Tonight I Bathe in The Dying River

brown skin, evergreen of scars
the battle for age-old bricks in the cemetery
of silent, rasping ghosts of my god, my
enemy who 
lives off of my squeezed and tweaked coin of one rupee
and signs my death, makes my feet stir;
roams around the checkered floor of the blessing house
	the city is saffron, it runs in the rivulets
	and the water, in every house is saffron
	but the colour of my hatred is saffron
	too
	it reveals, expatiates in the ghats
	of cow-dung stairs and sutras of happiness
	but the city received a curse of despair, depression
	evil termed as the city’s queen
	It will stay sad.
bring me garlands and marigolds
scarlet and raisin folds
offerings i offer from my terrace to unknown carts
while the raja of the city stumbles drunken to
the temple of my faith, solitary fancies
of empty pockets and wishes of a good
fight
the god of good, as we look upon him he punches
my god, who retaliates with demolition
you deserve more credit, my city
of love
where broken bodies lay 
breast to breast with purple marks
where a curfew stares, with khaki rolling 
on the road more than people
more than the daily rounds that my
newspaper-wallah makes
longbeards and greybeards and drunken seers
prophetic visions of visually vile demons
the ten-headed battered abnormality
to which the children are attached
like buds on a stem, fingers to a palm
the seers chatter on the cement
fueled by hashish near the broken potholes
that have lived for a century,for years
	my windowsill stained with betel spit
	fair house of beatings, of regarded overthrown love
	a lost soldier from a nationalist conversation
	bleats with unfiltered phobia of hands
	where 1992 began, and still lives in my gray cells
	and i return there, once every six months.

Mayank Rastogi is a student of literature at Hindu College, University of Delhi and an incoming Ashoka fellow. He is interested in dissecting emotion and guilt-ridden poetry, located in a localized context, and is also pursuing research on rural literature at the moment.