inquilab

my father worries that i am getting too political:

paled selpulchre bent back, stubble glinting moonlight

off a sharply set wedding band. in 2000, a

billion pallbearer’s dreams flock like

moths as we bleed blue. nana switches on

the television, antennae fiddling and a snowstorm

on its steady approach because She will wrinkle

her nose and powder up every frosted mirrorball

and say this is a muslim area. here, someone

leaves a child behind, here she is defiled in this city’s

growing sun-rotting, storm-kissed pavements. here,

a musalman will lay buried and some unsheathed devotee,

aluminium foil; false hegemony unto warmth will

step over each corpse and say it like it is.

red means freedom, and english syllables wire-cross

a geographer’s moon glass’d into state lines.

but you say

saffron.

building friend’s cook sprinkles saffron, and says

be brave, be kind, be good

then steals words from a coronet atop nilgiri’s peak:

now silenced, every babbling brook’s timbre

jarred into fractal, strapped // sitar strings.

gulzar’s footsteps: an inch closer

to a flying pilcrow’s freedom, bisects

an ichor-soaked land of no man.

and yes, i bet you were good and kind and equal when you shoved a little god’s girl down near the water cooler.

break cowering cattle into a million flaking pieces, and stuff

it into a bottle-gourd pumping, brown kidney.

biology teaches me that good good girls

bask good good hymen and cover up, choke

collarboned sequins. and a double

chromosome here is a wide-eyed invitation there- glossy

card paper wrapped up in a child’s bosom.

[h] iv:

mrs says that word is soaped up flamboyant, blasphemes steal

words. (i think they are mine, tinted violet. )

and you say, shiva was blue not stained dark. kneel a limb

on a sophomore’s slumbering lawn, but none for your own kind.

(these pavements will rise, rise in rebellion.

every foot out of line.)

and everyday you will shriek liberalism as history

teaches me merit. everyday some convent schoolgirl

will rip a nunnery’s shroud

to shreds and build a house, a bridge of cards, a home,

a card paper/ breaking / out of a red-eyed

ribbon. oil-glazed hair like honeysuckle;

hair that braids blond realism. rapunzel was a real rebel then,

& this country breeds rebels then, doesn’t she?

no: rebels are picked up, all chaff and falling glory,

see it in your cousin’s pupil- a battle of banded cryogenics.

because pretty, pretty girls are far to come and good, good women

are the ones with a high-top pyramid checked blue.

[insolent little children, insolent big children.]

click metal on coarse metal, ally your farces in the third moon.

light an altar candle to the past, here have some for

these victims.

a vigil, and you say ہم دیکھیں گے

the women of your country

they

we

will see.