Nitoo Das (India)

​Geeta Sings a Thumri
​
All you ever wanted was my voice.
A corrupt, cross-hatch voice.
A throat you could fill
with spit, with seed
and close-ups of your face:
plump and quizzical.

I gag with you now.
Now that you’re dead, dead,
dead. I gag
with the smell of my skin,
my bloodbath, my own
breath.

You wanted my voice and her
body, her greyscale smiles,
her alien laughter.
You wanted her mole.

Ang laga lo, ang laga lo.
Ang laga lo, bastard.

That’s my voice and her drunk,
drunk hands drummed into bruises
by a smoke-filled, transparent you.
Two women, each a fetish for you.

I want to gouge you out of film,
put on view for you: tragedy.
How it gnaws at you without glycerine.
Or Sahir’s poetry.
How it’s just a shriek,
wet and cunning, waiting
behind curtains. Replayed
without end in the dark.

You recorded me into wife,
performer, follower. I am faithless
without you. Shrivelled, undressed,
out of place without you.
Oh, Guru,
Guru, you never knew
how I loved you. How
I failed you.