who are we? [verse libre]

All night at my office
sometimes office work
sometimes poetry work
as if the
left & right steps
of the foot of the soul
in its body
couldn't bear being
apart from one another
for all too long

now dawn
begins to crawl
into the world
(another day missing
my predawn
music practice)
will hasten home
since at 8 a.m.
I join a few mureeds
cleaning up breakfast

am printing out
a few hundred pages
of chemical structures
& directions to
manufacture some
or other pharmaceuticals
to be filed with the US
Patent & Trademark
Office today by
one of my lawyers

not my invention
I'm the
workingbox wallah
in this small
non-drama
while the poems
buzz like (one
trusts) benevolent
flies around inkpots
of loft poet-charmers

somehow finally
made it to Ghalib's
stomping ground --
the Mirza Ghalib
Academy's a pinkish
building along the
narrow-alleyways
pilgrim route to
Inayat Khan's dargah
from Nizamuddin's

someday if I study
his language aright . . .
someday this &
someday that . . .
how many lifetimes
need we spend in
translating the
poetries of our own
former selves?
& who are we?

---

mureeds (Farsi/Urdu) : students [meaning here, fellow students / friends]

workingbox wallah [Indian English (of Brit. Raj era)] : typewriter artisan = typist (or in the instance, word processing specialist, if you wish)

dargah : tomb-shrine