Puram/akam: I
Shells of the bra pinch my skin
like crabs clutching my breasts
Never mind me. A bosom
could be many a thing. A snug satchel readily.
I am often abreast on the bus with women,
their breasts bearing possessions:
purse, phone, identification; a mobile republic.
/
At home in this city,
on some days, life is a long afternoon
with only lizards laughing loudly,
cackling from their corners, startling
smooth turtle shells—vessels dozing
on the silver sparkling bank of the sink—
out of their slow, summer slumber.
Puram/akam: II
On a bus ride to the end of the world, close to the sea,
sweat trickles down the ridge
of my spine into the ravine
of my gluteal cleft. The cold heat of my practicality
has been inadvertently aiding in the evaporation
of a love lubricating my heart. Now, the fistful of muscle
flinging itself against breastbone is afraid
of being closed tight as a sphincter. In a stable
but inert atmosphere, veins and ventricles
of this living red strawberry, miss the lissom lassitude
felt in the whipping-sweet lather of love
On another bus ride back from the sea,
in a moment caught, I am smiling ear to ear
Love? A loving picture
with a line from Zainab Ummer Farook
Puram/akam: III
A pigeon perched on the polished pate of Gandhi poops her worries there
Looking out from the window seat
of a blaring bus trudging territorially, I spot and stare
Sometimes I think, should I start wearing
a cross on my heart and my heart on my sleeve, and shake up things?
It would not be wrong to say, or so I suspect,
my love, like my poetry, remains
amateur and earnest. At home, smoking
and staring out the window twice a day,
sometimes I sight pigeons bathing on the next-door terrace
in a pool of rainwater, either in the mint-pressed morning light
or in the cut-diamond dusk rays. I am in the middle of my life
and happy. Solitude cuts both ways
only on nights too quiet to dream
Carol Blaizy D’Souza is a poet, translator and researcher living in Chennai. A collation of her work can be found at linktr.ee/cblaizd.