The View

Akshat Khare, India

Index of proper names
The view from my balcony
Confrontations of bluebirds with redheads
Sitting on electric wires that cordon off the air
My dead friend's mother
Looks up at me as she makes her daily rounds
Misery in the service of Muscles
On the corner of the unnamed street that intersects
With the cartographic errors
I see my neighbours build wooden shrines
From my empty alcazar
As I stand and write next to dead plants

Balcony #1

The green tarp used at construction sites blocks
From my eyes the moist warmth of my downstairs'
Neighbour's quiet life

Even in unseeing the dog's voice grates against


Balcony #2

An empty cane chair hangs
Across from lush sprigged potted plants
Yellow and green vases
Elderly earthen ones that smell of rain
Foreboding

When I am under the hail storm
Through their open door
I see them put out their hands
Into the world

Why are the plants on my terrace dead
And theirs’ still alive

The resilient snake plant has survived this case
Of Neglect


Balcony #3

This woman looks at me suspiciously
As she uses the wiper to chase out
Idle raindrops

The creeper climbs
A stick
Destined to go nowhere


Balcony #4

Behind their windows
Sometimes I catch the bald father
And his daughter playing
Ping-pong on their makeshift
Table

I think about my sister
Inside
And the net our father bought for us
Sometime before he died


Balcony #5

My sister's friend's cousins
Who have moved into the house where another
Friend used to live
Look outside from behind the plate glass
That has turned them captive
To the architectural police

Crimes of space that carve out
New rooms in brick and tin


Balcony #6

A crow lands on the hanging pots
Yellow Black Green Blue Grey White
Behind them an empty cage

The parrot has vanished
And so have many friends that flew over
To keep him company
The treetop roadside attraction
What is space after you've stolen
Its identity
What is a Bird after


Balcony #7

White hibiscus potted in brown plastic
Pots


Balcony #8

Sealed off and is now a Wall


Balcony #9

The young pomegranates are spilling out
Into the streets


___

The Balcony of Oblivion
Dissolving

From the Tongue of an Experienced Simpleton

Akshat Khare, India

With what words do I answer the Sun?

The song of time wordless
Flows through the matted locks of the destroyer
Shiva

*

On the streets of my city
Well-meaning people are handing out
Obscure books to the lost men who wander
And shuffle about in their faded green jackets
Searching in the back alleyways for the alchemic formulae
That can transmute old paper to bread

*

Which Chowk was it, Which Chauraha where Camus lies now
In a Jumble of linoleum and oil and fragmented steel and blood and bone

Kaufman did you finish writing the Great American Suicide Note
Before your old age death

In some forgotten gully of Delhi
Nietzsche in fits waits for a warm hand

In the palace of mirrors
His voice reflects eternally
Žižek stands fragmented and alone
In the Thar

Fisher I know it is you who haunts the sand stone forts of the pink city
Rambling to the tunes of jungle and jazz

At the end I can see you smiling Cioran
As the Ganga takes you
The celestial river of death and life

I found your bloodied bandana
Tangled in the branches of my Banyan, Wallace
What now

How do I balance your accounts Pessoa

*

Forgotten tongues trace out the alphabet of longing
On the backs of the unloved and the unloving

*

Signage: This is a memorial for the thoughts that died under the yoke of the unconscious

*


The Thousand Plateaus that drowned in the Aral
Dot it as Islands now
Tiny Islands once
Now Endless Desert

The Curves of the Landscape
Rising and Falling along
The shadows of her form

*


Zarathutra climbed the mountain
Searching for Solitude
But found only lonliness there

When he came down
He came down running

*


In the depths of the sunless stepwells
In the belly of the Bhramarakshasa
In the murky depths of forgetting
Messages without destinations
Wait
*

Saturday is a good day to die

Cobain died on a Tuesday
Calvino on a Thursday
Camus on a Monday
Wallace on a Friday
Mekas on a Wednesday
Kawabata on a Sunday


*

At the centre of the Mandala
Constellations of March are laid out
On the cloudless dark sky

In search for lost words
The tongue of the simpleton
Wandered the Thar
Rolling over every grain of sand
Gliding over the ever shifting dunes

Parched
The tongue found itself
In the Ganga tasting history
Drinking now the cool rivulets
From caves hidden away
In the Himalayas

Ending its journey
It folded back inside the simpleton’s mouth
No longer restless for secret meanings now
Having tasted the honey of unknowing

Akshat Khare is an Indian poet whose experiments with writing are directed towards developing a post-postmodern poetics. He is the author of Delhi Blues and Other Poems (2020), The Book of Saudade (2022,PANK), and Truth Be Told: A Tragedy in the Making.