Pune - November,2014 Poem by Mihir Chitre

These are elemental fires
Stoked by the unspoken
Where the night’s forehead
Emotes every half a second

At three in the morning
The winter recedes
In all directions
Pune is cold and casual,
As if falling out of love,
The room, a silence
We climb the ramparts of
With the outstretched
Ropes of our twenties

Along the hour’s neck,
Vision seesaws on Old Monk
By its chin, a dog
Barks pointlessly
At the restaurant
That shut several hours
And a consciousness ago

The weather throws up
Like a rookie on cheap whiskey
Outside, the world contracts
Into a big false identity
Across a barricade of smoke
And a self-taught uncertainty
A woman rinses her day
Over a cup of tea
And along the descend of the balcony
Stages a cameo
In this impromptu polygyny

The spider on the wall
The half-hearted missed call
The odd comb, the wafers
In the hall: The moment’s
Makeup overall, how
I wish, was a sticker
On the desk of eternity

In this city,
A glinting test tube
Of interpersonal coincidences,
We’re all experimental
Chords of the experimented