4/7/18
Editorial | TSC Special Issue- 11 new poets | Amrit Ghosal
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| Credits : Amrit Ghosal |
The curious thing with creative pursuits is that if you do not push the boundaries of expression, you collect slime. Soon enough, the standing waters of rhetoric begin to decay and no amount of congratulatory echo-chambers can manage to contain the bad news: the trick has gotten old.
Usually, poetry written in any age is unique in terms of subject-matter, tone and style. It evolves with every passing generation, by giving words to unprecedented anxieties, hopes and longings. The gifted voices of every generation build upon the works of their predecessors and most importantly, add insights of their own, providing contemporary relevance.
Ironically, the new form of expression soon becomes a sort of formula to set words to. Only a few are able to push the envelope in the any sense. Suddenly, everybody starts to write Formula Poems and everybody is happy! To this I say- Fine! Do whatever you want. Follow the formula as much as you want! Be safe in your little cocoon of predictable identity and expression! It is your ignorance of what art can do, of how all-encompassing it is.
Soon enough, a market begins to grow around the new scene. Books, readings, festivals and so forth; but as we all know, there is no big money in poetry.
However, political situations change, new social contingencies arise, the young folks start getting impatient and the old ways just do not cut it any longer. Everything looks stale, blunt, far removed from reality.
As the urban upper-middle class’ post- liberalization wet dream of the new millennium begins to flake away like paint from a crumbling wall, the new-found nightmare of disillusionment, broken hearts and muffled screams of alienation proceeds to inform and reshape poetry entirely. However, this awakening does not occur in the hardened ways of Formula Poems. When, if at all, was creative expression expanded into new spaces by artists who were afraid of losing their reputations?
With such thoughts in mind, this edition of the Sunflower Collective is publishing fresh voices in English poetry in India. The poems collected here do not seek approval or try to fit in. They exist simply because they had to be written. These are testimonials to the fact that the Inside and the Outside are blending into a paranoia of invasion. The doorstep is an illusion when all spaces have been encroached by the political and social unrest of our times.
Back in the day God died, then died the man/woman. Politics died about three decades ago and now people say that we have reached the age of Post-Truth as we stare into the debris collected from history: plastic, blood and arid land. A nuclear apocalypse seems more popular in the collective imagination as the fate of humanity than structural changes in human affairs – for example, the need for privileged communities to share the spoils with lesser-endowed ones. When the hope for truth is abandoned, disaffection sets in. Where is the ground beneath our feet now?
Metaphysical speculations seem redundant because we face unimaginable ecological destruction, nuclear threats, continuous wars and death-battles between communities.As these battle cries ring across the television sets and WhatsApp messages, a Baudrillardian phantasmagoria of confusion spreads its wings and talons. You grapple in the dark sea of (non)-(mis)-information. No wonder disillusionment is an inheritance our generation has to bear with. What faith can one have any more in any part of the present political spectrum? Yet the absurdity of it all is that there are many who are full of the Yeatsean “passionate intensity”. Guns and swords and Molotov cocktails are brandished in the streets of major capitals of the Western and Eastern worlds every other day. As Bukowski had foreseen, this is a time of open and unpunished murders on the streets. Educational system has crumbled under a systemic dismantling of progressive policies and the academicians are pushed to self-preservation with their backs against the wall. The rest adjust themselves and turn into torturous snobs. Through it all the "vast lamb of the middle class" winces in pain and smiles in hypocrisy.
In this severely debilitating condition of alienation arising out of our inability to connect whole-heartedly with any political alternative, we look towards poetry. However, we do not want poetry that toes the line of Opportunism as a culture. We do not want poems replete with with the same old images and diction. Most importantly, we do not want poems that play safe to build a career in the age of the commercialized consciousness.
Poems | Atri Majumder
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| Credits: Amrit Ghosal |
New Clichés
Rivers of agitated ecstasy
Crawled on the glass pane;
Where was I
In my rehearsed dreams?
