Minakhi Misra

He waited for me everyday
For almost two weeks at the fair,
Where I had given him a shirt
As part of a donation drive.

He found me on his thirteenth day –
He swore he knew I’d come that day,
He’d said the same thing everyday –
And asked me to extend my hand.

I saw no reason not to, though
The men around me said he’s mad.
I did recall the local news
About infected needle jabs.

Before I could withdraw my hand,
He’d pressed something into my palm.
It was a paper folded neat –
Like corner-matching-corner neat.

Inside, it had my father’s hand –
The shaky, feathered alphabet
He wrote towards the very end –
Some poem lines, familiar lines.

“Good, good, you did not wash the shirt.”
Good, good, I could not wash the shirt.

Love, like War, is a dinner plate
Of steaming rice in steaming dal.
You burn your fingers when you dip
Directly in the middle of it.

Instead, you have to pick at it
A bit by bit around the edge:
To touch with deeds before your lips;
To plant a smile before a kiss.

He saw upon my desk my Ulysses,
The Students’ Annotated Ulysses,

And dubbed the tome a “Trojan Elephant”,
A “mansplained, condescending Ulysses.”

“Oh, gee! the OG Homeric hero
Who so rejoiced in Joyce’s Ulysses,

Would lose his timeless, withering wits,
Emasculated by this Ulysses.

Embark, unaided, on an odyssey
Through Joyce’s oceanic Ulysses

To stand the slightest chance to comprehend
The incomprehensible Ulysses.”

I nodded, nudged him back to where we were,
Before distracted by this Ulysses,

Explaining, annotating legalese
Less comprehensible than Ulysses.

The Latin humor means “a dampness”;
Humorous means “dampening”.
So when you dubbed me “Damperfuck”
And walked into the balcony,
I thought you found my humour sexy,
Wanted me to follow you
Beyond the drunken reach of friends
Still caught up in the hullahoo
Of partygoing foolery.

And when you washed me with your wine,
Which swirling, you had sniffed and choked,
I thought you were quite funny too,
Though no one got that final joke
And simply hawwed and gawked at us,
As I stood dampened, “laughing” at
Your ridens pun in “Good riddance!”

Funiculì, funiculà.
You roll below to pull me up,
And then I do the same for you,
For we are tied together to.

Funiculì, funiculà.
We go our ways, but never far.
You share my load, and I do yours.
Together, we are quite the force.

A message from me to my Life:
No matter what you throw at me,
No matter what you throw me at,
There’s one thing I have in my hands,
The one thing you can’t take from me
So long you leave my consciousness
To suffer through your vagaries.

It isn’t just some daily lines.
It’s where I make my final stand.
Today and every next today,
It’s where I make my final stand.

He trudged in sweat and sweat and sweat,
And grudged the neem its bitter shade.
But still, he never let us leave
His proud paternal palisade.

He trudged in debt and debt and debt
That nudged the wood all screeching night,
But never clawed our fate or food,
Because he kept us locked inside.

He trudged in set and set and set
In moral masculinity
Of firewalking ‘Bachchan’ lines
He read to us in dignity.

I’ve written, so, a book for you
Of all the things I want to say,
But cannot say before I go,
And cannot know if this today
Will prove to be my last today:
A permanent just-yesterday-
he-sent-another-rhyme-you-know.

The book will tell you, not so well,
Of why a kid with shaky hands
Attempted every full moon night
To pull a bucket steady, right,
Despite the fear of reprimands,
To free the prisoned moon inside
Without it rippling down the well.

The book will show you, bit unclear,
Bazaar-view of entreating fears
The boy evaded every time
He washed away the cowdung slime
Beneath his father’s slippers, shined
The very morning through his tears.

The book will…Bloody buggery!
The book will this, the book will that –
The book’s a wish to fix a past,
Revisioning a story-me
Who never had a chance to be
An anything of any art
Because he never had the heart
To rise above his self-pity
And do something for somebody.

A headache born of thorny prose
Of maddening meandering
Of arduous ambiguity
Of words sesquipedalian,
Interminably labyrinthine,
Unhelpfully unpunctuated,
Unduly unparagraphed,
Is not a midnight malady,
But cognitive hypertrophy,
A coveted high-par trophy
To stud, with pleasure, in my crown.

I want to draw the air tonight.
The air that smells of petrichor.
No, not the air that smells of rain
Caressing down our garden’s floor.

I want to draw the air tonight.
The air that wears the cloud cologne.
Before the rain, before the earth’s
Intoxicating pheromone.