You are my domicile where I bury my lifelines

In your realm of rushing, frothing river-deltas

I stroll over the fluxing topographies

of your fecund anatomy

with its many revelations. I identify

every contorted mudra,

every eyeball morphed declamation,

every incandescent idolatry

accompanied by crashing cymbals

and beating drums, every marigold garland

wrapped around your chiselled neck,

every soul-breath wrench, every incense perfumed

sweat-gland drop that emanates from your stores

of dateless times --


I know I’ll never penetrate

your cloud-hidden psyche. I know

You and I can never be We, Us.

To comprehend fully is to understand the need.

Like an unsevered umbilical cord,

it is your piecemeal manifestations, your kaleidoscopic

scatterings, that tie me to you.

Yet estranges me, leaving me rootless.


You’re more than the halo-ringed homescape

that I happened upon on the hairpin bend of a roller coaster

to the grail-road terminal I was blindly heading for

those years ago – I have forgotten now the exact postmark.

Time never mattered. Like you I let myself

get scattered in your labyrinthine theme streets. And travelled beyond

dollhouse mentations to congested settlements

of neon lit stage settings, bustling bustees, clogged crawling streets

where word-painters tell their stories in lurid retellings

and the unending traffic flows bumper to bumper, winding through

spanking new aspirations, multistoried dreamscapes rearing

above low lying corrugated hubs; floating rivers of narratives

where laughing children play and procreate

and days drift into dateless times -- all of which

grow on your carbuncled body like extra limbs.


Your earth is fertile. Your soil is febrile.

You are my domicile where I bury my lifelines.