Tu ne ye Phool

(you have this flower) — a poem

This poem is about love,
when botched gender roles made us all edges that won’t fit; 
and everything is political.

And it unfolded (this poem) on the trail of a Whittard teapot, in Covent Garden, on the 27th of December 2025 (with 150,000 killed in Sudan; 72,000 killed in Gaza and counting…) 
as holiday crowds heaved with capitalist devotion under Christmas lights and fake snowflakes wafting on the air 
like that night we lay in actual snow under the streetlamps, 
somewhere in Camden, 
pretending 
that the stars were raining down 
just for us.

Hang the bloody teapot.
I’m pinioned to the cobblestones, 
coz this busker has started singing ‘someone like you’,
and the crowd joins in the refrain with a single, unified voice, and they’re coming fast now,
the memories that ease with a sting, 
lapping at the shores of us sitting under the Cupid, at Piccadilly Circus, 
when we decided 
that life is very strange.

I’m glad we did then. Decide. 
Because God knows an open wardrobe full of sartorial choices now petrifies me.
And now the busker has turned this medley into ‘Hey Jude.’ 
And the crowd is still singing, with hands raised.
And I know I shouldn’t be here this time of year; 
full of landmarks that drew a trajectory to doom, as stars align in ominous portent (like missiles over starving people sleeping under tents).
It was the day after your birthday.
It was a confession on Christmas.
It was fireworks on New Years,
and the rest was a crippling history. 
You set the bar too high.

This poem is about love,
which is political 
when the insatiable greed of paedophiles has set the world on fire and they’re killing children (always, but now we see) 
and what right do I have to write a poem about love 
when we live too fast, and too crass, and too publicly too much all the time to know what a precious thing is a moment 
suspended before the next compulsion to comment or control or both, 
in conviction that I am not… I am never enough.

And it unfolded (this poem) with the riff of a magnificent sitar 
as the Qawwali party sat tuning their instruments for so long 
that we didn’t even know they’d started when they’d started.
In your hair —he’s singing now. In your hair. In your hair. In your hair. In your hair. Obsessing; 
at the mercy of an intrusive thought 
in a right state which more words cannot express…
In your hair, you have this flower.

And the translation punctuating his ululations is courtesy of my friend; 
her Urdu poor. The lyrics archaic. The low light from table lamps throwing haloes, romancing my mind to lull and linger in longing.
The thing I hid —he’s singing (apparently). The thing I hid. The thing I hid. The thing I kept hid, in my heart.
And now the text on my friend’s can of Cola Gaza blurs.
Pathetic really.
After all these years.
Hopefully you’ll never know. 
Hopefully you’re already dead, somewhere off the coast of Hokkaido preferably, with eye sockets hollowed out by deep-sea creatures. 
Or maybe it was the Yakuza. 
I hope they harvested your organs. 
I hope whoever has your heart is issuing a complaint, right now, over its propensity to skip a beat at the mention of monkeys in zoos that throw their shit.
Because I’d spare you this world I’m living in now 
in which children are dying before our eyes
and we carry on, after teapots and stuff.

And the urge to keen is visceral; 
to exorcise you from my bone marrow. 
To bleed out with the mantra of an intrusive thought that cannot ever say how. 
Your eyes. 
Your eyes. Your eyes. Your eyes. Your eyes. Your eyes terrified me. 
Your arms
…in them I was whole.

This poem is political.
It is about love,
like a memory lit in absolute darkness, when children are dying
and we are all broken.

2025/26