Urna Bose: Poetry (Voices Within 2021)

Urna Bose is an advertising professional, writer, widely published poet and editor. Her poems have gone viral, globally. She won the ‘Enchanting Editor Award 2019’, from the Telangana Poetry Forums, and the ‘Women Empowered Kamala Das Special Mention - Scintillating Creative Impactful – Feminine Power Inspiration Award 2020’. As the Deputy Editor for Different Truths, she devotes her time to the ‘Poet 2 Poet’ column. Having worked with advertising giants, like R K Swamy/BBDO, McCann Erickson, Lowe Lintas and others, her campaigns have won Indian and global creativity awards, and some are industry case-studies. Urna believes that poetry can fix everything.

WHAT POETS DO 

You know what poets do? 
They poem out their pain. 
The niggling vermin 
that drive them insane. 

They poem out their sorrow. 
That like a disease, 
resides deep 
in their bone marrow. 

They poem out their past. 
The shifting grains 
of the sands of time, 
trickling through gawky fingers fast. 

You know what poets do? 
They poem out the inner contours,
of their depth. 
The insomniac conscience that without 
those sleeping pills, couldn’t have slept. 

They poem out the complicated chambers 
of their heart. 
That throbbing, pulsating, 
vulnerable baggage,
that aching body part. 

They poem out their compassion. 
The gloopy tenderness 
within, they simply didn’t 
learn how to ration. 

You know what poets do? 
They poem out their sixth sense. 
Their intuitive, clairvoyant, 
beyond the stare-in-your-face-logic lens. 

They poem out their own sweet blood. 
Sometimes a trickle. 
Sometimes an uncontrollable, 
break-the-walls-of-the-dam flood. 

They poem out insults swallowed, 
but not quite digested yet. 
The inky-black muck, hurled and thrown, 
when massages the ego doesn’t get. 

You know what poets do?
They poem out their poems in vain. 
“Will I too join the foggy graveyard 
of dead poets”, I wonder in disdain. 

They poem out their poems, 
because well, they just have to. 
A crimson-coloured aching 
or a longing that’s tinted deep-blue.

They poem out the silly, 
unsayable things. 
Kisses dissolved on the tongue, 
sweet nothings, their smoky, nebulous rings. 

You know what poets do?
They poem out what their eyes can see. 
Their gaze, a penetrating surgeon's knife, 
that seldom grows hazy. 

You know what poets do.
They poem out the world 
questioning their true motive to write. 
But doesn’t the world question anything 
that's not shiny, blingy and bright?

You know what poets do. 
They poem out those 
intravenous upheavals, 
they never knew they could feel. 

Yes sometimes, they heal their own 
dishevelled selves. 
But sometimes, it's the reader 
who also needs to heal.
***


YOUR MEMORIES VS YOU

Somehow the things you 
don't want to remember, 
stare angrily at you. 
Their eyes spitting out 
hot, glowing embers.

And the things you 
want to remember,
thrive on some strange, perverse pleasure. 
Of keeping your eyes 
tightly blindfolded.

Your memories are a 
funny, jumbled, disorienting 
bundle of contradictions, 
constantly colliding into each other. 
So somehow, you’re always losing this 
unfair 'your memories vs you' game.

Then again, what in life is fair?
Ask the labyrinth of your memories 
in all earnestness,
and you'll hear the soft echoes,
if you strain your ears hard enough.
"Nothing really. 
Nothing at all is fair. 
Ever.”
***


A RANDOM AFTERNOON EXPERIMENT

It was a bronze-tinted afternoon.
I was tired of being 
the same old, predictable, silly me.

So I took off my rose-tinted glasses.
The world then, willingly and eagerly 
showed itself to me.

Its ugly blacks, sullen greys and 
plastic, synthetic whites.
Oh, don’t ask, such a spectre.
My innards began to churn, 
my head began to swirl 
and my startled heart,
squished like a Lilliputian beneath 
Gulliver’s sturdy, giant, heartless boots.

In frantic desperation,
I groped around for my glasses.
My old, trusted friend – 
yes, that rose-tinted pair,
and put them right back on, 
where they always belonged.

Hugging my illusions 
and my delusions,
tighter than ever before,
in that given moment.
Silly me is the only me,
I’d ever like to be.

And, you and me 
are nothing
but a stained-glass mosaic 
of our illusions and delusions,
pieced together randomly. 
Nothing more. 
Nothing less, my silly. 


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