the bindi escape

an ordinary girl with perfect features and a living deity 
caught between the nearly-broken zipper of time
of trammeled drapery of tradition
poached red beams and freshly-squeezed morning noises
pouring out towards the streets
hasty footsteps moving the alleyways forwards
the altar’s loitering in the still-tired square
beside sleepy fences of sanctified tourist postcards

a living deity’s forbidden to count her own steps
converse with her ideas
stir her body, with hands or mind, instinctively or intentionally
nor toy with the conceivable outcome of wandering matters:
making silver bullets pass through ash-thin petals,
leading a lost compass back on its track with a string of questions 
resurrecting timeworn earth with a punctured shovel
cracking open an urn with will
picking thorns out of glassy eyes
the pinpoint of apologies

she is to sit
within silence’s watchful reach
practice alogia
the plasma will flow in due course

12 days of purifying in isolation
she wipes the red sun 
belated dreams off her charcoal-rimmed eyes
the spirit vacates the body
light escaping between her remoistenable thighs

two entities lie languidly
in the corona of midnight innocence
making bolts out of peepal with burgeoning tongues

the bindi’s making a scandalous cross
towards freedom

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s