Minakhi Misra

I’ve found in me a new disease:
A voice that tells me, “Give up, please.
You need to rest, you need a break,
To eat a slice of velvet cake,
To crunch your way through chicken fried.
It’s fine, you know? At least, you tried.”

I roll my eyes, say, “Nicest try!”
It simply smiles and winks a bye,
Until again the ghrelin drips
And shows me sizzling bacon strips.
“A day a week is not so bad.
Remember virtues Stoics had?
So, practice bit of Temperance.
You know what makes a ton of sense?
The middle path the Buddha taught.
A day a week is not a lot.”

I roll again my traitor eyes
And grab a fistful peanut fries.
The extra salt I do not mind.
I pat my tum, “Be kind. Be kind.”

It often happens late at night.
I see myself with lizard sight:
A foetal man with fatal flaws
Engrossed in some subsomnic fight.

I scuttle down the eastern wall
To watch my arches rise and fall
In step with rapid charging drums
Of some subdermal martial call.

I land upon the bed to scan,
Despite the roaring ceiling fan,
The dampness of a bloodied field
In some subthermal shape of man.

And back I go into my head,
To see the lizard flee in dread.
I hear its fear vibrate so clear
On some subsonic brahman thread.

O Infinite within me, please,
Remind me on my days of grief
I live no more to only live.

My life is worthless anyway
Except on days I live to give.
To give whoever I can give
Whatever little I can give.
To live enough another day
To give enough another day.

Remind, when things are tough for me,
That having You’s enough for me.
It may be years before I see
That I am You and You are Me.
Until the day, remind me, please,
I live to give until I cease.

I feel embarrassed to admit
I haven’t got the slightest clue
Of what I want to do beyond
A daily life of crafting lines.

It’s not even my Ikigai.
It’s not something the world will buy.
It’s not something the world will need.
It’s just a thing I want to do.
And maybe I am good at too.

It’s “good” in strictly private sense.
Of all the skills I now possess,
With crafting lines, I feel Success.
It doesn’t mean I’m good enough
To move a reader with my stuff.

I know the lines won’t pay my bills.
I know the lines won’t school my kids.
I know the lines won’t cure disease.
I know the lines won’t bring me peace.

But lines are where I feel so true.
And maybe I am meant for too.
But maybe I have got no clue
Of what to do, what not to do.

I feel embarrassed to admit
I haven’t got the slightest clue
Of what I want to do beyond
A daily life of crafting lines.

It’s not even my Ikigai.
It’s not something the world will buy.
It’s not something the world will need.
It’s just a thing I want to do.
And maybe I am good at too.

It’s “good” in strictly private sense.
Of all the skills I now possess,
With crafting lines, I feel Success.
It doesn’t mean I’m good enough
To move a reader with my stuff.

I know the lines won’t pay my bills.
I know the lines won’t school my kids.
I know the lines won’t cure disease.
I know the lines won’t bring me peace.

But lines are where I feel so true.
And maybe I am meant for too.
But maybe I have got no clue
Of what to do, what not to do.

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?