India

Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is the most important ally.

– Italo Calvino

My typewriter is multilingual,
its keys mysteriously calibrating

my bipolar, forked tongue.
Black-red silk ribbon spools, unwind

as the carriage moves right to left.
In cursive hand, I write from left to right.

My tongue was born promiscuous —
speaking in many languages.

My heart spoke another, my head
yet another — the translation, seamless.

Auricles, ventricles pump blood —
corpuscle-like alphabets, phrases, syntax

cross-fertilize my text, breathing life.
Texture enriched — music, cadence

spatially enhanced — osmotic,
polyglottal — a polygamy of grammar.

Letterforms dance, ligatures pirouette —
ascenders, descenders — pitch perfect.

Imagination isn’t caged in speech —
speech cannot be caged in language.

1.

My body carved from abandoned bricks of a ruined temple,
from minaret-shards of an old mosque,
from slate-remnants of a medieval church apse,
from soil tilled by my ancestors.

My bones don’t fit together correctly as they should —
the searing ultra-violet light from Aurora Borealis
patches and etch-corrects my orientation —
magnetic pulses prove potent.

My flesh sculpted from fruits of the tropics,
blood from coconut water,
skin coloured by brown bark of Indian teak.

My lungs fuelled by Delhi’s insidious toxic air
echo asthmatic sounds, a new vinyl dub-remix.
Our universe — where radiation germinates from human follies,
where contamination persists from mistrust,
where pleasures of sex are merely a sport —
where everything is ambition,
everything is desire, everything is nothing.
Nothing and everything.

2.

White light everywhere,
but no one can recognize its hue,
no one knows that there is colour in it — all possible colours.

Body worshipped, not for its blessing,
but its contour —
artificial shape shaped by Nautilus.
Skin moistened by L’Oreal
and not by season’s first rains —
skeleton’s strength not shaped by earthquakes
or slow-moulded by fearless forest-fires.

Ice-caps are rapidly melting — too fast to arrest glacial slide.
In the near future — there will be no water left
or too much water that is undrinkable,
excess water that will drown us all.
Disembodied floats, afloat like Noah’s Ark —

no GPS, no pole-star navigation, no fossil fuel to burn away —
just maps with empty grids and names of places that might exist.

Already, there is too much traffic on the road —
unpeopled hollow metal-shells without brakes,
swerve about directionless — looking for an elusive compass.