kids march to school
merry, hands linked,
socks strangling calves,
backpacks swelling with milk teeth,
dangerous smiles.
in the centre they stand
frondesce shivering overhead,
buttress roots clutching earth
like they know what’s coming.
bags dropped in a ring,
offerings to something older
than the walls they study in.
light fractures komorebi
and in its faded gold
i see pareidolia grinning
from the leaves.
i keep the temple.
the trunks sway in a rhythm
older than speech.
a faraway tree warns
don’t take pride in the faces
power is the thing they can’t hold.
if, my friend, you see the tree throw
know they are across the ocean.
owls, fat with promises,
every five years
stuff a new child’s face
into the stump’s rot
and call it a future.
the old tree votes unanimously
to shed its skin once more
they call it progress,
call the rot reform.
loosen your roots
the wind doesn’t care
which children
it strips for kindling.

She lost perspective before she met the glass,
Braces on lips, like wine, a fleeting stain.
Golden hair pulled too tight, youth locked in place,
Slipped like coins into the senex’s fragile purse.

Concealed in lockets, veiled from prying eyes,
Alluring hunters sought her tortured grace.
Through dusty rafters, golden strands would rise,
Brushing his scars beneath the public gaze.

No one regarded the banker’s loss or coin;
Old men still scattered mints upon the floor.
Some whispered fate had favored her to join,
Others claimed the devil opened the door.

The wise, unmoved, declared with measured breath:
All that has come is better—even death itself.

my mom slipper
splintered floor mat

hand rusted, hovering
breaths rake the air

lean, bend, chase
shifted rooms, his question:
“who you think you are”

foot sinks
in lakes of red ashes

fog thickens
ashes remain

pillow strikes
blue soles pressed
decades deep

his shadow clings
a silent fling of ash

time drips
floorboards groan

hands tremble
bodies stagger

ashes whisper
fog swallows

each day i reach your door
like a wet rag with a pulse.
heartbeat ticking,
hand hammering.

here’s your pills—
stabby, pretty, blue.
my fingerprints turn into bruises;
i forget my name.

shattered feet.
socks from last week.
air tastes like floor tiles.

i think the pill looked at me first.

you never ask what’s in it,
only if i still want you to take it.
your eyes orbit my pearl earring
like satellites.

bourgeois flaws taste better imported.
“jolie laide,”
tattooed where your heart should be.

you once told me:
i love ugly things, they last longer.
i mailed my neck to your ancestors.
no return address,
no name, no guilt.

pupil to pupil—
will you know
you never knew.

hope dies once
in a bag of dollars,
hollow with pennies.

you swallow orders like gospel.
who gave you empty vessels?

i bit the pill of idiots in half,
wore it as lipstick,
kissed your ego
until it foamed.

i leave the door ajar for ghosts;
they smelled like your cologne.

once,
you called me
your softest affair.

pill quartered.
earring taken.
no knocking.

goliath shadows hover,
even in the walls.
this one licked the floor
where your heart used to be.

coiling the summit
of your heart,
gisting my heels
engraved on the floor i missed.

your name clogs my throat
like i deepthroated grief.

i stitched my eye shut
to stop seeing you.

still,
visions came
through my teeth.

i licked
daily,
tender storms
into silent lakes.

my white crayon
wrote you a letter
in the middle of rain:

be peace,
and if not peace,
a a pale spill
that remembers me.

boy who craves a darker shadow
not just shade, but hunger wrapped in smoke and bone,
under headlines wife’s sister’s affairs rot at the root.

hemlocked, nameless, hair knotted with cuscuta string;
ghost-vines rope his wrists like hungry knuckles.
the hollow-eyed boy carves a bar and calls it scripture,
trades green for powder, profit for blood;
he’d slit a throat before he spares a leaf.

how does that nameless leaf keep grieving?
how does it stay alive?
it roots in rot
it drinks their blood and keeps on green.
.

