I sit beside my daughter on her bed.
I cannot see her.
I've peeled and sliced a cold apple
To fill her late night hunger.
A faint incandescence glows behind my wife, upon our bed.
I see a silhouette of the shapely table lamp, swaying slightly.
The clock projects the time upon the ceiling.
From where I sit, the red, digital time reads 85:01.
All I hear is my daughter crunch on apple slices.
Soft, hypnotic, crisp.
The night is poised like the luscious glass of wine
At the edge of the bedside table.
A word, a spoken word, like a careless hand,
Will topple the night and make it shatter.

We picnicked by the peaceful lake,
My daughter, wife and I.
The ducks were happy. They don’t make
A fuss — they’re born, they fly,
On birthdays they don’t cut a cake,
They swim, and quack, and die.

When I'll be old and full of pains
And clogged up arteries and veins,
I’ll draw my final labored breath
And laugh and welcome paltry death.
For I’m a desi! I’ll depart
With paneer makhni in my heart.

May the scientists of the world
Have the genius and the wisdom
To invent that drug.

The drug
That sparks feelings of universal love
And bridges chasms
In the minds of men and women.

The drug
To fortify wills
And metalize spines
And unroll the dice
Of birth and fortune and faith.

The drug
To treat
Not fathers nor mothers nor uncles nor aunts
Nor the fading generations of an unchanging world
But to medicate the youth
Of our vast and ancient lands
And inoculate them
Against the prejudice and the cowardice
That corrupt my repentant heart.

Today was my birthday.

We picnicked at our beloved lake,
My daughter, wife and I.
On our way back home, I noticed
Our car’s orange warning light.
It said, "Service due"
And I thought:

Today is my service day.

I'll be my own mechanic of self.

I’ll change my moral oil,
Replace my mental filters
Refill the washer fluid
For the windshield of my heart,
So I can see the world afresh
With a clean and sparkling mind.

I'll grease my brakes so I can stop
With grace
And look back one more time
At things that I have left behind
Before they vanish in my rear-view mirror
Or overtake and pass me by forever.

I'll wash away the dirt and grime
Of the year that is past
And recommit to drive with love
My wife, my daughter,
My fellow passengers for life.

I’ll service my spirit every year, but
My body
Is a different matter.

As our planet runs around the sun
My body too will run and run
And run and run and run
And run and run
Run out of gas
And mortal oil
And shudder
And sputter
And stop.

I bought a home, a bit of earth.
I felt a man, a man of worth,
And sought another by the water.
But the waterfront is a common quarter
And so I searched for rarer air.
I found that air is everywhere
And so I thought I’d buy the sky.
But no, it's ordinary to fly.
My lords and ladies, queens and kings,
They’re not for me, these common things.

Now all that’s left for me is fire.
Now all that’s left for me — a pyre.

Herr Carl Gauss was a son of a gun
who constructed the monstrous heptadecagon.
He wrote agonizing eponymous theorems
and demented treatises on magnetic mediums.
It is indisputable that this scientist
was truly a despicable sadist,
for who else would make quadratic equations
have roots that are complex abominations?
It is Gaussian noise that I hear
when heavy metal assaults my ear.
Let it be said now! His sense of music
was physick.
Mr. Gauss is everywhere.
In functions and eliminations
and equations and interpolations.
He did not spare even gravitation
but his worst is surely the normal distribution.
Oh yes, he is everywhere.
If science were Italian cuisine, Mr. Gauss
would be sauce.
(And if you please
Mr. Newton can be cheese.)
This German is quite a pein in die auss.
Even my car sometimes runs out of Gauss.

I rush through life. My world is whirling past.
I tell myself the old and false cliche:
The time will come to slow and breathe at last.

At times I pause. A kiss, a song, a blast
Of rain. The donkey, Time, then starts to bray
And I rush through life. My world goes whirling past.

At times I pause. I think of what I've lost.
Of trips with her. Of each forgotten day
The time had come to slow and breathe at last.

At times, I feel the years unfurling fast
For my parents aging half a world away.
I’ve rushed through life. Their world has whirled and passed.

