Minakhi Misra

I woke up one day to realise
My hostel room was a landfill dump.
The universe under my bed,
Which had promised me infinity,
Was running out of appetite
For plastic wrappers of my gluttony.
It spit out all my basketballs
Of crunched up crispy “party packs”
I gulped down by the triple dose,
Protecting fellow hostelers
From evil junk food overlords.

I was the segregation secretary:
The plastic went under my bed,
The tasty went under my skin,
And though my bed gave up on me,
My growing girth assured me that
It will support me all the way
Even beyond the edges of
The judgy mirror on the wall.

I couldn’t stand the wrappers, though.
I couldn’t stand them on the floor,
On the table, on the shelves,
On the shut down window sill.
Everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere.
Reminding me of treacheries
Slumping out from underneath.
I pulled the mattress off the bed,
And tractored into the room next door,
Announcing to my best friend that
I will be sleeping on his floor
Until the end of present term.
And can I dump my stuff on yours?
Was all he ever asked of me.

No wonder I can’t stand the room
Inside my digital marketing head
When on a pillow on the floor
I sit in meditation, quiet.
No wonder I can’t sleep at nights.
I run into my buzzing phone
Into the strobe-lit 4K minds
Of movie czars and YouTube stars,
Bingeing bingeing bingeing on.

Someone who shares the house with me
Someone who’s asked me many things
Someone who knows me very well
Has asked me why I never write.

I say, I’m writing all the time.
He says he’s never seen me write.
And if at all he’s seen me write,
It’s never more than half an hour.
I say, I’m writing all the time.

It doesn’t look like writing, though.
I’m nowhere near a desk or chair.
I’m nowhere near a page or pen.
I’m nowhere near a key or click.

It looks like kneading dinner flour.
It looks like filling bottles up.
It looks like tearing spider webs.
It doesn’t look like writing, though.

It looks like nailing finger scabs.
It looks like charting lizard paths.
It looks like pacing up and down.
It doesn’t look like writing, though.

It looks like jumping over dung.
It looks like slipping on the mud.
It looks like running from a bull.
It doesn’t look like writing, though.

It looks like glitchy office calls.
It looks like sipping coffees, tall.
It looks like slamming laptops shut.
It doesn’t look like writing, though.

And when it does, it’s mostly done.
It’s mostly coming to the page
And letting all this writing out
By getting far away from me
And trusting I have done the work.

Grief ripens on an autumn tree
With eight-legged persistence of
A spider as its final leaf.
A friend succeeds eventually,
Believing he’s Robert Bruce
Entangled in the web of Life
Who’s trying trying trying hard
To cut down all his earthly ties.

Why do they label a poem “derivative”
When all it does is approximate
The infinitisimally limited
Direction of human experience,
Charted (by them, mind you)
As a continuum of crucifixions
Of its expression (by artists and diarists
And traveling, chronicling historians)
On the axes of achievement and emotion,
Just to make a few points?

Do they forget sometimes that
The essence of a human age
Can be calculated by integrating
Its poetry over that period?

When yesterday the monkeys stole
Our peels of corn and coconut
To drop into our backyard well,
I only saw the monkeys steal
Our peels of corn and coconut
To drop into our backyard well.

It’s only when I peed today
To drain the en-saids from my veins,
I saw them for the physicists
Who tried to test Galileo,
Controlling for the autumn draft
That often plagues the Pisa lab.

The pills are killing more than pain.

I found a fence of staggered stone
Around abandoned greenhouses –
A centre tall, two broken wings –
That had been moulting shattered glass.

A kid was plucking ripe granite:
A final meal for a fallen Roc.

1.
Spaghetti on a clothesline taut
Returns to drawer or washing tub
Depending on the pigeon’s food.

2.
The drones emerging from the train
Return to hives or nectar bars
Depending on their honey’s mood.

3.
The dog-eared haikus in this book
Return to bark or lick my wounds
Depending on my gratitude.

A schoolyard fence proclaims this quote:
“The wise are those who ask the whys.”

Graffitied underneath, a note:
“The lice are those who spread these lies.”

And to the side, the silhouettes
Of children busy scratching heads.

They say the Master read a lot
In secret, silence, solitude.
And so, they say, his haiku’s not
Originally virginal.

They point at eighteen thousand lines,
And, shrugging, claim they cannot know
If in the cherry-blossomed snow,
The Master buried evidence.

From where I see, the Master saved
(If at all he plagiarized)
The poetry that no one cared
To keep so deeply memorized.

And if you ask me who he was:
A voracious reader, sure.
Avaricious writer, more,
Who pries into his present tense
And pays the price of making sense
To pilfer moments that comprise
The prize of living daily lives.