Trust

I sit at the beach one somber evening,
trying to see what lies beyond the horizon.
Then the sea separates
into halves, slowly emerging
a blue bronze statue
with a multi-headed snake on his back.
He says his name is Vishnu, the Hindu
god of trust.

I look around –
darkness visible as it was, silence replaced
by sloshing of waves against the shore,
mutable, wasted.
The red forked tongues of the snake hiss,
move in all directions like a radar.

Vishnu’s eyes open; behind him four arms extend,
holding immaculacy – a mace, a conch, a lotus
and a chakra. Choose, he says, what you lack
in this life.

I dust the sands on my feet, half wet,
and venture into the passage, neither land nor sea.
I put my ear near his conch, where I hear
air spiraling, luring.

He takes my hand; nothing is said;
a strange idea that the touch makes myself understood.
His eyes close, and mine. We walk
further, deeper into the core of earth.
Water rejoins,
the sea back to being a sea,
the beach is still very much of a solitary space.



Tailor-made

The apprentice pranced into the fitting room,
where she waited in see-through satin,
like a femme fatale in a grainy film noir.

She stood up, letting him calibrate her flesh
inch by inch, first with the tape, then
his hand. His fingers tell the magnitude

of her breasts, soft but precise. Then,
she turned around. He avoided her
eyes. “Listen kid. You’d better make me

a cheongsam all men want to take off. You’d
better make me a star,” she said.
He nodded humbly, as every apprentice

would do. She unzipped his pants
and rolled her hand in. “This’ll make you
remember me.” He breathed deeply,

hiding his moaning to himself.
He tried to listen to the aria of every
salacious stroke by closing his eyes,

but in darkness, he only saw faceless
men climbing over her, trying to remove
the fibre he would tailor-make for her.
.


Blizzard

Why do you envy my hands
that type delectable words, one after one,
seemingly relevant, yet to be deleted
someday? No

words are indelible.

Or you envy because they are warmed
near my desk lamp, a bulb flaring,
not knowing coldness and blankness
are twins in December snow.

Outside the window, only one color exists,
dull, purified; becoming luring

like the paper before me, flat and neat,
self-important like the first
blossom in spring.



Across the Road

A man whom I stop sharing my keys with waves from across the road.
His arm, once thin but relevant, flaunts with an arctic curve
in midsummer heat. The traffic
dies down. Only the monotonous ticking and flashing
of the green light is heard, like a crow crying for surprise.

For a moment, I am angry with this empty road,
across which I can see his toned-up body. So I look
for his shadow to make sure
he is not a ghost. And I find it, tragically
dark and flat, adhering to his feet.

Does he now have a dog that he uses as a dumbbell
day and night? Do his arms remember that
they resembled bamboos, wasted but fresh?

When I was small, my mother warned me
not to cross the road with a red light. But she did not mention that
I would jump into someone I least wished to see.

I tell myself I will feign. I will march towards him,
give a slight nod, with my eyes looking away.
I will watch our shoulders to ensure they do not brush.
I will, otherwise, drown in the orgasm of his mutable skin
and die in the carless traffic.