The questions come and haunt me now.
The questions I’ve been pffting off.
I know the answers well and through.
I know they aren’t what I want.
Again I’m striding want and need.
Again I’m split on wanton streams.
The boats have different helmsmen now.
The boats no longer do my bid.
Or so I say to cut me slack.
Or so I say to own it not.
My mornings have been starting late.
So late the curfew’s back in state
Around the time I brush my teeth
And fail to touch my yoga feet.
The tick-tocks of the hanging clocks
Remind me of the banging knocks
Of daily debts that wait for me
And care not for my penury.
I see the number on the wall,
The one I always mean to call,
The one that’s still a sticky note
The therapist’s assistant wrote.
I sigh again and leave it there.
Perhaps tomorrow I will share.
Today I have a lot to do.
A lot to do? Yeah, lot to do.
The Truth is often late to brew.
But Fact is instant coffee shot.
You choose to scalden, in your haste,
Your tongue with instant bitter taste.
So when the sips of Truth arrive
You splutter, cough, and call it hot.
With card in hand, she joins the queue,
Which serpentines around a tree,
To get her monthly kilos of
Unpolished rice at one rupee.
With bag in hand, she walks away
To where the grocer waits for her
And halves the bag on to his scales
To pocket thirteen rupees per.
With scales in hand, the grocer goes
To where the miller waits for him
And bargains down the two rupees
The miller tries to skim off him.
With cash in hand, the miller goes
And polishes the brownish rice
Into a whitish grain of sorts,
Which can be sold at fifty price.
With grain in hand, the miller goes
To where they do the packaging.
They seal his grain in branded bags,
Which sport the portrait of a king.
With kings in hand, the packager
Proceeds to where the grocer waits,
And, over cups of milky tea,
Dictates the share of babu seths.
With hand in hand, the grocer smiles,
Servility arching his back.
From suckers of the middle-class,
He profits twenty-five a pack.
I turned a morning nice and calm
Into a morning full of stress,
Because someone I trust and love
Accused me of a pettiness.
I wonder why I’m worked up, when
Secure I am in innocence,
And why my fists are clenched to punch
A crack through their distorted lens.
And where is meditation’s fruit –
So many hours in Silence spent
To learn to keep my mind in check
For times it fills with ill intent?
And while I sit and scribble lines,
I feel it bubbling up again:
The urge to scratch and tear and crush
These verses so pedestrian.
I want to take this crumpled page
And chew it into tasteless yuck
And spit it out on to their face,
Iambically, “What the f…??!!”
A storm is brewing in the sea.
And power’s gone for hours now.
I wait, I wait, I wait to see
The showers crush the flowers’ brow.
What right they have to pretty be?
So pretty fresh, so pretty red?
The rest of us in us we see
The ugliness of pretty dead.
A storm is brewing in my eyes,
So wet and salty, thanks to sweat.
My power’s gone for hours now.
I feel so helplessly upset.
I find him scribbled here and there
On margins of important thoughts
In books on western ways of life,
Attempting to untie some knots
Inside his head about himself,
About his choices and their fruits,
In words that overcompensate
With long, obscure Germanic roots,
Inadequacies plaguing him
And bringing down his confidence
To do the things he knows he can,
But finds himself upon a fence.
You switch his lettering with mine,
You’ll find me in his every line.
I stepped into the giddiness,
An infant drawn to fairy lights,
So mystified by twinkling eyes
That stirred me into clinking ice
And melted down my rigidness.
I let it lift me, slowly first,
A surfing moon on sunset waves,
Until it wasn’t slow at all,
My heightened senses now aware
Of gravity in recurrence.
Like finding on a Ferris wheel
A figment of forgotten fear
Of churning guts and whirling heads,
A wanting of the praying kind
To slow it down. No, stop it all.
I stood her up again today.
Some days it takes Herculean strength,
Some days a willingness to wait,
Some days a medication sweet,
Some days a yogic crow-like gait.
But mostly it’s a matter of
An extra hour of sleeping in
And half a spoon of coffee more,
To have a one-shot morning dump.
If you look close enough
The Christian Cross nails it.
It sums up Life succinctly,
Subtracting all the noise.
A + and a – concatenated,
Like so: +–, but without the space,
To signify that you can’t separate
The plusses from the minuses,
The ups from the downs,
The gains from the losses,
The joys from the sorrows.
Because they come together.
Always together.
Inseparably together.
Minakhi Misra 