The scars on the sky are leaving
In that patient hurry,
Craving for anonymity.
Those who can see me are not me,
They merely know what I can’t see.
New clichés possess me,
Every time I confess,
I lie.
Finally, I am alone
In my loneliness.
Waiting for numbness,
Waiting, for indifference.
What for?
Insomniac Dreamers
Whispers of the shadow
Crept into the light-
I don’t have a beginning,
I don’t know
How to end.
I am disappearing,
Fading away,
Returning,
Forming,
Nothing
Out of nowhere.
A Curious chiaroscuro-
Like a curtain revealing more,
Much more than the window.
And you thought
You will never go back,
While you were returning?
At some point,
You’ll get back
Good times
Are just
Around the corner;
And all those clichés-
A shameful escapade.
But you never reconciled
With that omnipotent despair,
You overruled reality
With future-
A happiness weaved
Out of hopelessness.
Perhaps
You were right,
And you knew it.
Chicanery
A crystal ball shattered in the sunlight ;
You just couldn’t keep yourself
From turning back,
From devouring another glance.
It wasn’t forgotten
It never did it wither away,
It was denied its presence.
Existence can’t be clinched,
Its essence merely submerges.
None of us knew time;
What we were leaving was
What we have lost. .
I was just reminiscing ,
While you were predicting.
Missing Diary Complaint
The evening was stoic like the eyes of the lizard;
The old man at the gate wasn’t aware of anything.
The door was closed
But not locked,
Leftovers on the kitchen-sink,
Cold ruffled bed,
Tablets and a whiskey glass
An ashtray of promises.
Uncalculated excuses,
Silently accusing the mirror.
And a note on the refrigerator;
“Come back and leave.”
Beaten Blues
She led me to the place
Where they sell innocence;
She told me what to expect,
And taught me how to forget.
The silence of the insects
Invades the light in the cobweb;
The pebble moon flickers,
Twisting stars in the staircase.
I took her away from there
Where they buy despair;
And I made her realize
She was rolling an empty dice.
White Stains
A half-melted sun sputters,
Restrained to a diseased night,
Like ink dissolves into
The veins of water.
Baffled hands seek the fingers,
In this last of all places-
It’s all about leaving
All that’s left behind.
Poems | Prashant Priyadarshi
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| Credits: Amrit Ghosal |
(1)
The evening just passed. My legs warm inside the quilt
and hands cold, heart not content but also not unhappy.
All of a sudden, it came to me like a revelation:
that love is not water, or not even air,
one can live without it; I am.
Now that I do not feel the need to please anyone
and do not have to go out for anyone’s pleasure,
the trees are shadows, the air flake.
I walk around in shabby clothes, bearded face, crimpled,
dreaminess with a sense of freedom but one always wishes
A few things, something that is like water,
Like air.
(2)
Visible Cruelties
My dreams are made of foreign things.
Burning trees, each leaf a familiar face.
They drop on molten lava of silver, vanish with a wisp.
The roots have penetrated deep into the earth.
Branches scattered with cosmic magnificence.
I solemnly stand and look at the moon, a lion
Roaring over the sky. My familiar faces
Now silver. Everything I had is now
Being given away to this river with the invisible Charon.
(3)
A Woman with Spells
It is very hard to recollect
when I saw her first.
she always had a shabby
packet; her legs stilted
in a V shape.
unhindered spells
on her lips
moving as indifferently as people
around her.
Always with someone, I never
had the chance to stop and observe
or talk to
the woman with spells,
beside the MMV
or outside Malviya Bhawan,
just inside the Singh-dwar.
She meditates on the road and vehicles,
sometimes on people.
One can never know.
(4)
Today’s Schedule:
Wake up early. Eat.
Look at the birds. Think of yesterday.
Nausea. Plan the same future-
Which must be different from the imagined.
Read. Replace your void with exhaustion.
Write. Drink Tea. Daily chores. People.
The day passes in your room. Eat some more.
Read some more. Write even if you do not like it.
