Author: Minakhi Misra

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.

I miss his musicality –
Unmetered. Yet melodious.
Enjambments jambing broken lines.
A man.
A child.
A tree.
A rope.
He leaves you hanging:
In suspense.
Permute.
Combine.
Somehow.
Make sense.
Your mood dictates this poet’s pens.
He trusts your most macabre mind.

They say she walks in bangle chimes –
The ones they found beneath her feet,
The ones they swear she only wore
The times her lover came to meet.

They say she comes on Durga’s day
And walks the roads till Kaali’s night.
They say she chooses whom to haunt
And whom to grant the curse of sight.

Of course, the ones who see her, die
Before they get to tell their tales.
But, every year there is a death
With tiny marks of fingernails.

Some say they are just lover’s nails
You buy per hour with gambled cash,
Until you run your luck away,
And back you go to picking trash.

Some say they must be puncture marks
From spatulas of boiling highs.
But most agree they are her claws
And shake their heads with heavy sighs.

This year, already, two are dead,
Though no one knows if she’s to blame.
The corpses bulged in beating rain
And drink from losses in the game.