She picks the boxes from the doors –
The Christmas boxes of the rich.
And sometimes some leftover cake.
And sometimes some leftover trees.
Her kids might love to have all this.
The boxes they can burn for heat.
The cake can thicken up the milk.
The trees can make a winter roof.
Her kids might also hate it all.
They hate to wake to fan the fire.
They hate to drink their milk entire.
They hate to even pick a plier.
She rather trade it all for cash
And buy herself some opium.
Praise be the morning when
We wake up, eat up, sleep again.
Praise be the afternoon
We wake up, eat up, watch a ‘toon.
Praise be the evening
We sit and talk of everything.
Praise be the magic night
We bake a cake in fairy light.
The swelling love within your heart
Erupted in your cake’s relief.
I gulped it down your Adam’s Apple,
Oh my perfect Christmas Eve.
I graduated Nobody,
Escaping in bellwether fur
Mistaken by its cosiness.
My one-eyed Education writhed
In agony of blinding pain
My passioned pen inflicted deep.
I should have listened to my peers
Who spoke of patient temperance
In stormy waters of the world.
But I, emancipated wrath,
Ebullient bravado-wreathed,
Proclaimed my name aloud to all.
My Education’s cursed response –
A prayer to Reality,
Its Father by divinity:
To keep me far from native skills
Whose love forever beckons me.
My dear, dear Poetry.
And so marooned from page to page
In fated twists, or false allures,
I write and yet I do not write.
See how the nymph of Comfort Zone
Confines me on her daily page.
My verse is worsening with age.
How much of this will I retain?
And if I don’t, have I progressed?
They say to squeeze the real juice
I have to read it all again
To find the things I’ve missed between
The lines, the words, the spaces too.
And then I’ll doubt my doubt again:
Is there a point to what I do?
To read and read and read again
To read and read and read again?
To learn that I have learned too less
To learn that I have learned too less?
To waste my time to learn I’ve learned
To waste my time to learn I’ve learned?
In school plays, he always was
Solomon the Wise.
Two mothers, one son.
Two claims, one lie.
My brother draws
His cardboard sword
To split the baby equally.
One mother cries and walks away.
She cannot see her son divided.
Now, every time I fight with him,
And mother has to mediate,
He simply walks away from us.
He cannot see her so divided.
You seem to have a lot of time
To find new ways of tearing flesh
The way you do around your thumbs.
You simply cannot let it heal.
You have to pick and open it.
And in the pain of opening
You push the borders of the scab.
Tomorrow you’ll have more to teethe
And more to show off, reddened raw.
Such comfortable victimhood,
Possessiveness of suffering.
Why should we tire ourselves
Debating, arguing?
It’s easier to learn
To stay inert, agree.
For making points is pointless.
Winning points, supreme.
A contest. Finite Game.
The Nash Equilibrium:
Pyrrhus, Asoka.
Why should we tire ourselves?
The night is bored. It leaves.
The window blinds have cast
Their rungs upon the floor,
Connecting us,
Reminding us
That ladders can be bridges too.
I want someone to teach me how
To say the truth and be okay.
I want someone to teach me how
To be okay with being okay.
I want someone to teach me how
To be okay to say the truth.
I want someone to teach me how
To teach someone to say the truth.
He sits and nods and only asks.
He doesn’t answer anything.
I ask him why, get no reply,
Except a smile, a nod, a gaze.
I’ve booked him for eleven days
And two have passed on one-way-street.
His questions throw me off my feet.
They have been stuck in drying muck.
My head is splitting into halves
The size of thirds.
Minakhi Misra 