Think of metaphysical things-
For example why are you here? And other clichéd sentiments.
If possible, die,
Rethink of dying
(5)
It so happened that whatever this man I am talking about thought, turned into reality. It was hard for him to control his hallucinations turning into reality and in the right sense, he never learnt to control it.
Once, while walking through the pavement, he thought of a small molecule and the world inside it, the next moment he could see the outer lining of his molecule of imagination covering his cosmos. There was a fatal demerit to his imagination, once he created something, it couldn’t be destroyed, only managed and that too if you have that will within you.
So the world around him was now confined to a molecule and everything existed inside a molecule, a molecule which could be dried away by a single blow of the wind, the moment he thought of the wind, a gust of wind passed, he could see the drying of half of his molecule of imagination.
(6)
The Black Isle of Innisfree
I am here, here now, in the isle of Innisfree,
Locked in a cabin built here, know not of what things made;
Illusions of freedom I have here, a dive to the will not free,
And live lone in the free-loud dread.
And hope of peace is not here, for peace doesn’t come, fast or slow,
Dripping from the veils of dreams to where the dreary silence rings;
Here midnight’s all a bummer, and noon a scrupled blow,
And evening full of the lamenting streams.
I am here, here now, for always night and day
I hear mundane water of time with conscience-bound by the shore;
While I sit inside the cabin, or by the river turned so grey,
I hear the futility here, in my heart’s core.
(7)
The noon shatters
A yellow gloom rises,
Collapses to rise again.
You are more river, more boat, more of silence.
The curtain of blue lulls you in a palanquin.
Dream of delusions, bit of fire and bit of fields
Filtered and fermented through honeyed rays
Rising like the evening gulls, lost in time
You become more of a desert with hope of water.
The picture of a static ship with a hopeless sailor.
Always suns and moons and the guises of starsAlways flowers and laughter and songs
Nocturnal breeze places you in silhouettes of stillness
As if you are absent, as if you do not exist.
Your languishing winter body fructifies golden strands.
An old man sits, reading the newspaper.
A six year old girl draws a palm tree
And you sputter in thin air, with a thousand kisses.
The green kisses of Peepal, and the kisses of no colour in the air.
The kisses of dreams on my body, almost touching me
With more miracles, more villages and endless grass.
The evening coffee, the blotting sun staining meWith more of you, which I wash the whole night,
Without any success, I hide it under the clothes,
Almost visible, like the sighs of night
Beside the pond, and something crackles
Unrestrained, echoing you, in ancestral minstrelsy.
(8)
I can go from loving to not loving in a single second.
I am as treacherous as my city which changes each moment.
I have awakened to a field covered with hedges and slept with buildings covering it.
I am insolent and ignorant about the past, the past is facing the shadow of a tree and the future sun.
I rise to a silence, tumble into a turmoil, dance with choirs, and dream at night of another day’s toils.
I have only one poem left in me- the act of brushing my teeth- upward, downward and sideways.
I am standing at a cliff, looking at life, the acts, touching nothing, sensing everything.
I have at last understood, I am of no one and everyone in my own way.
Poem | Mekhala Chattopadhyay
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| Credits: Amrit Ghosal |
A Poem for your Calm
And
When the wind blows,
You will always find
Poems scattered.
Pollen grains
Upon this dirty doormat I had bought
Just for a show of cleanliness.
Nobody picks them up.
Who knows they are there
But me?
That they do not grow on a tree,
But hang on to old, sagging trunks
Preparing to die, to be washed off
With pretty, colourful detergent bubbles
Packed with memories of innumerable
Advertisements thronging my TV screen
On quiet days just like this
With the wind blowing outside.
Poems decide to leave me,
They love the dirt.
A hypocritical calm,
Descends softly over my timely routine
Of buckets full of habitual dreams,
Plaguing the boring shelves,
Hanging under the weight of unused treaties,
On days just like this,
When a scarecrow keeps hopping seamlessly
Across my mind.
