Towns of Maybes

I dream.
I dream about a big white house.
I dream about it sitting idly on a dreamy street,
drowsing lazily near the poppy fields:

Big trees,
slinging shoulders on a too-windy street,
heavy-laden with the swaying
iron swing.

A goddess of love,
swinging hazily
from the trees that eclipse
the side wing.

Walls,
as clean as a slate
before it turns haggard
with gibberish words
from learning kids.

Paintings
with no flaring nostrils, only wings.

I dream.
I dream about a simple white house,
sitting loosely
on a winged chariot of a simple dream:

A house that sprouts no weeds—jasmines growing
in the sink.

Walls,
supporting paintings of
Moringa and Saraswati—
no fractured rings.

I dreamt about an ownership—undisguised.
Black or white.

A simple white house
on the mango street
beyond dreams and dearth,

Picking oranges in the goddess’s garb,
celebrating with lemonade and
a fluffy cake of my lover’s making.

The sun slides slowly,
making room for a crocodile in the clouds.

Why is the crocodile casting a shadow over
this elegant dream?
Is there a possibility that I am waking?

There is a dream inside a dream:
a woman lurching inside a poised woman.
Unchanged.
Undisguised in the slick of thick and thin,
like a burn that fails to catch flame anymore.

I saw this woman, and then I saw a house:
a big white house
with constricted chimneys and barely a sweep.
Battered pages in a new leather-bound diary.

Then I dreamt of a different woman
and found a chimney sweep:

Bougainvillea-covered windowsills
and boundaries overstretched but
always lined and trimmed.

Are there more women inside,
rendering this existence redundant?
A woman inside a woman inside boxes of insidious women.

Can I carve a calm woman with tools blunted
by reckless use?
To stand at the equator while the earth burns at its edges.

Is there a possibility?
Or perhaps a fragile probability?

I had revered the towns
of maybes,
until my family built a home
In one.

I had refused to lock the doors
of my ivory home,
until my child crawls through one.

There was nothing wrong
With a town of maybes,
until I took a stroll
with my love.

The world I live in and revel in
doesn’t believe in superstition,
until my mother lives in one.

What o’clock?
What o’clock?
The watch ticks, and the lover stops,
Raking his brain over rain and rot,
And his eternal train of thought.

Oh, the empty spaces!
Annihilate the places where
The lover’s lover stopped,
The last time the pickle was out of the box.

What month blooms the flowers?
What month lays the bowers?
What love smells of anointed oil?
It’s a wasteland of wasted lovers.

Did you hear the streets stuttering?
Last night, there was a lingering—
A sepulchre of vanished words.
The hyacinth girl had tears of her own,
Falling fluently like shooting stars.

Oh, the empty spaces
And the deafening monotony!
The lover stopped at all o’clock,
But time turns yellow and knocks,
A little wet on the sides,

And nothing smoothly slides.
The corner is empty, but there are
Masquerades for every actor—
An actor in the making, and there is
No face to witness in any sector.

Are you rolling your eyes
At serpentine mouths, while
Curling your lips in foul treachery?
All that you deserted—
Is it now a mirage in the doleful desert?

It’s late o’clock,
It’s late o’clock.
There is an infernal memory,
Whirling in a whirlwind of no remedy,
Choosing the same eyes of deception,
Working our way through digital factories.

It is eternal
And infernal,
Dead is the internal.
All that is piled up in the mountains:
The lover’s desires
And weighty mires,
Rotting in the pit of Dante’s fires,
In the wasteland of wasted tires.