Dishant Chourasia: Figures of Thought: Collegiate Voices across Spaces

Raining ecstasies

I am not your morals

not your stupid chaos

I am not your label or sometime you need to think.

I am lava flowing upwards

screaming my way up the top sky

and come pouring down like Valkyries.

I am the everlasting omnipotent

I am the latent developing cell

that you don't see

but I exist.

I have brown, black, yellow faces

with small eyes, big eyes and no eyes

but I see.

I consume, mostly devour

every part and pore

I drink two gallons of the ocean

and call it mine

I dig two metres in the ground

and I oblige to kill everything over and underneath it

except myself

Kill, sell and consume

that's all I am

Kill, sell and consume.

I am the sunlight on your destroyed column

I am the fire setting my own skin ablaze

I am the tornado you never saw or will see

because it’s inside my 

pair of odd clothes

and torn shoes

that goes through the empty cycles of bloom.

***

To hopes of despair

The light keeps me a prisoner 

but I find dark on days

 in its unmoving apartment 

floating on my head

with soot dripping from the cracks above.

I drench my body in black

And soak my lungs in the soot,

The light starts looking for me.

I run inside bright halls of worship

a godless creation of the Gods

I hide under its light

with Furies, my only allies.

Each breath splitting my lungs  into four,

I feel alive.

I run past oblivion

killing every kin

a creature of no creation,

I run home.

My lungs burn

as it waits at my door,

a bright formless horror

under crimson bulbs, smelly flowers and valleys.

I run inside and shut my door

still it finds me cornered.

My allies no more

and the apartment above

has had new tenants.

The light keeps me a prisoner 

but I find dark on days.

***

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Author's Bio:  Dishant Chourasia is an aspiring professor, pursuing his Master’s in English Literature from St. Xavier’s College, Ranchi. His poetry epitomises the struggle of a young, sensitive mind trying to translate both, the atrocities it encounters and the mental states in coming to terms with it, into art. It is drawn from the quotidian- the people he sees around him and their stories, observed from and contrasted with the vantage point of his own privilege.

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Setu, June 2021