RINGLETS
His broken lines in a sentence
are filled with sediments
and the quaint powder
from igneous rocks,
the kind you don't find
near water under the bridge.
He hails me with crumpled papers
all glued with the saliva
from masticating them
for a greater part of two years.
The third, he feels,
will be when he will
speak more than ten words.
On these papers are the graves
of dead red ants
and leaves from another season.
When I ask him
to show what remains of his
austere body,
he disrobes me first.
Starved of touch
and scrutiny as I am,
I accept the prosaic
hands,
his lanky fingers
that press my upper body
with their tubular ends.
It's the way he feels
my flesh and bones.
Then he takes his turn.
I see a veteran skeleton
that has lived out its days
for far too long
without pity or appreciable
charity.
Bodies, bodies.
We don't vary here.
The sky covers us
without smudges.
He tells me
to touch my injured parts with
spry leaves
and gives me ringlets
cut from a banyan tree.
"Bodies
Faces
These are passengers
pacified
and agitated
by
an unknown
initiative"
Together,
we plunge
into the shallowest part of the river
for a swim.
I emerge alone
back on earth.
To find that the ringlets have now
spread their network across the water
from this end to the other.
A voice echoing with the disappearing
stranger's tenor saying,
"the deed is done.
the broken lines
in your sentences
are full.
The ringlets are now spread
among your wishes
and your words are no
more mere mumblings
under the bridge"
MT. LUNA
Sister,
look at the moon
fret with you
above Mt. Luna.
He knows the fiefdom of
dissenting clans
is upon you,
somewhere
in a countryside
where poetry
never
had a chance.
The fire in the mountains
is a torrid
metaphor
you have to live with
till December.
If manifest destiny is what
I can put my faith in
then
that hill
visible from your window
at midnights
is a sieve
for all that you feel,
often
even your darkest hours
are there,
thick and immanent,
like the trees on its broadened chest
and the stars
that you count
are
lanterns
according you
the share of light
you need.
You know
sister,
this part of the world
has not forgotten
that you fret
and rain your quiet tugs
on your pillows.
Your brother,
he is unable to walk two miles
with a straight back.
He frets too
because that's how far
it goes
to sense your smoke signals
beyond hills and fogs.
We have only till December.
Trust in the good God of grace.
This month too will pass.
This separation too shall pass.
PART ONE
Lift up your veils.
You are someone else
below.
Your eyes are stored
in the most voluptuous
swell of the carafe.
You are a Trojan horse
whose body is the
farthest from corporeal
realisation.
You are made of wood
and sawdust from
the workshop has
dried out your last stand.
You are a forgotten sculpture.
He has brought you
to an auction
from a garage sale
and seated you
on a stool
in the deep-end of suburbia
and nostalgia,
on a Friday night.
They don't
think much of you.
Your only artfulness
is that you are
from overseas
and have been held
like a golden statuette
around February to March
by some of the
proprietors
then living in la-la land.
You know
your last place
is not here
but in the back-seat
of a rundown Ford
tumbling down
a highway
without cheap hotels
or almost any policeman.
Eventually,
you will be rusted and bronzed
and thrown out
till some others
hold you in their image
and in their slippery hands.
Your veil has been lifted.
Your time has been crunched.
Your sheen has been polished
but you are pawned.
Your eyes have now dissolved
in the thinning end of
the carafe.
You are now the smell of
sawdust alone
and the golden fritters
of your value
is void in the marketplace.
You are now another discard
off the shelf.
All the above poems were self-published by the author on his WordPress blog 'An Awadh Boy's Panorama' in October- November, 2022.
Prithvijeet Sinha is from Lucknow, India. He is a post graduate in MPhil from the University of Lucknow, having launched his prolific writing career by self publishing on the worldwide community Wattpad since 2015 and on his WordPress blog An Awadh Boy's Panorama(https://anawadhboyspanorama.wordpress.com/)
Besides that, his works have been published in several varied publications as Hudson Valley Writers Guild, Inklette Magazine, Piker Press Online, anthology Pixie Dust and All Things Magical published by Authors Press( January, 2022), Cafe Dissensus, The Medley, Screen Queens, Confluence- South Asian Perspectives, Reader's Digest, Borderless Journal, Lothlorien Poetry, Live Wire, Rhetorica Quarterly, Ekphrastic Review, The Kolkata Arts, Aze Journal, Dreich Magazine, Visual Verse, In Plainspeak and in the children's anthology Nursery Rhymes and Children's Poems From Around The World ( AuthorsPress, February 2021), among others.
His life force resides in writing.
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