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.