Vignettes

Faiz Ahmad
| poetry

 

I

An old man

wipes his glasses

with a handkerchief with no corners.

He remembers in circles.

He cries in circles.

 

II

A day laborer stands on a

pile of red bricks.

He adds another brick in his plate

when someone shouts

‘No color matches my dinner.’

 

III

A man lights up a cigarette

to live once more

in the span of the cigarette.

He ashes and he ashes

to make sure

he is not dead yet.

 

IV

A grocer sits within

a big glass jar of himself.

He shuts his eyes

into a dream.

The sun descends down

upon his shoulders.

 

V

A vagabond sleeps without his stomach

on a dead footpath.

So many cars drift by.

A glass window separates him

from you.

 

VI

Someone passes me by

on his ant.

Another man passes me by

on his ant

and another and yet another.

I follow their backs

until the ants swallow them.

Faiz Ahmad is a final-year student pursuing his Bachelors-Masters in Biological Sciences, IIT Madras. He believes in poetry as the ground of bewilderment, of amazement at simply ‘being.’ His poems have been published in Indian Literature, Off the Coast, Trumpeter, Muse India, and others.

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