This Is Life

In a city that never conspired
to launch a thousand ships,
or divided seeds
in the realm of ghastly eras,
I pull myself
in and out of consciousness,
with misty eyes like the day
at seven,
and the sun
like a bulbous God,
keeping his right angle
unbroken like those icons
from these umbrella-shaped storeys.
Above them, he is a humble supplicant,
to this man-made modern wonder.

I am a beholder,
who prays to make permanent
residence underneath this bridge,
the network of trains above,
as integral to me
as my morning walks.
“This is life”,
memorialised in my mind.

I can just lie on the grass.
and let the bougainvillaea in full bloom
touch my most sensual point of restraint,
or it can come
from the most gentle hands
of an entity,
who shares my own gender,
and has ripples of water
in his fingers.

That’s why I come here,
to begin with the efflorescence
of an adult mind,
still restless to embark
with the pursuit of innocence,
before summer fully burns our bodies
and temples.

Everything is in its right place,
but a verdant bed, where two
friends can stay conscious,
while rejecting
long, hard stares.

The fear is always in our minds first.
The deep end of passion,
like a paradise out of the question.
We accommodate the first.
We let the other reach sublimation,
before its time comes.

In a city where no one
vilifies with false testimony,
he became an object
to the other ‘him’.
‘Come here’,
ferreted out of the ruined
ramparts over two years.
The prowler could disappear into those ruins and overgrowth,
before the grass turned yellow in May,
and become a transplant of
misplaced lust
in the other.

It was the voice
that asked him to give up,
run,
and be shamed
like a dirty offender.
He had said ‘no’ to the advances,
even as wellsprings of
repressed desires
became a circling motion,
pulling him
in and out
of consciousness.

Sometimes
with misty eyes,
like the day at seven,
and the sun prickly
in its perch
and bulbous,
he sees him,
plotting revenge
for his
refutations.
Marking his territorial
entrapments,
showing the passive one
a dozen other
conspirators,
vilifying with false
testimonies.

Go with the order of your innate nature,
but do not become a crushed bone.
A dead soul
entombed under the sweat and blood
of bodies,
meant to victimise
and pull you
in and out of consciousness.

Leave.
Do not return to this site,
not in cowardice,
or as a foolhardy outcast,
but to save your skin,
your unaffected youth
from the terror and fear,
of a dozen ‘come here’,
the long and hard stares.
On the flanks of
this river bank,
is their colony.
Leave it to their
territorial trap.
They have their nets cast,
and their lairs are still
in their reach.
Let them be beasts
in that northeastern tip,
before the bridge.

Go back to another route.
You know it,
and were always keen to
get in touch with.

Go there.
Take that left turn
on the way,
to reacquaint yourself with
the golden crest of your best years.

Memories can be cast anew,
just like the changing face of May,
and such cool winds are hard to find
at this torrid time of the year.

This is then an initiative.
A renewal.
Go and diverge yourself,
from prior weeks
and months,
or the transformation
in these last two years.

The new yet familiar routes
are here.
Go walk in those lanes.
To never memorialise those lines,
‘This is life’,
in one frame or mould
ever again.

Prithvijeet Sinha, from Lucknow, centres his writings around poetry, the confluence of art, culture and cinema and has found place in several national and international publications and anthologies since 2018. His blog is https://anawadhboyspanorama.wordpress.com/ where he shares his prolific creative worldview. 

Featured image: Spencer Goggin / Unsplash