is now dying. We're hunters who cannot hunt oxygen for him, or her or the many theys, nor god, and the men who bought the internet know we've tried to find both. Anything below hundred minus five is a potential threat. He is at 59 and going down with the sun. We carry time on our shoulders as it bleeds. Souls leave bodies, leaves in autumn. Everywhere the birds appear; everywhere there's song.
II
The premier is deaf without being mute.
Isn't he guilty of all the good he did not do? Sometimes the body astonishes the mind. He visits a gurdwara to pray, to pay homage to Guru Teg Bahadur, extends greetings to a nation dying. He bows to him: a guru respected globally for his courage and his efforts to serve the downtrodden, a guru who refused to bow to tyranny and injustice. We're trying to balance on the fence between irony and contempt.
III
Some pray for their fathers to be relieved,
some want them to live no matter. The one who now stands in the queue for oxygen will soon stand in the queue for crematoriums. The sun scorches us like a lover we've wronged, pissing fire on us. In turn, our shaved heads threaten the moon. Everyone we love plunges deep into a sleep there's no waking from, men and women reduce to rising numbers on television. We were never taught to count so far. IV
India's spine crushes under the burden
of screams. The newspapers must be full of obituaries but they aren't. The trees laugh. The dead are nameless. The government is busy filing cases against the aggrieved. The greatest indication of irresponsibility is blame. We get high on camphor, the sky falls. We exit the world through a wound. Is there no god in the heart of a monster? He is tearing us apart, and making slow work of it. Dear destruction, we dread your old song.
When people suffer, they want to scream.
All we hear is the expression of suffering, not the anguish itself. Time is a window we cannot pass through. Have you ever watched someone suffocate slowly? We are drifted ashore, stripped of all but our grief which too needs a to survive. There are no words, all we can do is look silently at the dead. Sometimes the song just sings itself apart. The birds disappear. Future is nothing but a hole in the ground.