Something like this (scroll down to observe the entity called a poem that I am referring to) comes from too many trips at too unearthly hours, down familiar streets made totally and freshly unfamiliar by night - an experience that any sub-editor after a long haul at the desk knows only too well. Hmm… I see that after but four months at this damnedest job, I am already speaking as if I am anything but a rookie. And to think there is just two week of it left. The Indian Express people are understaffed as usual, but this time I SHALL NOT stay back for another month. No way. But I will, strangely enough, miss some aspects of the job (most of all the money, three guesses for that one.) But there are these weird moments… sometimes of a lull amidst the work in office when conversation stops, the sports people tilt their heads and laugh but I can’t hear what they say, the guy I have a sort-of fancy for (but then he’s STRANGE) looks askew and completely vulnerable and lost and not himself, Rupa-di (the other trainee sub) stares intently at some errant page that has probably gone and hung itself for good, and our little zoo is perfectly paused as if on the brink of some revelation. But then a packet crackles or a phone rings… or another batch of coffee is here, and one starts as if on a new paragraph.
And there are those exhausted rides in the car back home… cool, drowsy, silent: the town is marvellously changed from day in ways I never knew it could be. It is easier to let go of everything then, from body to waking consciousness - just as the town has.


Jouissance

People sleeping, sprawled on cold cement
On dust and hot dirt. Body broken up
In happy bits
On a cool spread of white…

I pause, hiccups stuck in my throat
Eyes on the patterned pavement lit under the last halogens
Of night,
Eyes on a fresh puddle of rainwater
On glistening tinfoil, garbage and grass

Mixing with hair… I watch, completely tense
Aware of my own tips and ends
Curdling

How past borders
And markings-off, deprived yet skilled,
Those bodies make it all their own
Under neon,
Beside downed shutters and spare trees.

To think, beside
Moving feet and whirling wheels,

May I lay myself down once? In a pool
Of parts let free of gazes? May I dissolve
Without a pillow? Without shame?