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| Anchit Pandey |
Days of the sun
Excoriare aliquis nosgris ex
ossibus ultor - Dido, queen of Carthage
(May someone arise from our
bones as an avenger)
The barren encroaches more and
more.
Weeds grow on what has remained -
No plants, no animals and no
humans.
Mind is the master and mind itself is
the slave-
Seeing and judging,
turning incidents into anecdotes of
rage,
Misreading every sentence,
convoluting every narrative
Rendering what is present - waterless,
mixed with dust,
Crimson under the sun.
The barren is the fate,
Like ashwathama’s leprosy
Like a country’s predicament-
Like a plague turning people into Lynch
mobs.
Throw me into the river after you are
done with me,
So, it rinses the blood on my body,
So, it permeates into the cells which
are fed up with cowardice,
So, it takes me away to a place where
the whole sky is a river.
Some general
notes
(one and a half
years after sister's death)
When you wake up crying
every morning,
you get used to the
tiredness in the first hour of the day.
When numbness recedes,
Pain follows
and yearning mixed with
emptiness can be
good for a poet, you are
told in a
countless number of books.
A mother sleeps on pavements
in Delhi.
Her son has faded from
public memory.
You constantly tell yourself
that there are worse fears.
You look for hooks to hang
on to and try running by the riverside
because you have heard it
does good - ‘elates',
and is better than
alprazolam 0.5 mg three times a day.
Nothing matters- is the
oldest of literary jokes. Also, philosophical.
I can form similar
phrases. There are
no rules, there are no
patterns -
what is new might also be
depressive - the
way post-modernism likes
it - expressive as a post-truth fact –
shaken and not stirred.
This is not good for your
mind.
you should look for
distractions, your lover tells you.
Your poet begs to differ.
That, we are, seems true
that, truth is, is
implausible.
While listening to Giacomo
Leopardi's opera Omnia at midnight
You stand on the axis
pulling and releasing the string I walk
on
(at will).
Life unfurls and shuts down
while I travel slowly away from
you
dissipating love and ideology-
up and down as a wave of infinite
possibilities.
They talk to me of politics and
communist-party-hats with red stars
and I listen
and I look for you in the crowd.
Gunshots are nearer every time-
blood more prominent at my hands
the insignia of love floats mid-air at
midnight, reassessing decisions
and behavioural patterns of comrades
and martyrs
You stand on the axis and
I travel far into the world,
it unfurling and shutting down,
when a murderer speaks.
A right -winged murderer speaks
like he is the moon; and
some glee and some procrastinate
and I am never midway,
always travelling far-
I wonder to what deltas.
Things can easily go south!
I wait for some intervention -
one in which you pull me back.
For an old
lover in Calcutta
Calcutta welcomes me in
its full Glory.
Crowded,
yellow, smelling of flowers and fish,
very much like home- only marginally different,
in between an ode and an
elegy.
I often got lost when my fingers
crawled along
the Hems of your light-coloured
underwear,
the Polka dots confusing and the
softness reminiscent of
Rimbaud, strawberry and old Christian
Graves.
'True love lasts forever!'
You never said in any Canto of our
togetherness.
I can only imagine how it is possible-
the malignancy that love is -
Once blood oozed out from my thigh
when one of your toenails pierced it-
sweat and blood, blood and sweat
together.
It stayed.
True love lasts forever
I told the cab driver on the Howrah
station,
as I had, to countless earlobes I had
kissed-
those kisses - straying and
staying,
human and material, burning and crying
out.
All at once.
We often talked of masks, Dear lover
and hid behind them till it was
possible
like a city -
the river its Eyes
the bridge some mascara
deliberately put on.
Leukaemia
1.
A catacomb
beneath a maze
Is laid out in systematic
patterns.
Venom drips in the IV,
in the tanks outside,
On the frozen oxygen cylinder.
Venom makes death patient.
2.
All eyes point in one direction.
There is no battle -
there is no one to tell you.
3.
A defeated smile travels
from one face to Another,
nonchalant - evasive,
Like a frozen lake on the South
Pole.
4.
Not a single incident is loud.
Not even the conclusion screams.
Efficient, slow and the only need of
the hour-
Like in a good poem by a master
craftsman-
Melancholy arrives
And leaves never.
5.
I am detached,
I tell the girl who lets me sleep on
her bosom.
At night, she offers me refuge in her
smell
And loves me from beneath a veil.
6.
She would be gone, soon.
Like the country where I grew-
Where venom drips in the IV
Where there is no battle in the land of
defeated smiles,
Where there are only silences
And leftover veils.
Extremely touching verse
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