these days

these days

i know what a piece of cotton cloth feels
when it's drowned in a mixture of onion skins,
or lac or turmeric roots or a vessel full of scented pink garden roses.
and left to stay there overnight or more.
what goes on inside that powerful darkness,
the explosion of hushed conversations
between the juices, the colors, the cotton filaments
and the empty spaces between those filaments.
the poetry of their marination, the staining of one soul over the other,
giving rise to a desire to remain overlapped, dyeing.
but equally bursting with an urge to share the sublime experience.

.

i'm a cotton cloth let to dye inside the pages of a book.
the letters, the thoughts in those letters and the man behind those thoughts and letters
are staining me in ways my own words could never reveal.
and as our souls overlap, i'm blissfully torn between
wanting to lock my inner door to everything outside
and a desperation to emerge, briefly, to play my rapturous flute.

.

i stay awake in bed under a warm razai and read.
i sit in the sun warmed balcony with saanjh bringing me
tiny stone gifts at random intervals and read.
i lay on the cool, naked floor surrounded by balloons and read.


. . .

wednesday afternoon
the sixteenth
kārtika