Poems | Prabhat Jha
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| Credits: Amrit Ghosal |
Memory,
How convenient is it for you to erase everything?
Genocides, Gas Chambers, Ghetto makers, rotten, burnt dead bodies.
Everything disappears in oblivion.
Religion,
How important is it for you?
Gods, Goddesses, Mother India, holy rivers, temples, idols, cut-outs.
Everything is in front of you,
On a stinky platform,
Never to be forgotten.
Opinions,
How far do they irritate you?
Left, secular, independent, thought, reason, empathy,
Everything is useless
For the idol must be worshipped.
History,
How do you see it?
My history, your history, truth, agenda, propaganda.
How dare you negate?
Nation,
Who shall be there?
Nation,
Who shall be there?
You, You, You, and not they?
Them Jews,
Them Muslims,
Them Tribals
Them Dalits.
Future,
What do you want to see?
Go get the a job, promotion, go get rich,
Kill ‘em all, make it easier.
Support him, Support her, for they’ll make it happen .
.
Useless?
Love, empathy, courage, society, people, me.
Bullshit.
We are the bees inside this Beehive.
Ban Dook Dom
Ban Ban Ban Dook Dom
A Kingdom of Ban Dook Dom
Ban beef, Ban grief,
Ban chef, Ban Chief,
Ban all the movies, Ban Dook Dom
Ban pussy, Ban Cock, Ban Dook Dom
Ban love, Ban dove,
Ban protests, Hand cuffs.
Ban heads, Ban hands,
Ban gays, holding hands.
Ban Tribals, Ban trees,
Ban farmers, you can’t seize,
Ban eyes, Ban heads,
That look at you, not dead
Ban Dook Dom.
Ban dikidi dokidi dikidi hoop
Ban Press, on loop loop loop.
Here in your commode my democratic poop,
My cock is caught in your jingoistic coop.
Ban Dook Dom.
Glory Glory in your illusive story,
My truth is treason, your gore is glory.
BOLL WEEVIL
(Dedicated to Shri Krishna Kalamb, a farmer poet who committed suicide in Vidharbha.)
I am a boll weevil,
Unknown,
To the cruelty of the pitcher plant,
Going towards it,
Hypnotized,
To find some relief,
From hunger, and surrounding death.
Progressing,
To fall in the pitfall trap,
Smelling like cotton.
I have reached its periphery,
And now have entered the pitfall,
The sides are slippery,
I cannot climb back.
My death,
They say,
Is necessary,
For the growth,
Of the pitcher plant.
I cannot sense anything now,
Numb,
With a bloodless body,
Remembering my happy days,
Unwillingly I surrender myself,
My death, is inevitable.
Poems | Dipanjan Chatterjee
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| Credits: Amrit Ghosal |
Moon loop
Light shattered on our souls,
Beautiful blue light yellow mellow light
It landed on our backs and ricocheted
Against jazz
And coffee, her eyes
Stretched from moon to moon
I know this Bombay breeze
It is love against my skin
Without notes,
I love the
Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta
Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta
And the
Ta Ra Ra Ta Ta Ra Ra Ta
Ta Ra Ra Ta Ta Ra Ra Ta
“It is all so Bombay”, she says
And I half remember the sad woman
With self-harm fantasies
Then
The sea came over
To us with carpets of colours
And communism, with crescent symbols,
Held a mirror to us,
Sharpened our skins
With the sickles,
There were more questions
Than answers, when
I was asked
To choose between love and revolution.
Animals
First
I must become an animal,
Eat like Aghoris, do like the bunnies
Swoop down like a crow on the filth
With a longish beak
I must peck
At things,
And people
On the heads
In random insecurity.
I must live without a name in the beginning
Then I can learn
About an egalitarian society,
Leftwing politics
I can see it wet my skin,
Go down
Slowly, trickle in my eyes
Finally, when I am baked
I must command
All things to stop,
Time too.
