Her poem is a bulb on the raw wound of

feelings that flutter like drunk soldiers

and swell like words in a parenthesis.

 

Last night my poem pushed wet nose into

open palm and loved to lick your

ice-cream eyes, your sleepy khadis,

anti-nuke blasts, expensive poverty.

 

This morning, the streets that winked and sealed

their lips when some guy hit a girl with a scream that bled. 

The streets that I called home and you called home. The streets

they just sat like bow-tied collars round our necks

and shone in the last limp flare of petromax.

 

At dusk the street was home to a love that grew

up in the oil of local fries by the banks of open

BBMP drains. And I, I scrabbled in

loose mud to peck and eat from your speeches

fallen to the ground.

 

Come back my love. Let us chew, once again, from

each other’s poems and act as if we pick our way

through rich fields of golden corn.

Let us in the ripening dawn plunge like peasants’ huts

into swelling floods and sweep away into the sea

that leap straight up to the skies.

 

Where are you come back my poem my love my poem.

I cannot tell one from the other.