for
A word in a poem
Is solitary confinement
In the prison of syntax.
The immigrant experience for
A word in a poem
Is an undecipherable tombstone
in the war memorial.
LICENSE TO KILL
Not a morsel of food down her throat
An act of protest against licenses to kill
Her periodic crimson stopped
To stop the crimson rivers flowing down the streets
Of her seven sisters.
Plus-sized poem
This poem refuses to be
The world’s wife.
This poem is not pimple-free,
Is printed on rough paper.
This poem has cellulite in its rear end,
Its rump outsizes itself off the market.
This poem walks the ramp with a self-edited gait
Without introduction or foreword from veterans.
This poem does not opt for offshore liposuction
To make oneself eligible for international prizes.
This poem eludes the trap
In the hourglass of time.
A LOCAL TRAIN CONVERSATION
As the station moves
I glance at the
Elderly man seated opposite me
Still like an inanimate cog in a wheel.
His religious mark between his eye-brows
A one-eyed search light
Patrolling for moon-light indiscretions
Down the ages as the train furrows
Through a dimly lit tunnel.
His insidious queries
Incised with his Swiss-knife tongue
Are like a handshake
Prolonged to probe
The pulse of my wrist.
He tries assessing me with an
in-swinger first
‘What is your full name?’
Then he tries an out-swinger that seams a lot
‘and what is your father’s name?’
By this time, he loses his nerve
And tries on a swift york-er
‘What is your caste?’
SERVING QUARANTINE
After SERVING TIME by Charles Simic
I was locked in a prison cell
The size of my smart-phone screen
Before being remanded onto the death-row of the sick.
While serving my time.
I read many books.
Firstly they are on pathology and medicine.
Then on the Indian Penal Code.
I was assigned to compose loud
Straight-jacketed with a lexicon
Of only synonyms of ‘necessity’
adhere a rhyme-scheme between
‘greed’ and ‘need’.
Then books of behavioral- economics to choose between
Two nightmares
One was death preceded by a sensation of drowning.
The other was death from hunger.
A little ventriloquism lingers around me.
