SWEATING SAND

Thar’s sand dunes have
Hot bubbles of venom in its loins...
These are secreted with the spools of moonlit sweat
That dances down the forehead of a snake charmer, his
Legs curled like his pythons over his mistress...the polished
Silver of her cunt intoxicated with his sighs.
He has the scepter of
The desert in hand.
A hissing lizard and the stemmed brown, powdered
In his eyes. She smells the stories he carries through Udaipur and Ajmer,
Through the chilly incensed bazaars of Jodhpur. The insidiously masqueraded
Roads to Makrana, where once Mirabai flowered her madness for Krishna
And the honking of drunken trucks racing down to unknown towns. He has crept
Abundant tales in his one tepid breath...coated them with his dramatic zeal.
She rummages for some more granules of soil on his face, the scattered atlas of
Sun’s heat which has half marooned with dehydration...
She pours pots of water on his body, sluicing him in dreams of
Cool river jungles and immensity of her breasts. The aroma of wet leaves, pine wood..whorled
In her nipples..
He has to smell, he has to drink the flavored milks she boils.
The leaking run of her greed that he serves religiously, jamming
One, two, three fingers at once..raising her body
Like a grove of lilies stormed by winds. Her wrists breaking down like mud...waiting for more of him.
And she comes whirling down to the loins that generate the venom in Thar.
It is her man, she knows..
The snake charmer with ganja and cobras..Who breeds the thirst
She wrestles all day. It is the mirrored lakes on his member, splashing rivers into her...
The
Irrepressible vigor of his tongue that slithers like Shiva tasting Parvati...
Take away my bangles, take away everything.....she hollers
Repeatedly.....but just stay with me...
Paint my world with your candor, the sweetness of your touch. Let me be filled.
Don’t leave me thirsty in these sand dunes.....
I am too weak to resist this poison.

In my city

In my city, I have forgotten what it is like to
Call it mine...

The ancient fortress skirted over the skyline, glimmer
Mirrors in the moonlight. They leak some of their radiance down to the
Urban mad child in her lap and I, one of her patients...
Soak in the stories I heard in school. The rhymes of mighty queens
Who wandered through Rajasthan’s desert to find the sparkling gems..
The sages, the mystics, who never spoke to me...
Lay curled in their secluded erotica. The epics
Written on the Peepal leaves, woven with confusions...
These legends, the folk tales. The masqueraded beggars.
The dance of poverty stricken hijras

At the stroke of twelve, the alcoholic murder of an innocent mother.
The gothic silence of the city at night, the crickets from house gardens
And the roar of televisions in the tiny apartments.
The jarring tractors, the tumult of school life.
You will love this city, whispers an old woman. But what does she know about
My love’s vision? My barometer of loving.


A man? Who despises my touch and dons a fake mask.
A friend? Whose life is now seemingly a suicidal drama...
A dead poet? With whom I fumble
In nightly hours, lined in a perfect synchrony.
There is nothing that I have learned about any city in these nineteen years.
There is nothing I have felt that resembled love or its smoke...
I don’t know Jaipur. The city I am supposed to call mine.
I regret.
I won’t even know Bangalore. The city I crave to call mine.
I regret.

So my excuse is the post modern confusion and the sensational overload...
(Some more intellectual bull crap)
And that is all what I hold on to now.

This city is a witch of dream neurosis.
This city
Is a scheming middle class mother, straight out of the soap operas...
She spends her days in luxurious loafing and with dreams of
Settling in the US. It has turned into sweet vicious cage of
Countless foreign education institutions and “Learn English”
Offices. All I hear is chanting of money machine. Humming
Of laptops busy in stock sharing, its users masturbating
Afternoons with Katrina Kaif and bad clones of Angelina Jolie...
Couples

Decaying with their energies, they discuss money even in the bed.
They make children with planning...
They use expensive, specially engineered condoms
Because they have forgotten what it is really like to fuck..
This city has imbibed its mad children’s flavor. It swallows the gin
Of its ruins, its old heritage. The stumbling wraiths of Hawa Mahal, the
Magical birds guarding the windows of broken palaces..
But there is nobody to savor the dance of loss. We all have
Relinquished the battle long time back. We are terribly comfortable
With losses..and that is what I have learned too.
We have become accustomed to drab lectures of non violence
And then delighting the street brawls. Confiscation of a prostitute’s earning, her rape
In police stations....After the same constables have drooled over her cunt
And licked it like melting icicles. So which part of the city
Am I supposed to call mine? And start learning it?
The more I learn, the more I forget. The more they talk,
The more meaningless they become.

City
Is a glorified corpse of a thousand dreams and I am just one of them.
One of the dreams which are sold at the lemonade cart by
A fifteen year old boy who wants to be like Brad Pitt.
A city..lost in its own translation.