Swerve
I lean against the bus stop with you
on the phone telling me why it all
went wrong between your parents.
That there was no concrete point,
and the ground was always tilted. How
you swallowed your words to survive
and childhood was held together
by bargains you were too young to
understand. The freeway leaks over
the landscape its gestures of light,
wet asphalt hurling velocity after
velocity into the translucent night.
Horns blare in the wind and I lose
a link in your argument about why
you are not particularly innocent
in all this. Hence, there’s no point
running. Nowhere in the world
is any better than right here. We are
a sequence of contingencies converging.
Why resist when it’s easier to give in.
The years are behind us. We know
how this ends. We’re on the clock.
Hurled against our will. Or despite it,
if I were to see things your way—
our futures collapsing on opposite sides
of the median. Our lives a curl of light—
the landscape inevitable. This is all
we have. I hold nothing against it.
I tell myself this is why I am
in love with you. The catastrophe
of this; it agrees with me. Nowhere
in the world is any better than right here.
I am a silhouette on a child’s window,
kaleidoscoping with the night. I’ll get home
when I get home. Time piles up
on my sleeve in pearls of dew and I hold
on to the sound of your voice.
(For M)
Landscape and a Blur of Digressions
There is a slant in the city you can only measure from the footover bridge when the night is chalked in a translucent haze. And the freeway hums a coarse throat lullaby for itself. You can play along, or you can latch yourself outside of it. Take note of things. Register that nothing in your life has felt like this. Nothing will. Above you a barren sky threaded with pincers of light. Beneath you a patch of the sewer still under repair. A man standing at the bridge in an act of faith against the night mumbles some truth, and before you can gather it, washes it down his gullet like a sleeping pill. In another life, you will save him. Make conversation. Astonish him with the things you remember reading in obscure texts during odd hours because there was nothing else. Help him arrive at a metaphysics of kindness— in unexpected places, from unsuspecting strangers. In this one, you’re both the same person, and everything is too complicated. There is a lightbulb at the riverbank shivering in the breeze and your father has learnt to be a better person at your expense. A just world has to have forgiveness in it. Which makes you a hypocrite. The night is a tally of discrepancies and there is always a door in the mind. You can hear the voices in the other room; the collage of your life—its flashes of light rearranging themselves in a logic of their own. When you fall asleep, you dream them all gelled into each other, helpless as a child.
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
In the landscape’s memory, I
am a curve slicing the light
in a blurred parenthesis.
My shadow dissolves
in yours like a delirium
dissolves in God. Your name
a liquid blur, my name
a curl of your breath.
The night drools
against the window pane–
And I lick you off
your neck. These are
the things we are
guilty of— of trying
to latch want against time.
Shutting our minds
to the obvious. Our wrists
quivering in and out
with desire. We gnaw
ourselves out of ourselves.
Look at these veins fade
inside you. This vector
of thought crashing like stone
against naked glass—
the margins of language;
a river leaking.
Abhinav is from Kanpur. His work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Trampset, Chestnut Review, Fahmidan Journal, and The Deadlands Magazine among other forums. He is also a Best of the Net Nominee.