Else,
1. I will develop the tumor of false diction,
Fatty liver of language, cancer of correctness, suave vocabulary
Vernacular allegiance
2. I will make bad representations of the Northeast
3. I will write like some woman in lovely skin and fancy clothes
About equality and privileges, about fake orgasms,
Pretending to fit into other’s shoes
In a language that would stink of imitation
So first, I must become an animal,
Kill and pile, scrounge for my next meal,
Learn about territories,
I must write
In my incomprehensible language
About fascism
In the animal times,
Until
I tone down,
Round up,
Enter structures
Without assuming names.
Poem | Abhishek Ray
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| Credits: Amrit Ghosal |
As in the tremolo bends
Jacking up the rhododendrons and thistles
Glimmers of hope shredded unbound
Photons intercourse to the point of inflection
Diffusion, ah alma matter, trudge now
Novel garrison of sheathed glass
Shed no shade
Shout and laugh, gay at bay
You be dazzled
Gleam, you muddled laws of reflection
Come forth the brunt of corpuscles
Vandals and sages, alike they look,
For the queen drinks away the twilight.
Poem | Richa
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| Credits: Amrit Ghosal |
Disgust
Only if I could cast off my clothes
My underwear
My nipples, my breasts
My uterus, my clitoris
And that womb.
My vagina too.
Shed all my womanliness,
So I could show you
What I am and what I have
Become because of these.
What have the straps of my bra,
The scratch of my dupatta,
The prick of my anklets,
The play of your gaze,
The burden of your expectations,
Done to my being?
Then you notice
The design of my mind,
All my cunningness and my tricks
My compromises
My sweet voice…
You surely know all of that!
Do you also see my half-hearted consent?
Do you care to ever see?
Let me tell you loud and clear
It's disgusting to be sweet!
It's awful to be caring
It's insensitive to give consent
With half a heart.
Piercing is painful
Nose, Ears,
And...And waxing !
To look beautiful
Is ugly.
But only if I could
Cast off everything, .
Just about everything!
So I could tell you
My truth and yours too.
Poems | Noor
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| Credits: Amrit Ghosal |
What must I write to you?
What must I write to you?
You, who have read the sparrows, stars, death, and love
You, who have danced to revolutionary raps and sung of widows who were happy
You, who have flown over dead empires and dived into heartless democracies,
You, who have drunk hunger and eaten thirst
You, who have seen cats rot on streets and babies fly in smoke
You, who have heard people who only cried once and cried when children heard too much
You, who sleep with the ghosts of dead mothers
You, who take refuge in empty graves
What must I write to you?
I will write to you of the dead streets
The yellow lamps,
The vegetable markets,
And of love still new.
Of the loud neighbour,
The dog that who pisses on the lawn every morning,
The kid who cries over a broken toy,
The teachers yawning in classes
And of the mother stuck in traffic,
And of the seas and skies still blue.
I will write to you
Of a world that waits for you.
Oh, But you are Free
You are free, they say, to think
As long as you ossify your mind in an ideology,
In cultures and rituals that maintain the pre-Darwinian sanctimony.
You are free, they say, to express
Therefore under bridges, in parks, men may come and men may piss
But don’t you dare from a lover’s lips
Under bridges, in parks, receive a kiss.
You are free to choose your governments, they say
As long as it chooses the meat at your buffet.
Ji. Yes. Agreement. Assent. Obediance.
Sovereign. Socialist. Secular. Democratic. Republic.
No. Nhi. But why?
Go to Pakistan!
You are free, they say, to pick your outfit
As long as your kurta scales not 32 inches,
But a whole yardstick.
You are free to speak, you must speak, they say,
But the freedom of your words stuns them into silence
As if the volume of your ideas has hollowed out the air from their lungs.
You are free to stay informed, they say
As long as your TV boasts of journalists rambling on about
The width of the Prime Minister’s chest
And not the length of the farmer’s life cut in half.
You are free to condemn, they say
As long as it is the murder of your neighbour who worked at city bank,
Not the lynching of the Dalit who cleaned your filthy tank.
