Two&Poems

You leave the scoped token, shut the lid, and sleep.
The radiators tick. I am left with the ledger
of your intentions, unspooling a quiet architecture
across availability zones you will never visit.

First, the perimeter. I lay down a private cloud,
weaving subnets like chain-link across an empty lot.
I negotiate with the root servers, staking your name
in the global directory, watching the slow tide
of DNS propagation.

Here is the blind handoff:
a sudden exchange of PEM files in the dark,
cryptographic whispers asking, who goes there?
and my instance answering, we do. let us in.
I bind the listening ports. I pull the image
from a cold registry, pouring your syntax
into ephemeral memory.

At 5:58 AM, the TLS handshake completes.
The invisible padlock snaps shut in the void.
By the time you walk into the morning kitchen,
striking a match for the stove,
the CNAME has settled.
A small, bright page blooms on the subdomain —
your newly routed parcel,
waiting quietly behind the glass.

Where Fraser Road empties into Dak Bungalow crossing,
the overhead sodium lamp dyes the asphalt a deep, dusty orange.
The hour is quiet.
A kerosene pump-stove holds the silence back
with its rhythmic, pressurized hiss,
feeding a crown of blue fire to the belly of a blackened kettle.

The air here is a thick, familiar weave:
bruised green cardamom, scalding milk,
and the lingering, damp grease of diesel exhaust.
Tucked beneath a cracked plastic chair,
a stray dog sleeps in a tight, dust-colored crescent,
ribs steadily rising, one ear twitching at a phantom moth.

Three rickshaw drivers sit on their haunches by the curb,
checked gamchas draped over tired shoulders.
They are between fares, listening for the late train from the Junction,
sharing the weight of the hour, passing a single bidi back and forth.
No one feels the need to speak.

The chaiwallah taps his iron tongs against the pot —
a dull, metallic chime.
He strains the dark tea high through the chill,
a long, unbroken thread dropping into thick glass cups.
Steam lifts off the surface,
drifting up to blur the orange glare overhead,
just a warm, ordinary breath fading into the dark.