Bhargab Chatterjee

The snowball beside the dry twig still possesses the warmth of the child’s palms like first love. Though the child passed carelessly towards a warm place with his parents.

A flight for a special agendum
is convened. The sky is cut
into two pieces through referendum.

Molecules
of the electorate
are superfluously organic.

“I am” is diagonally refracted
through the thick glass of being
and falls on the green algae

buffered,

collisions neither sink nor swim.

Here I feel,
“I am alone in this white street lined with gardens.”

A linear concept has many vertical columns.
Concrete pillars are flat; mute structures.
People try to bring out meanings;
sometimes mathematically.
Equation: emptiness + substance = time
A line of control enters into me
from the floor
where I am standing.
I try to remain
around authenti #city.
Skyscrapers fall from the sky
all around
and shoot out innumerable roots.

Anti-intimate math integrates them.

The Christmas tree is alive with invisible birds.
The room is pleasantly warm
where ‘Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish
the inner organs of beasts and fouls.’*
I am not so ghoulish.
In my room, today, I ate a plate of rice;
I don’t know what will happen tomorrow.
I have learnt how to be indifferent
about the gun-fights elsewhere
and the elections on the card.
Yesterday my efforts were smudged by rains;
though I know, monsoon rains are too feeble.
Now, having quenched my hunger, I hope,
a full moon will appear in tonight’s sky
and a complete, meaningful sentence.

*from Ulysses by James Joyce

In the fog it is not possible to read someone’s face. Is optic nerve only reliable? Can it break a concrete surface? Work. Think. Assume. Gravitate. You accumulate all concrete slabs and rubble somewhere else. Say, in a bog. Environment experts gather with festoons of their political identities. Political slugfest starts. Croaking gets sharper through the cracks. At the end, your diapers get soiled with major contradictions.

editors note: Clearly, there’s trouble in the rubble; best sit this one out. – mh clay

savagery
automation
solar eclipse

trauma
modals
the atomic structure

polytheism
grass
refraction of light

independent variables
proletariat
insomniac fog

justice
nightgown
war-game manuals

dust
Cezanne
mother board

blizzard
super ego
the alimentary canal

Every time when I ask my doctor
about the mole
just down my left nostril
he replies that
he observes
the rubble
of a drawing room,
well furnished in the past.
The broken pieces of furniture
and the walls
interpret the devastation
in various ways.
He adds
that rats are often leaping
over full stops
and disappearing
down the cantilever bridge
of the city
which the English built in 1943.

An homage to John Ashbery

When I mark the two edges
of a contempt
with a sharp pencil
naivete interrupts.
It bestrides on the two edges
and pushes them away.
‘I just walk around
Into the dusk-charged air.’
Vividly smell my own perspiration –
the monster inside me
replicates itself in an endless variation.
Is contempt a chess-board?
A driveway?
Amorphism?
“…I cannot explain the action of leveling
why it should all boil down to one
uniform substance, a magma of interiors.”

Every day my gazes break on her smiles. In the hot summer afternoon I sit on the pavement of her silence. Thrashing dust buses, cars and all other vehicles pass with so many words but they never get down before me; in this scorching heat I sit beside the street dog of my desire who pants with drooping tongue. I visit to meet the “idols of the theatre” in the city where Francis Bacon lives, though dust and heat on the roads make me tired.

There are
many dark lines.

Only a few of them
are vertical

on the surface
of my life.

Others form
different angles.

The thicker ones
are embedded firmly

and pierce
through the bottom.