the sun was rising, rising still
as if the morning like him was burning
with that desire that desires to delay
all desires, to starch every detail
in a noticeable shade that forces one
to surface when washed with gazes
but he swam on, past holy-named houses
streets that marked precisely the other
streets that sprouted from it— a proud node
of a familiar labyrinth— past the temple
the supermarket, the school, in that order
into that disorder, into a potholed road
through a gap in the yellow morning traffic
the road with gullies that were stubs
& scabs, posters stapled to the walls
with the sweat of poster-pasters &
house-shaped tumors that flooded
every monsoon. a cow was grazing
at the weeds by the open sewers
two girls were playing badminton with
a pile of burning trash where the referee
would have been— the road of the
goddamn real, a cacophony that she
must have passed through to escape
that privileged sheltered silence
of last night, of almost-happened fight
the jaded finger of a faded mural of ambedkar
points him into a gully spewed with pink
& yellow flowers. why isn't, he wondered—
wanted to ask her if he found her
somewhere ahead in time— why isn't
your reality real enough for you, why
this projected nostalgia for the oppressed?
but for now, he could only answer
in theory, what the scattered flowers
pink & yellow, really meant.
~ ajay
12/1/2022
