A Room of One’s Own (Hospital Room)

Where my first love was the smooth lining of the CT scan, where I grew to love symmetry, the colour white and phenyl. This is the only honest room in your entire life. This room knows you, flawed and frail. This room loves you for who you are. This room is where you live for the first time. This room where fathers and cousins struggle. This room, their colloseum. This room which destroys us, this room which rebuilds us. This room to which we must return.

To watch the gardenia ripen outside, watch it rot on the stem. And savour the brief perfume.

Storm at 4AM

4 AM and outside, in the dark,
The storm slams into the street’s tar;
The gutters sing ghazals,
The ground gratefully guzzles up the water;
The winds slash at me violently
But this concrete square shelters well.

I think of all the times I’d been in love:
I think I was in love with the storms
That brewed inside of people;
I’d never been in love with any one body –
Just the flush of a few moments –
Moments which came as a delicious dream,
Moments that linger on even when
The entire body of courtship is cold.

Despite this, I still prefer this weather,
I still hope and wait for the storms:
When a positive and a negative meeting
Play out their inimitable Beauty on the skies.

Past Life Repression

Betrayal
Father chases me with a stick
I run to grandmother in the garden
I sob into her warm clothes
She hands me over to father

 

Pain
Father dies in a car crash
Father dies in pain
I hear this in the garden
Now I know Pain

 

Anger
Why did you take him away
When I did your Sunday School work !?
Why did you fail me
When I prayed to you each day ?!

 

Loss
Something went missing
Around my 16th year
Something flew away
I don’t know where it’s fled