Traffic

The traffic inches forward.
                          At times it sheds its hide.
For a while it places its head between its knees
                          and feels sad.
Don’t know whether it’s dead or alive.
Don’t know whether it’s moving forward or backward.
Like a torso whose hands and legs have been broken by someone
                           it keeps struggling.
A policeman’s vehicle too
                           must keep fighting for life like the fish caught in the line.
Someone keeps kicking it on the buttocks.
Unable to move back to go ahead
it keeps kicking helplessly hopelessly like an epileptic.
Two crows sitting on the electric wire
fearlessly shit on the traffic-head.
                            The traffic like the lame man
                            crawling on all fours in Sultan Bazaar –
doesn’t break, doesn’t die.
It keeps moving with the last breath in its tail.
Here, I from the Irani restaurant
                             hurl fragments of looks
on the immobile measuring-scale of traffic
                             like a boy throwing stones at a dead snake –
The river that can’t move doesn’t give birth.
The anguish the pain of those that witness.
It would be so good 
                            to shut this traffic like an umbrella and put it under the arm.
Very irksome. Won’t let off. The poison won’t get to the head.
Irritation. Interminable intolerance.
I’ll break the bund and jump to the other side.
There’s absolutely no difference between the living and the non-living.
As the machine controls the world –
                             an amazed world.
Perplexed and confused a young girl
                              with finger in her mouth stands at the edge
hoping the traffic in kindness will give way
                              like the Yamuna river giving way to the little Krishna –
But 
this traffic, she is heartless.

TRAFFIC