Category: Poems

He calls his mother late at night.
The one who’s been a decade dead.
He asks her for some spinach soup.
Perhaps, caress his throbbing head?

He cringes at her loud reply:
The spinach isn’t good for you.
Your body needs the iron, but
The spinach has potassium too.

Your kidneys aren’t strong enough
To keep the ion balance yet.
So don’t you ask me for a thing
That I can’t give without regret.

The morning drains his sleeping pill.
His pain is back to wake him up.
He peeks into the bedside tray
Where Grandma used to leave her cup.

She’d beat you with her Jatra sticks,
He tells me as he figures out.
To match her words is easy, but
You cannot imitate her shout.

Discharge is quite the Fitbit day.
From Ward to Finance to Accounts
To Pharmacy to Nursing Pounds
To doctors on their hurried rounds,
And all the way again around.
And stairs, so many many stairs.
And chairs, so many waiting chairs.

It comes to thirty thousand steps.
That’s almost half a marathon.
So, that is why I daily try
To walk some fifteen thousand steps
And every second day some more.
And every third, some further more.
The way they train for Boston Half.

Except, I have no scheduled date.

A million-copy bestseller,
A man synonymous with “coach”,
Has this to say of giving care
To loved ones terminally ill:

“You’ll maybe save a single life,
A life who’s at the end of rope.
Instead, you could be building wealth
For million people round the world.
You’re wasting time and talents here.
Let go of Dad, let go of Mum,
Let go of spouse, let go of child,
Let go of pride you feel for you,
And come with me to serve the world.”

Perhaps, he’s right. Perhaps, he’s not.
He lives his word, I’ll give him that.
His mother came on TV once,
Disowned him, calling him a “cunt”.
It only helped his courses’ sales.

It’s not for me, this “Buddha Way.”
This “pure abundant selflessness”

He’s startled by
the clicking pen,
the toilet flush,
the oxygen.

He sits up with
pinballing eyes,
jackhammer legs,
nutcracker cries.

He pinches thighs,
then nods,
then sighs,
then, if convinced,
again he tries,

To shusshhh the bombings,
shusshhh the mice.

Just talking to her settles me.

I love the call. I love it all:
The silly in the serious,
Delightfully delirious,
The mask I drop so she can hear
The quiver in my voice so clear.

What stops me, then, from calling her?

Like holding on can save my life,
But letting go will ease my palms.
No wonder both my hands are clean,
While rest of me is Jackson Pollock
On the ledge of bottom rock.

It isn’t nice to make a scene.
But neither’s when you’re never seen.

It isn’t nice to fight aloud.
But neither’s when no fight’s allowed.

It isn’t nice to say “you should”.
But neither’s when you’re always shooed.

It isn’t nice to poorly rhyme.
But neither’s when your art has rime.

I “caught” them with their party cones
And chocolate cake that read “Hap Bi”.
They sorry-sorryied, wiping hands.
I sorry-sorryied, let them be.

I filled our bottles at the tap
And picked a promo flyer up.
It promised me some “carefree care”.
I turned it to a buttercup.

I left it with a sticky-note
Beside the always-ringing phone.
Our morning meds tray had a piece
Of smiling cake under a cone.

His writing starts with noisy breaths.
His eyes are closed, his jaw relaxed,
His body stilling for a sec.
He opens to a gentle gaze,
And scribbles in a practised hand
The bullet points of his advice.

Unlike the other doctors here,
He seems unhurried, strangely still,
Though like the other doctors here,
He visits dozens patients too.

The nurses tell me he has seen,
By far, the most demises.
“His Speshal-tea is death,” one says.
Another slaps her wrist, corrects,
“He deals with palliative care.”
“There’s not much money in that one,”
The former giggles through her mask.

I see him talking to a man
Who has been shouting all day long –
His wife is still in cancer ward,
In far more pain than she can bear.
The doctor stands unflappable,
And somehow it’s contagious:
The raving man’s behaving now.

If ever things get even worse,
I’d want this man to talk to Mom.

I ask the wheelchair guy to stop,
To take a little break and shop
Whatever orange notes can buy.

I tell him he deserves the dime.
Transporting patients all the time
Can be a damper on a guy.

He thanks me, winks, and runs along.
I stand like there is nothing wrong:
A patient’s transport gone awry

Upon a rusty bridge that cords
The ICUs to private wards
And opens out into the sky.

He likes the nightly summer breeze.
The way it tickles through the trees.
The way it melts into his sigh.

To feel it, not just see it through
The tinted glass in AC rooms.
To feel it cool his running eye.

The wheelchair guy is back too soon.
He puffs into the rising moon.
It’s time again to go inside.

So many who have lost someone,
Or losing one with every hour,
Or losing in the fight themselves,
And yet they aren’t lost at all.

They clean up every morning still.
They dress up, practice smiling still.
They cheer up patients sitting still.
And yet they aren’t lost at all.

They’re past the sudden waterfalls.
They’re past the pacing down the halls.
They’re past the sympathetic calls.
And yet they aren’t lost at all.

It’s part of living on, they say.
You have to find the strength someway.
To grow up, show up, everyday
Until you aren’t lost at all.