New | Poetry | Three Poems | Akhil Mishra

 

Second Pair of Eyes

Some memories are ghosts of their own memoirs.

Mother’s first specs,

A-decade-and-some old

Bifocals, Gandhi rims, painted in city-gold.

‘Cheap and alright’ the seller had said. They broke today.

 

Should not have mattered. Ma never could read.

She was a living relic of that medieval breed

Where holding a pen was like riding a steed.

A moustache was your saddle.

 

Disruptions in my morning routine!

Things break all the time. It was old as the Peepal tree.

I ordered one off the web and set myself free.

Same difference, mother. Fret not, ye!

 

Dark days need more ISO, or the picture turns hazy.

I recall a woman battered by time - broken, but not blind.

Wrinkled white sari, those gaudy glasses, with a thread behind,

Like a bank teller, a teacher. She sat cross-legged in the winter sun.

 

My cab back home tonight is taking a detour. So must I.

When I was but a boy, a man had died.

They, by whom he was survived,

Survived with nothing but practiced pride.

 

I come home tonight and find, the dead man’s gift,

Her lovingly named ‘second pair of eyes’,

That Frankenstein - taped and glued and mended -

Now upon the Bhagwad Gita lies.

Some memoirs too, are memories’ slaves.

Letters in Ink

 

I used to wait for a time when I wore glasses,

and lived far far away, so I would get mail too.

Long letters from family, and birthday cards folded in two.

 

Like most things simple, the red boxes have been dead for a while.

I turned sixty today. There were no cards for me.

The mail now is ‘e’; delivered instantly for free.

 

The quote of the day by some Palo Alto hotshot -

“Emails would have a personal touch after the upcoming update”,

The 21st century notion of touch, too early, too late.

 

A father’s letters are data packets now, floating through the web.

The letter-box is a software, with attachments just to the files

Still a darned miracle they say, “In seconds across a million miles”.

 

With age comes adamancy. Can’t trade emotion for function!

I tear a sheet from a notebook, and watch it blot as my nib sinks.

In shaky hands I write a letter to myself, in watery blue ink.

 

Meaning

 

There’s never enough.

Time or Love or Drugs.

There’s never going to be enough

Money, hard earned sweat stained

Or stolen, stuffed into pillows,

shoved under the basement rugs.

 

Philosophy is a slave to the privileged.

Art, a concubine of the insane.

Living is just driving in circles,

On the right track, on the wrong train.

 

The men who yell hoarse to hide their faces,

Will hear them echo off their high walls.

And they who toil in hunger, soon

Will ask the right questions in clarion calls.

 

More verses will be scribbled in their answers

In new hands and old words

Their ink tasted in metaphors, metaphorically

In the blots they leave behind in their curse

And turned into a malady for every known cure.

Their meaning, forever obscure.