before - walking yellow streets - black buildings banyan strangling shadows -

wake up to god in a beard escaped from innocence - but the light -
a CFL eddy - shows it cousin on father's side saying his hands are dirty
with life - tell him the mythology of teenage - more than breasts & boners
& blood & semen - is about justifications gaunt excuses of how you are

what you are - little fictions realizing like chants everymorning typed into eyelids -

you are fire without a salaam of smoldering - no smothering sayonara -

you pot a rose in oil lamp - see houses content with being roofs -
cousin god confessed wanting to run away - but where kept him ropewalking

the golden thread - tongue tied with think twice -
I am on the canopy & the fall - caught by the branch a sigh away from thud -
dangling by a leg - looking the right way - from the right place - cupping jamuns
& squeezing them - undripping - not onto the fallow earth but into the sky
purpling it - she said you look the handsomest in purple - she is dead - or
at least married something the first day of her eighteen.

(huh, jamuns unsoaked in salt? what are you, a monster? look over shoulders at the jar
of salt, knocked off, smashed, by a running rat, or a cunning lizard. there used to be
an ocean here, it is a spill of memory, ma. I'll explain it that way, rather than clean up.)

~Ajay
5/7/19