Aubade

Early morning light filters in
through the window's glass,
revealing dancing dust particles.
It's one of those
abstract beautiful things
that just elude your grasp.

But the woman by the window cannot grasp
the beauty of sunlight that filters in;
she is too shocked to notice things
like early morning scenes visible through glass
windows; it's one of 'those'
mornings; her heart has been shattered to particles.

Her heart has been shattered to particles
too sharply painful for her mind to grasp,
gather and repair logically. Those
paroxysms of angry grief have started raging in
her mind. His betrayal is transparent as glass:
he has gone with all his things.

He has gone with all his things:
there remain no particles
of his memory to break like a glass.
If one damned thing would come in her grasp
it would be destroyed to ashes and chucked in
the bin of her memory: it would break all those

spells he cast on her, those
spells that bewitched her to abandon all things
and fling herself across the globe to join him in
a faraway land with no approval of others, no particles
of a souvenir of love to grasp
safely in her hand, to nurse like delicate glass.

Her innocence was  transparent as glass
when he, one of those
dirty handsome men, set out to grasp
on tightly to her, a beautiful 'thing'
to keep, with not a single particle
of love in his heart. He has left her to wake up in

a lonely land, to grasp reality cold as glass;
his particle-seed had inflicted major damage: 'unwanted things',
twins to be born to her in of those dreary December mornings.

The Thursday Think Tank #65 - Windows

The cramped classroom
can barely accommodate
forty-seven students.
It is smothering stuffy,
but of course it has windows!
Their grills look like the bars of a jail.

In the confines of jail,
in the cramped classroom,
we grudgingly open the windows
of tolerance. We have to accommodate
every unreasonably stuffy
teacher with 'respect', like good students.

Like good students
we adapt to jail.
We don't complain about stuffy
air or the shoe-box like classroom;
it can at least accommodate
forty seven. It also has windows.

At least it has windows!
Grateful are we students
to the sarkari* circus for accommodating
windows in the grand jail
drama. They're needed or else the classroom
will become deadly stuffy.

Our minds have become stuffy
and unimaginative. The windows
let in minimal knowledge but the classroom's
walls need to be broken down. We, students,
should break free from jail in jail.
We should not just 'accommodate'

We should not just accommodate
formidable knowledge in the stuffy
confines of the mind. In jail,
knowledge is useless. The window
lets in facts but what goes in should go out. We students
know all about ventilation: it's lacking in the classroom.

In jail, we just accommodate
stuffy classroom facts.
Students can only look longingly out of windows.

*Sarkari- of the government in Hindi.

The Thursday Think Tank #63 - Something Stinks

Her body stinks
like the smell of rotten
eggs and human dung.
She removes the muck
that chokes every sewer
in the big bad city.

In the bowels of the city
she braves the stink
and opens the sewer.
It's a sick rotten
job she has to do; the muck
has to be tackled. She dreads the dung.

People leave their dung
for her to clean. It chokes the city
sewers with noxious muck ,
making it a gaseous stink
bomb. Everything is rotten
in this dark dangerous sewer.

They can only create a sewer
to control the flow of dung
spoilt water, and all the rotten
products of excesses found in the city.
The overpowering stink
comes from a month of piled up muck.

She has been cursed to live in muck
and condemned to clean the sewer.
She can't afford soap- she stinks.
One day the heaps of slimy dung
will claim her- a victim of the city.
It has already declared her rotten.

As she lives her fate, she feels rotten.
She has been drowned into muck
by the privileged evil of the city.
They can only make a sewer;
they can't clean their own dung.
It is them who really stink.

But the city leaves her to stink
alone; she cleans the sewers of rotten
people who're too good to clear mucky dung.