Crocin
Three men,
sick to their cells
in Periyar Nagar Hospital.
Limbs aswill,
an aguey mercury
pulped against anvil.
Sickled eyes wince
under soiled bedsheets:
Ellam nam neram.
Stirring the tar of the sewer,
indistinct nerve and sinew
that soundlessly fracture.
Caste scourged into marrow
and knuckled into bone,
caked like dirt under nailbeds.
The mute lingams of brains,
fissured by scripture,
inculcated self-erasure.
Blue-throated from poison,
bodies coiled into themselves
like oil-braided serpents—
half prison, half person.
Slivers of silver movement
scouring the basins.
Coins smelt by acetylene,
the welts of generations.
Splintered and blackened
like spent matchsticks,
stamped at the altar
of an extinguished candle.
Sacrificial damnation
at the hands of a Manichean God
grinding out births and deaths
on his mortar and pestle.
Crows thronging white morsels,
cawing their famine.
Portraits of sons,
hung with jasmine.
Promises, broken
like the tumoured system
that multiplies its ills
in fractals.