Ghalib asks for a seeker of tongues

& a single anklet falls into the hare

-footed gray of the lily pond. Full days 

you were pebble or fin. Useful friction. 

Nights would pale as if swallows volar 

in a eulogy. What is time but a woman 

split from her shadow. There is water

beneath our dark. A coup d’état of petals

storming the drains. The jasmine buds to

be culled in a dire coveting. All of this

when the moonlight in its borrowed per

-fume will hoist our bodies into a paused 

cinema. Children still wrapped around sari

borders like snapped vines. Our names are

skeet to the catapult, a table for dead gods

—melancholia & salterns. Our names are

places where railway-stations have no  

signboards and the platforms are home

to a troop of monkeys wetting their tails

in dirty fountains. I say this to him & close

the door on a city I can enter only in memory.

Tomorrow the news will again cut its teeth on

the brutal alphabet of lynch mobs. My throat

will become a cave, the words will fall as rocks

damming any procession of language carried

within or outside.

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