AJAY KUMAR - POEMS

Ajay Kumar is an undergraduate student based in Chennai, India. Poetry, for him, is an explosion of things he cannot say out loud. He was the editor of his school magazine- Abhivyanjana. His works have previously appeared in The Bangalore Review, Muse India and The Medley among others.

Angulimaal

I don’t know why I cover my nakedness
with doors dressed in tantalizing ajarness,
why the clock, when I punch through it,
gets lodged on my wrist & when I try to
shake it off makes me jerk off the air,
orgasming in a breeze that ruffles nothing
but the everything of me- never go into
the river with wounds, fish will lick them healed
& no one will ask you how you got those scars
& you will not narrate the solar myth labor
behind it- you won’t wake up with the nebulous
idea of existence, wet cloth on your forehead,
back of fingers feeling throat, palm in palm
in palm, no touch to bridge energies- 
I don’t know why I wrote haikus under benches
as if benches are for anything more than chewing
gum punctuation & lunchboxes before lunch-
appetite, when I lose it, will give way to digestion,
of the smells of the lunchboxes of the benches
still opened ahead of its time, by rusted words,
that pinch of sugar, that pinch of fingers that wait
on you swallowing a bitter herb when you woke up
with the nebula.

​

Fire medicine
​

Has a knight ever slain the damsel & loved the dragon,
the words you say sometimes are exactly not what you 
meant, wondering at the accuracy of error & the shell

of metamorphosis, the Taoist alchemists were thinking
immortality when fiddling with sulfur & saltpeter, would
have they thought fireworks, tunnels, mortality- tunnels

pincered on both ends by LED fingers, the jade mirrors,
looked into by gunpowder fathers, look at hungry animals,
on gunpowder mornings, in 250 sq ft apartments, thinking

only of dawns.

​

& the cycle chain slips
​

/ The fishermen go to farm, hand sickles slung across the back,
gandasas hooked on lungi-folds, on-head baskets kept on
 with broken twill weave wraps, the crops
 all mirrors, caudal fins rooted,
gills un-gasping, 
the 75 iridescent scales
 sheet music of boat-songs,
 fading as the oar-printed hands swing 
& the baskets get heavier/

/ Mad, the jungle of legs,
waxed hairy bruised muddy
thighful gaunt, rainbow,
a cadaverous spill of bicycle dreams
to any eye but there is none
& the legs cycle in the nirvanic breeze,
propelling the jungle forward/

/ Some pale eggy thing on the mountain top
is sun, & when you see a hatchling drooling
by the dewy grass: say good morning/

​

song, purple
​

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 and boners 
And blood and 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 and fall- caught by the branch a sigh away from thud-
Dangling by a leg- looking the right way- from the right place- cupping jamuns
And 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 
A ocean here, it is a spill of memory ma, I’ll explain it that way, rather than cleaning up)

Or the eye storm

The battery would be dead today, this may well be
the last call for weeks. It was, for a month. 
I remember the mornings, resident mosquitoes, rubber trees
ejaculating into coconut shells tied to them. Nothing is in its place,
palms bent into bridges & the rising water drowned them, making mud
of houses, and bodies.
There is no longer that temple over there or the house behind it
nor the coconut-climber living in it. I remember him,
billhook on lungi, cloth wrapped around ankles, up the tree somewhat
exactly like Frogger crossing the road; me and my sister holding jute blankets
make them fall softer than sunlight and later eat them with shaved jaggery.
The coconut tree snapped in agony but nobody looked. I remember,
the yet unconceived memory, of the inability to write my name
on beach sand without the sea claiming it for herself.

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