Nights Out in Dhaka & Other Poems

CHILDHOOD IS A PERFORATED TAMARIND TONGUE 

Childhood is a perforated tamarind tongue:
Through which drops a table in a lawn of green silk, 
Its spindly legs— the kind which made Victorians go heavy with lust—chase me.
I break into a run. I have grown in caterpillar widths in all these years 
They web themselves around me, a breakfast of lettuce bloomed salmon flesh  
And papaya juice, the colour of a lime-yellow towel soaked in vacation days made of scraped knees and 300 languid liquid summer hours
There, fathers striding through corridors and the deeper ends of pools
Brown skin glistening, singing a cigarette laugh, while swaying with an awkward ease to Armstrong beats, evaporating with the sandcastle rook 
Someone blows loony moons through bulbous glasses  
My toes stretch, spilling red pulpy bits, having it appear amusing like a deconstructed omelet, on its white legs
My memories, a mushy fishbone 
I hear the dead wear rings of cedar and wings of the sea at day break 

GOD COMPLEXES 

A feast of eternal sweet nothings by baby pink angels 
By the bubbly cobblestone alleyways hinged at 225 degrees, I swelled up. 
How the winglet of the winter night quivered, ready for a flight to snowless lands away
The lady in the leopard print blew smoke morphing the mountains into giggly balloons
I peered my head within and gave him a bellyful of rose rinsed stars 
Which fell, soft as a coo, for poets to grasp
Humming of how the sane do not know the deliriums of longing and that of love
Under the disco fresco we became a turquoise conference of peacocks 
An engineered eternity, held by giant fingers of bluish distillate.

NIGHTS OUT IN DHAKA 

She scooped out sweetmeats and fed them to him. 
Outside Louis Khan’s sketch, a man with infinite ringlets on his chest 
Climbed out of a three wheeled vehicle with God’s blessings and
Passed on the paper box to an instrument of delight, 
With a tucked in pink pocket; purrs of little deaths.
Dainty fleets of laughter, sheens on cheap chiffon salwars*.
A dappled moment of hunger, an affection barely imaginable. 
They floated on an amorous sea of saturated orange trucks. 


*Salwars are South Asian harem pants