Nothing is Missing
Arranged beauty, a vanishing self. Silent guns in the corner reveal an…
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From Matchbox
Matchbox – May ’26
Ruins of Ruins
Where monk-grey pillars and collapsing stone flesh echo the terracotta soldiers' search for lost beauty
May 28, 2026
A pillar, monk-grey, still standing,
while the slumbering flesh of stone collapses
into the slow erasure of desire.
Hannah whispers—
verses submerged beneath Heidegger’s aging skin,
where existence rusts and rots
like warring nations laundering their sins.
They smoke their secrets through charcoaled memory—
eyes dripping with extinction memories.
Night thickens inside their freckled bodies,
underground terracotta soldiers searching their pockets
for dead bougainvillea.
Is this the unconscious history of violence,
or the repressed rage of toy tyrants?
Everything burns here, even the dust of moon.
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PART OF A COLLECTIONThe Night, a Naked Knife and 4 other poems
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Ashwani Kumar
Ashwani Kumar is a poet, author and academic in Mumbai. Widely published, anthologised and translated into several Indian languages, his poetry volumes include ‘My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter’, ‘Banaras and the Other’ and ‘Architecture of Alphabets’. Recently, he has published “Rivers Going Home” (Red River)- a major anthology of Indian poetry. He is author of the acclaimed non-fiction ‘Community Warriors” (Anthem Press), and one of the chief editors of ‘Global Civil Society’ at London School of Economics. He is also cofounder of Indian Novels Collective, an initiative to popularise translation of classic novels of Indian languages. In leisure, he writes a book column in the Financial Express.