Shikhandin Shikhandin

It Has Been There All Along

An old anger glints with lust
...

New Winter

I have grown unused to this
tightening of skin,
...

The Church

Every time I close my eyes
I see a bright white Church
...

She would cycle down everyday
and bother us till we
did her summer vacation homework for her.
She would try to dazzle us with
...

Pandora's curiosity didn't just do her in
It dug a cesspool for the whole human race
For what flew out
After the locust swarm of ills
...

Our brother's come home
let us rejoice. He has come bearing unwrapped
gifts and untold stories while we circle
around him like a chant.
...

You talk of hatred, bullets, bombs
and bad memories. Here
we inherit these things
from our fathers and mothers, who
...

Once upon a time, long, long ago, the humble
home-made papad could actually become foreign-returned
‘pepper biscuits' with a simple flick of a wrist opening
a manila envelope. Madras Checks flipped outright
...

You throttle it
into permanent un-speak-ability
then you bury it
...

There is this ‘I' in it, right at the beginning,
an ‘I' for an ‘I' that is you. But of course, you are
your own inspector and spectator.
...

Fire spoke to her before the child was born, caressing her long hair, her pale skin
speaking sweetly, making sweet promises, seducing her into a state of insensibility.

The child beat its tiny fists against its watery cradle crying out voicelessly until
...

Dusk has hefted this bloodless day
upon grim shoulders
and is now striding towards a horizon
where the Borealis are waiting
...

I am riding west, past rows of electricity poles
lined up like prisoners before a firing squad. Past
sad buildings with the legend ‘ABANDONED'
inscribed like a scarlet letter plucked from a romantic era.
...

The Rakta Karabi blooms in blood red defiance.
Stupefying my neighbor's patch of pious flowers.
A pristine gray sky tilts with its load of secrets. But
no cloud splits apart. And, man does not yield
...

The smallest bones I collected,
still warm and sticky
from your smoldering pyre.
Mother
...

There are days when I choke. Like a turtle
With a plastic bag gagging my throat.
This is the stuff of black inertia. Inert afternoon.
Fighting the nausea of memories.
...

Death is

a rusty truck
roaring
...

The sky speaks to me
of pollen disintegrating in the wind,

of sparrows whose silences
...

These are the minarets of the rich. Be agile
when you climb, because you are not rich.
Here are the brushes that you will need. Wield
them with care. Make the tall palaces look bright
...

It is everywhere. Between every rain lance.
Atoms of air. Nothing is spared.
Something is wasted between
the tasting and the tasted.
...