To My Mustard Yellow Girl

A hue of lust and love
You wore it like soul
The pleats run through my skin
An emotion -
Mustard is not a color
After you

MOURNING DIARY

Someday Barthes
We will meet over a cup of tea
(coffees taste bitter after death)
Smoking your favourite
Havana cigars
Under Srinagar skies
(not Parisian)
And discuss
My Mourning Diary
That I never wrote

BAARISH

Door kahin aasman mein
Aansuon ka ped hai
Jis pe khizaan aayi hai...
Udaas dil
Kabhi Yeh bhi sochta hai

Voodoo

Rain definitely is magical:
Piercing transparent needles
In earth's body

Aaina e Zaat

Ujde baal
Sooji aankhein
Toote daant
Aaina e zaat tod diya hai
Meri tanhai
Bilkul mujh jaisi hai

UNTITLED

Sometimes
More than beloved's laugh
You need
The Shrill cry of her pain
To lessen the burden of life

Sometimes
More than futile breathing
You need
Asphyxiation
To tell you that you are alive

Sometimes
More than the loneliness of room
You need
A mad joyous crowd
To sing you your forlorn song

Sometimes
More than emptiness
You need
The softness of a woman’s bosom
To blunt the barbed lines of fate

PURSISH

Sach tou yeh hai ki
Tumhare Jane kay baad
Sab ne mujhse
Mera mizaj poocha hai,
Haal nahi!

LACK OF EVIDENCE

My heart is a crime scene:
One can still smell
The rusty blood
Of killed dreams
Murdered desires.
Because I never marked
The premises to save detritus,
Everyone walked in
As people walk into a crime scene
Changing everything
Changing nothing.
My heart is a crime scene:
Homicide now looks like suicide.

MEHFOOZ

Tumhari Baarishon Ki Chatt
Mere Sar Pe Qayim Hai
Sooraj Ki Barsaat
Mujhe Bhigoyegi Kya

محفوظ

تمہاری بارشوں کی چھت
میرے سر پے قائم ہے
سورج کی برسات
مجھے بھگوئیگی کیا

WINTER IS SO BOURGEOIS

Adjusting the volume
Of his Sedan subwoofer,
Where Begum Akhtar's Raag Kafi
Shrilled lifeless through
Electric diodes.
The reverence of Snowfall made him stop.
Picking up his magnanimous snoot camera,
He captured Snowfall in every aesthetic angle;
Under the shade of that incandescent light bulb
Where
Snow threads weaved metaphysical patterns
Capturing a shadow,
Limping through snow.
"How poetical this all is, " he thought to himself.
He couldn't wait to show
The magic he had captured
To his significant artistic circle.
And that Kafkaesque shadow
Wandering through snowy desert.
He pressed the button,
Glasses came up,
Started his AC to warm a bit.
With rising Raag Kafi he was gone,
Leaving behind the Kafka shadow -
Not a shadow
But a body,
But a soul -
Cold
And shivering.
He had not forgotten the umbrella,
But left it deliberately, so that
His little brother could use it.
Like mad thoughts, snow had
Crept its way through a hole inside his shoe.
His foot felt like an old sunken ship
Deep inside Antarctica.
He pulled it out.
"Winter is unpoetical of all the seasons, "
He thought to himself
While he wrung his damp socks.