When the time comes, As I am lying on the floor,

I wish I wish  to the wishing well I had more time with you,

No river remembers the exact moment it became a river. It remembers rain, perhaps.

If I’m doing well but the sun is being cruel as I protest the rape and murder of yet another child.  My belly gurgles—I wanted to feel grateful this Ramadan,

Loosened from the  narrative of my own living  is a world

Get drunk by Gazal they say, I never understood that Until now,

Morning greets us with Upturned eyes. Or is it just me?

They say silence is peaceful. They’ve never met mine. Mine arrived at thirteen— uninvited, unannounced.

I am a phenomenon.  Like a whirlwind  I’ll twirl till I can  change the world. 

By twenty-four I could make my voice sound sunlight-warm over the phone. No trembling.

One thing the season of sacrifice whirrs though the air is the reminders of the story behind it. The intention behind the willingness, the grief behind the bravery and the miracle of God’s mercy.

The only problem in our ‘Shahebiana.’ Is our complexion, that’s not ‘White.’ Still, we don’t stop trying; use ‘Vinolea,’ Powdering our skin in layers, with might. We are back from the West: a few, We destroy the Congress in a chew. Although our Shahebs are our God, We make them angry on a nod. Whereas, we walk like the Shahebs. And give speeches in perfect English; But in the time of crisis: steadily we run, Like every other Bengali son.

And the crocodile cuts through the burbling rapid, mossy snout blinking with sun.

The plane begins its descent past the customary carpeting of sepia clouds,

You’re a traffic island in our consciousness, O Rabindranath!

Every word I write is contemporary  My pain is urban

I slip into your hut and salvage bones, a soul,

May love guide our path forward May joy bring us together. Shubho noboborsho and long live resistance.

One of these days, you will lose one or two limbs to the slow erosion of years, the same silence that took Grandfather’s stories mid-sentence.

Once in a full moon, Ophelia's flowers received full bloom, beside the daffodils, But they never saw eye to eye, as a narcissist only stares at her own reflection