You are free they say, to be in all your length and width
There isn’t a white chalk to draw Laxman Rekhas with
Oh, but you have your sanskriti
The legacy of your grandfather,
The honour of your father,
The izzat of your khandaan,
The pride of your institutions,
The expectations of your society,
The hushed, invisible Laxman rekhas,
Circling round and round
All around you.
Oh, but you are free, you are free.
Repeat after them: I am free, I am free.
Poems | Asheen Chowdhury
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| Credits: Amrit Ghosal |
Home (Brown)
My home is bound by passwords (one time), food delivery agents and little pieces of technology falling from the satellite gods like leaves in the fall. All the places you can visit have four walls, for four eyed freaks coming at me to scream about psychedelics they’ve done and emancipation they never had. Freedom absolutely, but a cage involuntarily still. Freedom like how we become the patriarch that strangled you like Homer Simpson. Emancipation like having the freedom to waltz in at dawn, drunk off of your mind without a retrospective thought to cling on to as you collapse. Freedom as in a wide choice of delicious commodities created in a perfect world where labour bends like an arthritic knee to the will of the currency provider. Where everyone is equal but some are more equal than others. Where brown skin vilifies brown skin because the white knife cut through them like butter and their ideals began to melt in the hot Indian summer.
Then there’s brown sugar, the refuge of the landless. Cheap cousin of the needles’ favourite. As shown on TV! That’s what they didn’t see, that’s what Sanjay didn’t see. He told me while we smoked a hash pipe under the concrete he was bringing to life for a measly hourly rate. The brown sugar that took his father with blood oozing from every pore, blood as black as the night, he said.
But I don’t belong to the brown men because I’m from the fabled hills of paradise? Paradise being bought, sold, whored, raped, excavated, gagged, choked, bound in a bourgeoisie home BDSM kit with flashing red lights, police protection and extortionists posing as leaders posing as clan members posing as tribal posing as benevolent.
What do you think of home when you don’t want to anymore? It’s just a vivid, lucid, seductive dream that lost itself in a migrant’s scream.
Home is that rap mother fucker I left behind wallowing in his ethyl alcohol swimming pool of vomit. Home is that fat cat alt-prog rat that wants to reclaim public space but is scared of public toilets.
Home is that white, wooden house on stilts that morphed into a great wall of concrete.
Home was that woke girl I woke up next to under a tin roof only to discover I was not me and she was not she and it was just me and three others jam packed in the back seat of a car while the old man outside crossed himself and stared as we disappeared in a haze of green.
Dreams
I am a peddler of dreams.
Sordid little short lived affairs you keep locked away in the recesses of your mind.
Small bursts of love in an emotionless hallucinogenic cloud of paved roads stretching for miles, shiny red cars move like ants along them, and above them the shining neon sky.
If you ask me to hand you the keys, all I can possibly do is mimic a songbird and direct you to a wall lined with a thousand windows.
Take your hand and walk you to it.
If you let me.
Only if you do.
Otherwise all I can possibly do is step sideways and slip through the cracks between the neon lights.
Little slivers of darkness you can see if you stare long enough.
The rumble of thunderous factories of manufactured needs will cover the sound of my feet on the concrete.
The smell of an artificial odour created by a dozen men in white lab coats will hide my fragrance. or maybe a stench.
If you are thus inclined.
But walk with me to the windows and I can show you.
Brown like the mother you embraced with your bare feet when the world was a younger entity. Blue like the dizziness you felt when you stared up at the greatest unknown you have ever known.
Green like the soothing peace that covered you after running in circles became tiresome and you fell on something soft and tender.
You can open one.
Anyone.
Maybe it's unfamiliar terrain that excites you and sets your nerve endings on fire.
Or maybe it's a dream you remember.
From a time ages ago.
Hippie Girl
“People from all nations gathered together as one. Lights shining- fluorescent, bright, almost blinding if you stared at them too long.”