civilisation ruined* yellow grass  
     even weeds choke on concrete air  
december light 29 days too bright  
     for a cage in the zoo of pay gaps  
          where we performed domesticity like ballet  
     bruised and beautiful  

i ate tradition blind honey-drenched  
     we called it sweet we called it choice  
          we called it love when it was only  
     the slow swallow of erasure  
          but it was silence  
     silence dressed in wedding white  
          silence with a kitchen knife  
              
some minutes after i saw you  
     the blueprint emerged  
bodies as real estate  
     empires need foundations  

you said kitchen's your place  
     power for you was kink  
          dressed as culture as care  
prejudiced not me you said  
     just fluent in the syllabus of dismissal  
          where my silence  
     was your mother tongue  

je viens d'un milieu instruit  
     say it again it tastes better than inheritance  
education was my escape hatch  
     my father's house: no books,
                           only rules,
                                       architecture of diminishment .

         whatever was fertile you named hole  
     archaeology of want  
apertures for legacy for rage  
     for fathers and their fathers  
****-coded nescient you left-clicked then fled  
     anonymity as contraception  
        
priest i saw you in the mirror  
     when i genuflected to the altar of credibility  
          compressed myself to fit  
     the confession booth of palatable anger  

truth-teller from marrow  
     no father in my tongue  
no patriarch in syntax  
     i built this language  
          from scratch and spit  

your patri-architect face  
     brief in my heel's reflection  
divine glitch god in drag  
     costume of authority  
          theater of dominion  

hey sir mansplains-a-lot  
     aphrodite wept at the sight of you  
you fear kittens museums  
     whatever carries memory  
          whatever resists revision  
from your father's echo you learned  
     to fear permanence  
          it keeps score  

god became sermon about control  
     became warden in father's clothing  
you lick the wrapping  
     never open the gift  
mistake container for contents  
     worship the cage name it sanctuary  

you diagnose independence as flu  
     something requiring cure  
contagion of wanting fever of ambition  
     prescribe obedience like medicine  

but even yellow grass fractures cages  
     even dying things refuse your architecture  
when feral enough  
     when finished performing survival as gratitude  
to burn  
     to incinerate the honey-drenched lies  
the curated traditions the inherited silence  
     to burn until only truth remains  
          and the women who speak it

walking a rowdy street
tight grip on the leash
streetlight lays it bare
light pooling on my reach

panorama:
 the leash, in pieces

Anna in daylight,
 hands steady, calm and bright
 embracing cracked margins —
 called it love, her rite

but her fawn,
 beneath thorny shadows drawn
 the same leash condemned
 its trembling spirit wan

broken—
 yet a gift unspoken

street cries, in sight
echo through the night

there is a man
whose voice pins the room.
he sits at a café,
the naked bean.

hands tremble,
camera bag hangs low,
news clippings spill across the table.
he whispers to no one—
stories of lies overheard,
a story that could endanger his family.

dust threads his veins,
pressing against bone—
the ossicles in his ears
still ringing with what he heard.
pollution and corruption
sound the same at this frequency.

minutes drift.
his words gather at the edges
of the notebook,
crowding the margins
like they know what's coming.

elsewhere:
a wife curses her phone,
sweat fogs distant lenses.
men linger with steady breath,
children hurried to bed.

they carry him to the hospital—
broad shoulders lifting his dust-bound body,
veins dimmed with residue.

corridors white, strained.
nurses pass, faces pale,
hands rinsed, charts checked.
drawers of pills, overtaxed bodies.

even in silence
they observe him:
veins threaded with dust,
bearing the burdens of all—
bones carrying truths
no one dares to speak.

The road is everywhere now
houses adrift, clouds sliding past Preet’s roof, past every gate.
Blue water swallows the old fence lines.

Boys who ran through mustard fields
float face-up, eyes wide to a sky gone silent.

The wheat called for rain. Rain came,
and came. And will not leave.

Barefoot on the crumbling bund, I watch
yellow blooms bow beneath the current
mustard that grew waist-high last month
now learns to breathe sideways.

A duck dips through a bus shelter.
My father’s tractor, red once, rusts in a stranger’s field.

The floodwater knows no Punjabi, no Hindi—
just the physics of fill and drain.

At the relief tent: women,
silent, wringing silt from dupattas.

A child asks when. A mother shakes her head.
This water plays no favorites.
It takes the wedding album, it takes the diesel can.

Roads will spend years remembering their routes.
My sister says: ik teer naal do shikar—
but this arrow hit everything, killed nothing clean.

The proverb floats by, useless as soap,
and we stand in water to our thighs,
watching the old words
drift.