And now I see the swirling years amassed
Upon their eyes. Their faces, ancient, gray.
Their time will come to slow and breathe their last.

I tell them how I feel. They smile. With vast
Eternal hearts, they set me free and say,
“Live! Rush through life! Your world is whirling past!
Our time will come. Our love will breathe and last."

Once upon a time
The atoms that I am made up of
Were forged within the stars
And traveled across
Inconceivable space
And inconceivable time
To conceive me
Who conceives this.

This land — our land — is not a land for lovers
Like us. Forget our passion under covers,
My outcast arm around you, and even this:
Our holding hands in public, my furtive kiss.

The rains are here, the sudden summer showers.
They fairly fall on both our favorite flowers.
Your roses and my hanging jasmines drown
With neither love nor hatred raining down.

I watch the blind, impartial rain for hours.
I watch your home across this street of ours.
Your empty room, the roof of red, the line
For clothes, the flower bed. A home like mine.

No gods or men can tell our homes apart.
And yet they’ve slit your throat and crushed my heart.

He left his weeping father's side,
Exiled and dressed in bark and hide,
With loyal brother, royal wife,
Unfit for brutal forest life,
And walked an unlit stony street
On tender naked lotus feet
And heard above the wailing crowds,
Like thunder from some distant clouds,
An echo ringing in his ears.

The echo rang for fourteen years
Until he came back, riding clouds,
To fireworks, drums and dancing crowds
And walked with weary calloused feet
By rows of lamps on every street,
With no desire for palace life,
With hardened brother, tested wife,
And longed to flee, exile and hide
From the festive faces by his side.

A final time in fourteen years
He heard that echo in his ears.
And finally in fourteen years
He knew that echo in his ears:
The echo of his father's cries —
Those final, fatal, futile cries.

With lamplit face and lotus eyes
Lord Rama watched the endless skies.
The high and wide and endless skies.
The high and wide and godless skies.

The world is full of fearless girls who fought
Against the world to marry their true love
And lost.
               A few stayed single, rose above
Their grief — without an angry, bitter thought —
And filled their hearts with books and friends and tea.
But some, by parents, forcibly were yoked
To someone strange and broke, their spirit choked.
Yet others met a stranger destiny:
An unknown husband, then unexpected bliss
From roses, strollers, jobs and real estate.
For some, romance, again. The rest still wait
For a second chance, for love's addictive kiss.

We say that life deprived of love is death.
We’re wrong. What life requires is hope and breath.

The night is meant for us to speak
Of eternal things.

Of old and faded photographs,
Of chicory, coffee and great-grandmothers,
Of slow walks through blue and winding hills,
Of shades of a silent summer twilight,
The origins of life,
The origins of the universe,
Or, perhaps, the universes,
Or, befitting this ambitious night,
The origins of love.

And yet we all are here
Tonight to sit and talk
With a cup of tea in hand
Around this crackling fire
Among our friends and lovers
Upon this sandy beach
Beside these rhythmic waves
Beneath that open sky
Below those distant stars,
Where the atoms we are made up of were forged,
To sit and talk and talk
Of politics,
That most brief and transient of all things.

“The lion isn’t appointed
Nor crowned, by rituals anointed.
He earns himself his nobility
With courage, grit and ability.”

Thus declared a wise and ancient man.

And thus replied the wise and ancient woman,

“The lioness isn’t appointed
Nor queened, by rituals anointed.
She earns herself her nobility
With courage, grit and ability.

The lion is indeed appointed
And by his father anointed.
He’s handed all his nobility
In spite of sheer inability.”

Occasionally, in an enchanted moment,
In the midst of an incomprehensible love,
We resolve to take charge of our lives
And stop
sleepwalking.

We resolve to act, to change,
To become better spouses
Than ones deemed so by our spouses,
To become better parents and children
Than the imaginary ones conjured by our children and parents,
To become better people
Full of love and will and purpose.

Of course, nothing comes of it.

The moment vanishes,
As all such moments do,
And life, uncontrollable,
Springs back to where it was before.