I miss your white glow.
The ethereal being that was you
Before He took you away, so soon.
The crash, the shriek.
Formulas stained with blood
And a crushed future lying there, lifeless.

I hold you crumpled in my palm
Seeing you walking with me,
And surrounding us is just bright white light,
Nothing else guiding our step.
You’re mute, but interested in me. I smile.

The trick in the calculator, the laughter
Afterwards. The letter you showed me proudly,
The kindness that was you, you, you.
No one can replace you,
Not even if you had come back alive.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

I must have a stupid face.
The smiles, the cold hooks
Tugging at my heart like a lunging fish,
Narrowly breathing to keep itself
Alive, only for the moment.
Then gone.

I love this, this resurgence of things
That may come. All true, you believe,
Till they prove you wrong.
The murmurs, do you hear it?
Through the steel, the pages,
Shakespeares I and II.

Cold, but loud. They buzz all around
The years, old and new,
Stillborn and cursed.

Don’t stop, they want you too much now.
I turn and turn, I do not hear anything.
No one comes up to me,
I don’t want to hear anything else.

The cold surfaces, the white acetylene tables.
Burp burp, who goes there?
Who’s arranging all these?
Yours, yours?

I mock you,
I mock your noise,
The silent shudder of you deciding
To leave me.

The hurt, the stinging pain.
The loud crash of it.

This is the sinew of my curse.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

Hear them rush through, the magic splinter of it
Cutting through the stars, clouds,
The roars of the leaves rustling.
It has been too long.
I don’t wait for you anymore.

Round, my love, the ring, the globe,
This whirlwind of things we remember of each other.
Round and perfect, it never ends.

What more do you want –
The bones, or the memories,
Piled up together in that hut,
Husk brown and wild,
Smelling like some wild beast bleeding to death.

The promises, the promises.
How I believed the words.
Exiting off your mouth like gold watches
Gleaming with fake glamour.
Lies, lies, who would thought I had it coming.

Mud-thick, they plop to make a scene.
This one, that one.
They’re all the same.

Your legacy is torn, just as you decided
To do away with me.
Taking her, the sister-*****,
Who held your heart before I began to.
Overshadowing the very being that drew
You away from me.

No remorse, love, no,
That’s not the right way to live.
This cycle, this viciousness,
Proud and naked like the night sky.
All round and fat.
They never end.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

This aloneness has no morals in mind:
Only white emptiness and the black of it
Fall like hexagonal snowflakes with deer-horn edges,
Piling, tumbling till they fuse water. They purify me.

Love never made much sense to me anyway.
The mystic it is made of: the stellar parallax of it
Tempts me, a loveless woman, to its orbits of unknown.
Queuing kisses exit and de-exit from it like civilized people.

The moon is pregnant and partner-rich tonight:

Its stars of many flashes sing and dance
Thundering sky-melody comets,
As the world slowly turns.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

These layers are inconspicuously
woven together with regret and some great loss
that has arched a cave in the sinew of your heart
beating anxiously, to not let the stalagmites stab
as they drip with every memory.

What was it about the electrical storm that mattered the most....
Was it the arrow through the heart?
Was it the bubbling of innate care?
Was it the act of sharing?
Was it the brewing of love?
Was it the sudden slip of all of those things through the cracks of your fingers,
like sand grains returning to where they belonged?

Do you think it's achievable again
This great cardiac wave that runs through your soul
enveloping the other person with nothing but unconditional love
or do they long to belong to the earth
where they never break and love flows like a wild current, stopping for no one?

Shalini Nayar
© 2014

This is a special typhoon of sorts.
It revolves and turns;
A windy conch-shell blowing in a
Random, disorderly manner.

The patrons that travel in them
Are enviable. Unclothed and unashamed,
They are useless to be reminded.
They remain oblivious throughout this

Journey, that demands so little out of them.
They get a whole world of ***** love in return.
Yes, it is love, the sick purity of it
Makes them feverish. It’s like being

In the middle of a tornado of
Hot-coal, with no control of the temperature.
It is quite a traffic in there, with hordes of
Turned-on traffic looming together

With the cheekiness of rotations.
Clockwise, counter-clockwise,
Either way, they look comfortable being
In their own skin.

This twister are more like telephone cords.
Not so black, but with the same
Terrible, manic curls, each concocting
Its own love story. The lovers are wind-bathed

And pampered. The flawlessness that resides
In their hair, faces, bodies! They are so white,
They’re almost perfect. It is so pure, so magical
In there, it is heaven!

If only the wind lasts forever
In this eternal sea of people,
The world would start
To utter more sense.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

It is a Russian dish, they say.
A plate of two diecious moons
Rising on different waters.
They reflected a common bond:
The mushroom sauce that
Goes with anything unmushroomy.

One side was a pile of rice,
Yellow fleshy seedlings, brown
Chunky gravy for headtops.
They mountained over like uneven Alps.
They kissed the air, like good army boys
And rose their spice to dance firely

Within me. They spoke a foreign tongue,
That deciphered itself in my mouth.
The credibility lies somewhere my love, but try
Finding a speck of truth in a death full of lies.
It was painful to hear its story,
The way it winces and rolls over to convince you.

Being genuine is something special, sacred.
It can’t be too hard. Just when my fork
Scooped up a bite, the lambs started hooing.
They were in juicy threes, each with
A bone and a bit of marinated flesh.
They smelled like grazed greenlands.

It is something else with mint sauce
But I hate it. Truthness lies somewhere
In the nervous system of its body,
That is bloodless and tender. They too, attempted
To lull me with an anecdote, fallibly in its juices.
The grain and meat are proud godfood
      with histories tailing like dreams.

Whom should I consume and believe? They
Withered and tempted me like a candystore does
To bored children. It is too agonizing, I’ve become
The middle woman. Two moons, jaundiced and stony
Stared back boney, and sick. The overcrowded trash
Had acquainted two odd friends that night.

Shalini Nayar
(c) 2002