 So I wrote a poem series called Pointe Thilism. So it's a double entendre. Everyone knows that Thilism, of course, Pointe Thilism is the style of painting associated with Odellon Redon. And Thilism is actually magic in Urdu. So henceforth, Pointe Thilism. So it's a six poem series. I'm going to read the last four poems. Cowboys and cowboys. Now that there are cowboys and cowboys. Now that there is a red line that breaks and breaks you, trumped up to twist into a noose. The same line I went humming arm in arm, what I called Ganga Jamni, what you called a Wendigram. Those lines are lost. The night is long. My mind's skipping like a cheap cassette, trying to rewind history with the turn of a pencil. These are the years of static and stasis. Kis kis ko batai in judai. To get to the analog of Inhi logoni, to jog that, thread that fugitive dot, noisy, nosy point of contention. To green absence, you need the pointilism of raindrops. There are wiles to reap, hairs of bigots splitting your side, as they try to untangle the bindi from Hindi, extracting the sand wound that birthed the pearl they stand on, lodged like a cumin seed in the sea crevice of a camel's mouth. Water has logged every mile of my grave. And you named each painstakingly painted rose? Yes, I did. Shamimara, Jahara, Shabnam, Nargis, Noshaba, Anjuman, Shagufta, Shahrazad, and so on and so on, until the 1,000 nights were done and there was the one left to right only, the very longest one. The Department of Wronged Rights. You have made a wrong turn. You have made a wrong right turn because left is right and we just wanted to drive that point home. Your life is wood, get the drift. This is now a checkpoint. Please to sit while you wait. We will check you in a box, in triplicate. BBG, by any chance that Adakara's sister, you mean the one that still lives on the tip of her tongue, tied in brackets of silence stuffed in her straight-faced helplessness? Mutation would require you to visit another office. We only mince words here. On stamp paper, it doesn't matter if you can sign your name. Thumb prints are necessary. Only the right thumb is right. Would you look at the price of pomegranates? Tell me, how can a simple officer possibly raise one's family in this mehengai? Please have some biscuit with the chai. Where were we? Yes. I was going to tell you about the siyagush, the supari jinn. It is he who cracks your nuts into a heart. He who folds your teeth into paper-thin walls of limestone, your legs into eighths of red ochre. He who breaks your spine into a moist green triangle spiked with nails of clove. He who offers the bite of bruise bright cardamom shot through with the tracery of electric moonlight jammed down your throat. Benevolent or evil? It depends on which way the wind blows. You must not only believe he exists, but solemnly attest before we can continue. Before you pass out of any port, you must solemnly attest. Before you pass out, we can continue. Notes from a holding pattern. When the paper-thin roses that began as a lullaby had climbed all the walls of her garden of the thousand and one nights, but first there was a gold-green blur and blood-red roses crowning the heads of walking thorns with the strength of ten oxen. Or so it seemed, Lahore was a mirage. If you got too close, it disappeared. Like all of her loves, she keeps Lahore entombed in her drawer, an entire city of rooftops and gray doves walled up in a four by six postcard. The mythical walled city itself, a walled in anarchally, hard-pressed in the pages of a Basant beyond all remnants of return. Taproots, the eyes of Leila are almonds. Morning is a white sheet where no one takes off their shoes, gather them into piles, perilous pyramids to recite the names of loss under your breath, circumambulating the graveyards of possibility. The eyes of Leila come into this world wearing their coffins. The eyes of almonds are blind, the eyes of Leila are blind. The eyes of night cry themselves blind and leave a wet shroud on the earth each morning. Don't cry for Leila, for it is you that has strapped her again and again. The eyes of Leila are a Leila of blind almonds. You are condemned to be lost in the braille of their labyrinth in the labyrinth of their braille. Bhuul Bhuulanya, there is no luck now.