Radio Commentary

She,
Who would balance the world
On her fingertips,
Would hide in the Darkness
That lies between the flickering of flames
Fiddling with the curtains,
Breathing secrets in my ears

Her secret kisses
Would hang in the air,
Frozen between sighs,
Holding my breaths hostage
In the palm of her tiny hands
Creating little tea-rooms
From her imagination for us

Over cups of riotous tea,
In the deserted shelters of memory
We would hold hands,
While lording over cake crumbs
Drowning in the quicksands of eyes,
Playing her personal
Favourites amidst the never ending
Radio commentary

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Surviving Kashmir

In Kashmir Tragedy doesn't strike you, It seeps inside you, like a malignant disease Slowly making its way to your brain, Disintegrating your mental faculties, one by one. Taking you apart one minute at a time, making happiness A sepia picture that grandfather Put up on the wall of the ancestral house, That is now just a road, with every passing car Raising dust over your family tree, the room where You once crawled, teeming with unruly pedestrians, Grounding your memories to mere dust, walking by an invisible house with blue windows and tin sheeted gate. In Kashmir, tragedy doesn't seek you, it survives you.

In Barely Discernible Darkness

I will trace the Jhelum Across Your back with my fingers In barely discernible darkness It will form a paisley Drawn from the memory of An imagined Kashmir No language spoken by Man or Gods shall be Uttered that night Words will be melded, Sentences molded to form A new language of love The ink, a fine powdered Amethyst, shall dry as We write its grammar The quill tips, fashioned From old bones, shall Burn in its blaze The room will be Full of scorch marks In barely discernible darkness -- Tz

Chapter 9: Madness

I hold onto the ledge of sanity by the edges of my fingernails polishing a tune that i heard long ago on radio Kashmir, sandwiched between propaganda and farmer's show, where they taught how to sow blood in fields of saffron to reap a harvest of dead bodies mutilated with joy and skinned alive by bayonet edges and threshed by a machine made of army boots I hold onto the ledge of sanity by edge of my fingernails playing an imaginary santoor, made by the last santoor master of Srinagar, its wires made of Human tendons and its small wooden hammers, bones of young poetess its fickle frame crushed bone of orphaned children trafficked from mortared houses into army camps disguised as play grounds I hold onto the ledge of sanity by edges of my finger nails dreaming about refuge in the asylum of ugly emperors and handsome beggars hiding behind masks of iron, smelted by gunpowder made behind the mosque made of stone, where th...

Tasenda

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