Chaos and Kismet
Heartbeat or rainfall, will or whirlwind, kismet or chaos?
Lovers claim kismet wed them, but more love means more chaos.
‘What’s the secret ingredient of your ghazals, Amit?’
Rhyme is the chaos I use to make kismet.
She greets me with a meteor-strike
Kiss on either cheek. Bonjour, chaos!
The world is baking. Why fire clay in a kiln of form?
Beauty seeds a nostalgic naked ache in kismet.
Eros fires arrows, kismet, heart-seeking missiles
That burn up fools for fuel. At the warhead’s core? Chaos.
My sweet tooth hankers for whirlwind icing.
Birthday, doomsday, Thursday: layercake kismet.
Enough with catastrophe’s kissing cousin.
If this is kismet, I am all for chaos.
I plan the same mistake twice: Here, lightning!
Love doesn’t have the wisdom to ignore kismet.
The science of oops, the art of ricochet.
Not every cause has an effect. Take chaos.
The revolution looks like riots in the footage,
But the heart will dance through fire to restore kismet.
I’m sleep deprived. My mind is a wideawake chaos.
A true Sufi waves as he waterskis Lake Chaos.
One glance at the language, and Amit can’t control himself.
Through rhyme’s schematic chaos, at least he can force kismet.
Denial
There is no such thing as I used to love you.
Married is something lovers become in real time.
The way the sugar cube dies and gets reborn
as the coffee, the way a song touches her own face
as her composer hums in real time. Some say love
is in the heart, others, in the liver, but I say marriage
is in every tuned-taut nerve your lover’s name
strums in real time. Time is never more unreal
than in each other’s clockface-tickmarked irises,
two mathematicians forgetting dinner as they tot up
the stars, projecting their astral sums in real time.
Lyric, that lovelorn word, tells everyone who’ll listen
what it lost. Voice, like wisdom, comes in real time.
There is no such thing as divorce. When the knife
slides in, you feel it no more than the sting
a lidocaine needle numbs in real time.
The life left after a marriage is the silence
left after the music: infused, fused, full of what was,
a never with nothing in it that thrums in real time.
Ardhanarishvara
[Sanskrit, “Half-Woman-Lord” — name
of the unified form of Shiva and Shakti
that combines both genders]
The last rain, like the first rain, is
reborn as steam, a ghostly hiss.
The atmosphere is one sheer sphere
of fire. His hands say Do not fear—
upright, and facing forward—as his
numberless arms fan out, a lattice
to shelter her against the rain
that shivers like a peacock’s train.
Unless it’s she who shelters him,
her daybreak saree’s nightlong hem
becalming him like swaddling,
though she’s out of cradle songs to sing.
Now lover clambers onto lover—
no higher point, no deeper cover—
as lava sniffs between their feet
eager for more world to eat.
Destruction flows beneath them, molten
creation to its waiting mold. Once,
the icecaps melted; now, the boulders.
They watch it from each other’s shoulders,
neutral observers safe on ridges
as rivers buckle below their bridges
and boardwalks in the grip of gales
toggle and rip like fingernails.
They sleep, too, always at the same hour,
in the noontime of the flamethrower.
They rest their heads in each other’s laps,
a Mobius strip that never snaps
no matter how intense the shockwave
bowing the glass skyscrapers concave.
Their third eyes—either one, a warhead’s
blast crater—open. From their foreheads,
the dreams go soaring in a braid, two
vines on a trellis, a shared tornado,
the grapes that swell along those vines
blood blisters, crushed for the reddest wines.
And when they make love, like a parted sea
they come together. She and he,
two gasps, one breath, one shout, two ears,
teeth in each other, engaged like gears.
They only find out they are halves when
the gunshot of a glacier calving
startles them back to who they are,
or were. By then, they are just too far
into each other’s bodies. No border,
no bounds. The only way is forward,
both genders coupling in their form,
embraced, and braced against the storm.
