Widening of NH 17

1.
Acquisition came to occupy
like aalmaram, alamara, alarum
districts of our tongues
that wouldn’t budge but was made to
to accommodate. It became how dinners ended:
a prayer in an adventitious tongue that we intone
to keep us either safe, locked,
exposed, open, whichever might be—enamoured as we are
metamorphosed to moths overnight
buzzing ‘what if that light is what I think it is’
burying what-if-it’s-nots
just happy
to see hope as a serving on a platter.

2.
It also became how the newspaper,
when brewed and downed, made us gaze
beyond our gates
till our eyes turned into bore wells
craving sight.

3.
‘We know selling and buying’,
a he or a she would pronounce, pause,
and, very carefully, place ‘home’ to ward off
a strafe as you position mothballs
on every cupboard of your alamara
like a ‘keep off’ sign.
Old senses in youthful lenses stare at maps,
cleanly cut by asymptotic lines
that mulch and march to either edges of the paper.
A paper can’t always contain the world,
still it cuts and culls ours like a crazed collop-man.

4.
grouped and sub-grouped,
submerged in ourselves,
by what we stand to lose (and not what we own) as in a hospital ward—
I lost my kidney, I lost half of my liver, I lost my tongue, I lost my big toe, I lost my brother, I lost my beginnings, I can’t clot my blood, I can’t clasp my keys, I can’t feel my knees, I can’t remember, I am membered
into many.

5.
Gates. Gardens. Gardenias.
The guava tree. Porches and pot-plants.
Arches and orchards. Corbels
and courtyards. Front-doors and foyers.
A fistful of welcomes. A furlong
of lingering. Where we sat
and planned vacations. Where we potted
anger to harshen. Like those chairs we settled on
and likened the world to—limbed, limping, losing
things they gave homes to.
Where the old woman would stand and sand out her acquisitions to atone for living so long.
The woman who wears her room like her bones counting watermarks on her ceiling than moles on her skin.
A child who comes to cry into an elbow of the tamarind tree. A mynah soaking it up and making it home.
A wanderer who comes to these shoulders to curl and wait for wandering.

6.
In place of houses, we picture caves and turn cavemen, feverish, (and eventually futile), in our search to find boulders to seal mouths.
Reaching for roots is hardly what will solve this, acquire means ‘add to possessions’, quirere meaning ‘to search’,
where do you plan to home in grilling through to bedrock, what do you ‘acquire’ by destroying than destroy,
acquisition despite being downed like pills and draped like poultice leaves a stain, a staleness which when animated becomes a giant who wrecks homes as he walks.
Its cupboard doors keep rattling on hinges keeping us awake and insane
in our awakening.
It becomes an alarum that keeps saying what it said before. Wake up so that I can cut you and watch you unbleed into quicksand.
We have to go back perhaps countless times and keep searching so that it forgets the greed, the grating never-enoughness of acquiring and stops at the instant short of finding what it found once in acquisition.
As of an aalmaram that keeps coming back and roots and, endlessly, roots around.