When it rained in
strong daylight last week,
a part of nature
felt violated.
Dust storms gathered
like God’s wrath
over the city’s crimson-brown
body
and rains came,
with no intention
or invitation
to pacify.
These unfriendly showers,
out of season,
are what I recollect
because I never bathed under them.
I was never given the freedom.
I am still in the habit
of feeling a certain dissonance
from a downpour
and mistakenly fear for a deluge.
So the winds may be cooler
in the mornings
but by afternoon,
they disappear off the face
of this earth
to eat by doleful mouthfuls
any hope for these days.
I need a pleasant morning
and a night to disappear into,
like an outline with a feeble body,
lucid mind
and memories.
Yes,
memories by doleful mouthfuls
that metastasise
in certain hidden
parts of my body,
parts which confess
yet don’t really show
or tell.
***
I am in the cool, dark shell
of my room,
barely in tiptoes,
darkening with the slatted shadows
from these windows.
There is a dream vision
but it is unwieldy like the month
and I don’t want to reason
or negotiate
with the fear
and terror
of the body craving for a touch
that transmutes into a violation,
again,
under barely perceptible
conditions.
Where the skin and body separate,
break the soil of an experience
and give others
a peep show
to commodify pain
and gorge on details.
The words
that I write
outdraw a line
across a shaking body
where blood pumps itself out
with lacerating midnights
and becomes
water by the dry bank
of this blue sky country.
***
Look keenly.
I leave my encounters behind,
all whispers across these green
trellises of thought.
They have pinned my hands to the concrete.
They come in groups
to lick my waist
and finger my naked frame
with a brash caress;
The betrayal of my innocence
soon comes,
from the one mastermind
as he digs deep into my roots
of passion
and pummels my yearnings
with ‘come here’,
reverberations reaching into
the coy and reserved sites
from where I came,
to find affection
perhaps
under the bluest, lucid noon sky.
**
Look keenly.
My face withdraws
even as my bitter tongue
regurgitates
the smells,
sounds
and tastes
of my wrangled youth,
under their command.
A search for companionship,
a quest for a sensual reckoning
heaving
under their lumpen weights.
The weights of their lumpen worlds.
A world of men
constituting
my body
for the life
to come.
***
I sleep with the childhood puppet figure
I always clutched
for comfort
and correspondences.
I repeat
these verses back
to it.
I visit another garden
after fifteen days,
to face a graceful seagull’s
single audience.
I say,
“Remember this day
when I came
bearing marks of
my body
under the influence
of dissolute men.
If the pain becomes
too much to bear
and the world becomes
a vertiginous kaleidoscope
of injuries and scrapes,
hardly sutured,
with the prospect of better days
because the memory stings
in that most cerebral part
of one’s recollections,
lashing at the violations
against this breaking skin,
let me be plucked
from this life
then and there,
just like a moment that
came with a flash
and squirt of the noon
under clear, bluest skies.
Let me join your pack
sooner
so that the human,
mortal parts
don’t even have to ache
for a resolute ending
soliloquy.”
****
Let the rains come there.
Let the crimson-brown rim
of this earth
then decide
whether to take me
with a strong, gusty invitation
or leave me solitary
to take my next shape.
A shape
that constitutes
this body
for the life
to come.
Prithvijeet Sinha‘s writings on the intersection of art, cinema and culture and especially poetry have graced several anthologies and publications in a prolific fashion.
Featured image: Eutah Mizushima / Unsplash