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| Kushal Poddar |
One Sentence Hermits
I
I told her, too many of me
will date her, but later my psychiatrist
revealed that there were only two,
and so threegether we cocooned
around an embryo we named in our whispering
'Mirror'.
II
The tree was bugged;
it listens to death all my confessions
full of anticlimaxes;
they nailed a brass plate honoring its service.
III
A hermit stooped near
one leaves-choked gutter
seeks his saved-for-a-rainy-day from another life;
staring at him from my window makes me
a freshly bankrupted inside-out pocket.
***
The Myths and Facts About the State of Being
The crows ghostwrite the biography
of a self-bonsai guava tree.
This is the first chapter, 'Morning'
and for the settings
they have chosen the coils of smoke
rising from the foggy roofs of the slums.
The smoke dragons above,
not the kind you can pet and summon
as an aide in case a battle breaks out,
nor the kind you should slay to save
a village. The smoke, a wise dragon,
states a few words about afterlife
of the trees, of the departed ones
you sometimes wonder about and yet
cannot open the photo albums to see in
an unspent memory. The smoke writes
an earth beyond human beings, and it is
only the first chapter, already myths
being mixed with a fistful of facts.
***
Tumbleweed
Heart released a blue horse this evening,
and it galloped into the milieu, or perhaps was a scene
from a Western, and I roll to and fro at the whom of the wind,
a tumbleweed, light and easy.
***
Troll Bridge Toll
Between the business
rills the bridge, brick and mortar,
mortals inhaling myth from silver wrappers
down there, there underneath.
One sapling on the rib of the bridge
sips its existence, grows bit by bit.
Does it know - I visit
to see its growth as often as time permits?
Clouds shout past us.
Smoke freezes misery. Somewhere
in the underbelly water leaks from no origin
and whispers, "Man down. Man down."
The trickle lips 'Emergency'. No urgency.
Between the business shoots up to the sky
one tree, gawky, and I, fumbling with
time to be lonelier than the spurt.
***
Monsoon Markets Metaphors
On the monsoon mossy market wall
sun lays down its merchandise
one by one. Already tired are its flesh.
Clouds gossip about the imminent reclining.
The shine stares me blind. I am here with my
wife, a better bargainer and a worse spender.
We pass the shops, toddle together
through the throng towards the storm
marking the exit. All wet in the drizzling,
our hair prolonged-release rain
as if its medicinal cool might solve living.
We stroll, hand in hand, towards the gate.
We have too many hands by now
burdened with the debris of another life
for our offspring.
***
Kushal Poddar: An author, journalist and a father, Kushal Poddar, editor of 'Words Surfacing’, authored eight books, the latest being 'Postmarked Quarantine'. His works have been translated into eleven languages.
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe
‘As if its medicinal cool might solve living’ ……. *marvellous*
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