You say you want a revolution

"Oh Shivan, if you had to be Kashmiri, couldn't you have been Muslim? You'd have been so much sexier."

Unfortunately, dull quotidian loss is blasé. Doesn't quite have the attraction of a nice little blood-soaked revolution.

Allahs, that I shall never know the language of my parents.

This lack of a home is not sexy though. No flags to wave or songs to sing or Shakespeare adaptations to be made for something to which your only recollection and right is a white-haired woman's account of what used to be a home, before calls to prayer were calmly punctured with the hysterical laughter of midnight torture.

Sadda Haq unko dedo yaar, humein kehwa peene do.

Arundhati Roy is sexy. Delhi University girls with wits like zanjeers studying International Development/Relations/Politics/Economics whose Facebook About pages scream that they are 'Libertarian' are sexy. My beautiful friend who charms in a single conversation and studies social impact in Kenya is sexy.

I am boring.

Temporary

I fall into her
Insatiable softness,
and find temporary oblivion
in her too-small arms-hands,
and her softly insistent grunts
and the brown freckles
in her eyes, and on her soft white cheeks.

Ghost in the Shell ("Doublethink")

You don't live up to yourself.
You couldn't. You are human.

...

I am lost in the infinity between us
And nothing is real to me
Until I've translated it for 
The ghost 
That haunts my shell. 
I talk endlessly to Her
And this artificial intelligence
Is my Idea, and not even you
Can steal her from me.

But
I wait for her to dissolve
Into me, until all I can make out
Is flotsam, like
An outtake of amused breath
That shall pop into the landscape of my consciousness
Like a stray strand of
Brown hair.

...

I indulge
In this Orwellian game
Of not remembering
(Because you are my
Big Friend)
And holding on
(Because my mind
Is untamed)
At the same time. 
And every day I get better.

Of Scar Tissue and Compilers

We are
Always
One revolution
Of mind and emotion
Behind each other.

We fall
In infinite circles
Around equilibrium.

Stuck in orbit, we
try
To solve
A free body problem.

And this separation
Is delicate.
Stretching us to comfortable stability;
But
Does a snapping string
Make a sound
If there's no one around to
To hear it?

...

For silence you art, and unto
Silence shalt thou return.

...

And time and sleep shall heal,
As always, too much;
The great lobotomizers.

...

The turtle crawls into herself; alas
That fate is an artist, not a logician; alas,
That I touched too much.

Shelf Life

Ideas
Are cold.
They do not
Breathe fire
The way
Undulating skin
does.

But

Ideas
And memories
Last.

Prophecies

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/03/inkwell-16/

Eden

I wish you were a boy.
I wish you were a girl.

...

We played
Human jigsaw
last night, on
a mattress of your Original Guilt, and
my confused affection,

and in the morning it was decided
that we must repent forever
for the temptations of
The people we were
Last night.

...

And now, you
and your green God impose
Exile.
But
You have your guilt to sustain you;
What have I?

...

Hello coldness my old friend.