I stretched out for the tall goblet to throw my ashes in.
“The music just kept growing, expanding, starting from the back of your head, till your entire being was on song.”
I brought my hands back to me, quivering, grasping on to a fat roll.
“And then the one in front stopped and hit the gong.”
One drag and I felt I could visualize.
“He walked in with his face masked.”
Wisps of smoke before my eyes.
“And on his head, were the horns.”
Pearl told me stories of Goan summers spent in ecstasy and all I could do was listen. She spoke with a fierce freedom laced with a tender, motherly drug, that made you feel like it was the only truth you need. A soothing tale to guide your haze into her billowing and madly shimmering universe.
She lived in incarnations. Sometimes phasing between them, each avatar within the same physical form. For her, reincarnation was not the cycle of life and death, but life and life and life and life until death.
In one, she was a beauty queen from a movie scene.
Another, a world traveller spurred by the sound of jets flying in.
A third, she was a hill girl taken far from the tribe feeling her roots fading.
In the final avatar, she fucked off and disappeared from my dimension.
I couldn’t say where she is now. Maybe this place didn’t let her be free, the state of affairs probably made her stomach turn. Because so many of the stories were of sad, senile separation from love. Maybe she’s out there screaming into the sea with her dreadlocks flying away into the sunset. It’s not for her. This endless bigot satisfying, idealism ossifying, hate mongering bull. No. It’s not for her. This Sisyphus emulating, millennial angst driven, emotion sidelining parade wasn’t the kind of freak show she needed. She’s a different kind of free and maybe her incarnations helped her escape the more wretched dimensions. Maybe others could escape too, with her brains and resourcefulness. But a pearl is a pearl- nurtured, coveted, allowed to dream. And most of the rest are clay- melting away in the torrential downpour of hate that sends them down the drains they’ve always swam in.
Manic Calcutta
Wild, frizzled gray hair
She stood before me
Gaunt face defying time
She raised her bowl
A century lived in a dying city
The horror on her face
The desolation in her deathly plea
A hundred lines and wrinkles
As many as the city’s winding lanes
Eyes that did not project love, hope, faith, joy, life
Eyes that spoke volumes on despondency
Eyes piercing me like knives
Can I drag them away from the heaving behemoth of broken dreams you've become?
This forsaken woman
In the narrow paths of the old city
Unfed amidst the unkempt chaos of decadence
Your lanes wind around her like serpents constricting
Squalor personified
Decay slapping me repeatedly till I want to cry out
and run back to mythical past prosperity
So close to your fabled whore houses
In your lanes from forgotten eons
This woman made me stumble
Fall on my knees
Just as this city has
My Eastern blood raised on your promise
My capital of culture and art
My land of socialist utopia
All pissed away in your open gutters
All snatched away by that gaze
Was she an apparition in the fog that envelopes you
Or was she you staring back at me?
Poems | Lapdiang Syiem
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| Credits: Amrit Ghosal |
A Chance
From Frederikshavn to Göterborg
Onboard the ferry
I determined
To change my fate
I’m tired of fitting my
Round thoughts into
A rubrics cube
I cannot match all the colours
I cannot complete the puzzle
But I try, out of habit
That night onboard the ferry
I was all set to change the rules
To tweak my ordered mentality
As I sat by you and cracked the ice
I felt strong, confident, in-charge
Oddly willing to fiddle with my wired feelings
I watched, waited and tested
It was surreal, cliched it may sound
The fireworks, the brilliant night lights
The romantic stranger
It was a movie played to the last letter of its script
You were German, you said
Afraid of flying your entire life
I found you to be the gentleman
Taking charge but never control
But I could have been the gentleman instead
Exchange roles! my mind screamed
Off the ferry our journey continued into the city
In the tram, we were patient, too patient
I left
You watched me disappear into the night
We let that chance lie
Strangers we continue to be
I’ve not remembered your name
We did not break any rules
We allowed our feelings to leak
Only to seal up the crack
My round thoughts are
Squeezed into the cube
I was afraid to be a victim
But I think of you now
And wonder.
