Author: Minakhi Misra

“You write because you feel too much,
Too much to keep it all within.”

I love it when my therapist
Relinquishes her ” you tell me”,
And shares a bit of what she thinks.
For what she thinks is so so off
I cannot help but laugh aloud
And make her blush and closed again.

“You call me not to look at you.
You call me now to laugh at me.”

Sometimes, I wonder if she’s right.
And other times, if she’s the right
Psychologist for me to see.
At least, she’s pretty. Present. Prompt.
At least, she’s vulnerable too.
At least, she reads the books I read.
Not all of them. Important ones.
At least, I see her as a friend.
Perhaps the only friend I trust
In times I do not trust myself.

“I write because I do not feel,
I _cannot_ feel the way they feel,
The way the writers I admire
Describe the feelings I require
To feel that I can also feel.
I write because I envy them.
Now that’s a feeling I can feel.”

She laughs. I sigh. She laughs again.
“Frustration. That’s another one.
You try too hard, but I see you.
You write because you feel too much.
Too much to keep it all within.
Now, tell me if I’m wrong, okay?
You’ll write this as a poem too.”

At least, she knows the way I think.

The day is done for others, but
I haven’t even started yet.
They stretch their backs,
They shoo their kids,
They plonk into their TV couch.
I haven’t even started yet
For that is sort of what I did
Throughout the day,
Throughout their day.

I pick the pen, I scratch my head,
I roll the pen between my teeth.
The laptop booting takes a while.
I type with pen between my teeth.
Within the minute I am sure
The lines are going nowhere good.
They take their writer’s life as guide.
I think about deleting them.

The nurse, whose shift has just begun,
Is here to make mistakes again.
“You have to rest.”
“It’s all I do.”
“The laptop’s on.”
“I see it too.”
“You have to rest.”
“I have to write.”
“The doctor scolds me.”
“My delight.”
She turns and stomps out. Then returns.
She’d left the clipboard on my bed.
“You have to rest.”
“I’ll do my best.”
She turns and drops the clipboard pen.
At least, she’s started with her day.

I slip into a seashore sleep,
My snoring waves erasing all
The lines I’d fingered in the sand.

I wake to melancholic notes
The bottle sings on empty tum,
Its paper cargo still so blank.

The snoring waves return, return.
The fingered words erase, erase.

A hermit crab ideas out
And dashes sideways leaving dots:
“To dream, you sleep,”
Its Morse Code reads.

“To write, you dream,”
My page begins.

For some, the road’s their only home.
For others, home’s their only road.
It doesn’t mean they aren’t lost.
It simply means they haven’t found
A better road, a better home.

It’s not the weight but how you lift.
It’s not the slope but how you climb.
It’s not the dark but how you see.
It’s not the punch but how you breathe.

You think you are Intelligent.
You think you are Creative too.
The only thing you use them for
Is making up Excuses new.

You do not rise to Need-of-hour,
Not even to Potential.
You fall to these If-not-for-thats?
You’ll fall to Immaterial.

She said she’d lit a prayer lamp
To help him with his interview.
He said the lamp’s a waste of time,
“You trust in God, hunh? Good for you.”

“What’s wrong in having faith in God?”
“He’s just a myth, accepted lie.”
“What’s wrong in having faith in myth?”
“I’m getting late. My CV file?”

She handed him the printed sheet,
“You’re placing faith in future You.
A You who’s just a myth for now.
A lie you want accepted too.”

He pointed at his bullet points.
“They’ll hire me for things I’ve done.”
“In faith that things you’ve done induce
Predictions of the things you can.”

“I cannot do a single thing
If I cannot have faith in me.”
“Does faith in you somehow ensure
Tomorrow you will even be?”

“Of course I can’t. And nor no God.
It’s Randomness, Statistics, Luck.”
She pointed at the watch and said,
“I’ve lit the scented lamp for Luck.”

She reads me out some lines of hers –
Her fingerprints of pensive nights,
When solitude reveals the depths
Her hyperactivity hides.

She reads them from her notebook leaves –
Her kindergarten alphabet
Betraying childlike innocence
That walks in adult silhouette.

My fingers touch her words and feel
The pulsing pressure of her pain,
Engraved in, not her mother tongue,
But buffered English of restraint.

She says she does not write to write.
She writes to free the boiling steam
She has repressed for so so long,
It poems out in whistling screams.

And here I sit, adulted child,
Who writes to write and write again,
Who fuels the stove to fuel the steam,
Producing poem-worthy pain.

He’d promised he would take us there.
The bamboo boat was ready, flagged –
My brother let me make the flag,
A Post-it on an ice-cream stick.

He’d promised he would take us there.
On full-moon night of Kartik month,
When bamboo boats voyaged the pond
In light of rocket fireworks.

He’d promised he would take us there.
But here he slept exhausted, out.
Our mother’s fingers fireworked
Around her warning, shaking head.

He’d promised he would take us there.
But, as my brother pointed out,
The moon was here, the boat was here,
And so were rising falling waves.

He gently placed the bamboo boat
Upon our father’s moonlit paunch.