Angular Mohabbat

This Angular Mohabbat

Fashioned out of old wives tales

Of failed romances, dead Mahiwals and broken hearts

A tapestry of faded old songs.

Their meaning now buried under the years

Shadowed by the daily routine, This Angular Mohabbat

So black and white like sacred pianos of Time

Voice garbled by the sadness of being alive,

An orchestra of Beatle look-alikes

Our madness now accentuated by the rising sun

All those people we talked to now dead

Poets that no longer kill, disappearing along their own trials

Crying out

Khatam-Shud, Khatam-Shud

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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...

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