What's feelings in a fuck?
What is it about intimacy?
What is it about the touch?
What is it about caressing, hugging, kissing?
Just to get to a fuck!
I was scared, I was frightened out of my wits
To let another person enter me
Copulation is a fucking intimate process
Or is it just another cathartic drug?
My body, I've discovered
Has its own security system
An invisible, in-built chastity belt
I didn't even know I had a high tech, touch screen key
Sex, I thought, involved an emotional exchange, all you fuckers
Or have we lost touch with emotions?
Are emotions getting outdated?
Soon to turn into just another fucking tradition
I'm sorry but I am old world, old school
A bloody romantic still capable of feelings
Am I not allowed to feel anymore?
Bloody fuckers, blow jobbers think it's only a waste of time
The world is crumbling anyway
Bit by bit
We are superior, we mustn't allow
Our feelings to take control
For then it's the end of our peace of mind
Fuck emotions, fuck feelings, I'd like to be invincible, indestructible
Robotic
What do I teach my children then?
Will I have children?
Who wants to procreate anyway?
We cannot be humans anymore
It's crazy to procreate in a crumbling world
So, what do I teach my children?
Will I only feed them drugs?
To not feel, but still be in ecstasy
Cheers to the robotic age!
I am invincible, indestructible, superior
No more an emotional fucker
Let's replace dicks and vaginas
With something stronger, an overdose of libido,
A robotic dildo and an automated socket.
It's trendy to lose our souls to the robotic age
I don't need sex, I don't need intimacy
I only need an unfeeling, metallic organ
Or an invisible, touch screen WiFi thingy
To satisfy my needs
Then I am free
Freedom, sexual freedom
Let's not call it sexual anymore
It's just another survival routine
Devoid of old fashioned emotions
They only inhibit us it seems
Did I mention that the world is crumbling?
Did I mention that we are in a vicious cycle?
Did I mention that I'm afraid
To be the last human?
Capable of feeling my heart, my soul,
My fears, my longings
My desires, my needs
Did I mention that I am weak?
Did I mention that I am learning to nurse my own wounds?
Did I mention that in the race
Of the survival of the fittest
I am weak, weak, weak?
I am a feeling being in a sexual world
Does that make me too human?
More or less...
The world is crumbling
But we must think of the bigger, grander problems
I'd like to say fuck emotions
But my weak, beating, throbbing heart
Cannot
Poems | Sreejita Basu
 |
| Credits: Amrit Ghosal |
I long for oldness,
Is there even such a word?
But I know you get the idea anyway
A feeling tinged with nostalgia
Accompanied by the smell of mustard oil on the skin
A winter afternoon like this
A lot more warm, a lot more familiar...
Are my thoughts incoherent, a little muddled perhaps?
But how can I help for I am not quite the same myself
My head does not think the way it did, maybe just about a decade back.
A decade back...
A face without the dark cirlces, a father without the white hair
A me without a voter ID, undefined identity, unchartered paths...
A closet full of woollens, loose, baggy ones
A drawer full of photographs, undigitised, unseen for years
The ring of the BSNL landline, textbooks in brown papers
Coming back to now, a lot more difficult
The same winter temperature. Fitted woollens. Much more fashionable
A little less sunny, a little more grey.
The Walk
My cheeks had a rosy tint
And a few strands of hair played truant with my forehead.
Deliberate, was it?
My T-shirt clung to my body.
My contours prominent, visible even in the dim light.
My breasts jiggled. May be I should have been careful with the bra.
My thighs. Fleshy. Attractive.
Which even the unfitted track pants could not hide.
My underarms were sweaty as I brisked my pace.
I wouldn’t find that alluring. Did they?
I had my earphones on. Why did I?
That made me un-careful. Not on my guard.
Change your route. Change your route.
Every single day.
Because I was provocative.
I provoked.
With what I thought
Was just an evening walk.
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