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| Artwork: Diego Rivera |
Mad-Poem, Bad Poem
I want to write a bad poem, mad-poem
springing out of the clamour in my head.
I want to make metaphors of broccoli heads fetched from my mother’s garden:
fresh, decapitated delicacies waiting at the table for dinner
or ramshackle houses teetering at a cliff’s edge.
I want the mad woman’s scream to echo between the lines
because the shape of reality is when reason exceeds its bounds.
Most of all, I want to write about you and me
and the things we left unsaid which became white noise at the dinner-table
became the clattering forks and spoons and empty plates
became the quiet of a slumbering town
destined to wake to honks and rumbling traffic and hungry bellies.
Mad poem, bad poem sitting at the edge of a starving child’s lips we saw on T.V.,
waiting for tomorrow’s undeclared war.
Mad poem, bad poem exchanging notes beneath the table
waiting for a fix at a street corner wringing notes like a politician who never believed in public service
so that we, we the people, waited for the fix that never came...never would come
believing it would hurry at a cripple’s pace in a town
that favours speed, alloy wheels and five-storeyed houses.
I want to write about the time you disappeared sending everyone in an uproar;
your face plastered on to social media, your name, screaming out from bodies carrying placards and ideologies nurtured in the dead of night.
Did you taste the bad poem, mad-poem then?
Did you roll your tongue and smack your lips at its asinine aftertaste
when you were asked to become spectator to life?
Maybe you got a whiff of its scent and you mistook it for springtime roses.
Maybe you smelt it in the mouth of your adulterous lover
in whose eyes you saw fireflies flickering like five-second dreams that died from too much sun
like one-shot wonders the world has forgotten: Billy Ray Cyrus, Amit Paul and B*witched to name a few
like tilling the ground for a peach tree that doesn’t yield fruit;
but you never understood what he was, what she was and what they were until you raked the earth of its moist fertility,
until you bent your back and scraped your knees bearing the plough in the world’s best killing fields:
Gaza, Syria, Kashmir slide off your tongue as if you and they were second cousins.
And they are, though the insidiousness of maps would have you believe otherwise.
Did you munch on popcorn as you waited for the play to unravel?
Trump-this, trump-that, trump the voter-who-should-have-gone-
as democracy became ink-on-index-finger
and we were told that this saffron longing was what we needed, what we deserved.
“I did not ask for this!” you protested,
wrinkling your nose at breakfast eggs delivered sunny-side up.
But when do inheritors of madness ever have a say in the nature of their inheritance?
Mad-poem, bad poem sitting at the corner of a room,
wondering where all the mad-poems, bad poems went.
This House
It is the weight of remembrance carved into one’s flesh
that causes me to wake to its heavy-lidded mornings:
a ray of sunlight peeping through some makeshift curtain,
certain of its arrival like the coffee you brew at 8 AM
like lime juice squeezed of its sour malcontents
sweetened with a spoonful of honey and warm water
and, on the counter, a used mug as paperweight
for thirty-something nightmares duly flushed in the sink
along with milky residues of late-night sex
and cornflakes and movies and Chinese takeout
holding time hostage to the hem of one’s jeans
and shoes and dresses and dirty laundry hung from hooks―
strange fruit of a different kind. Billie Holiday, forgive me.
Forgive me as you did the day I mistook care for disdain
and we went to bed hungry, grasping at a language
flung from the far end of the world as it made its way
past deserts, oceans, mountains and settled on a shelf of books
too painful to be opened, too lacerating to be soothed by a tube of Cloben-G
placed next to Saibol, Bupron and Rispy Plus
3mg, 4 mg, 6―how does it matter
between power cuts at ten and dry heat at noon
between Archers and Peraltas flickering on 13-inch laptops?
When you take my hand to lead me out its open door, I know I shall follow.
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