Jayanta Bhaumik

the meat centre begins with the price of the tongue.

Just one forkful and a succulent creature lacquered around the tongue.
The appetite note is a confusion: everything is a taste, but not food.
I wonder if hunger is just a slow universe, like other half-cooked ones,
born to ready the meaty physics holed up by humans, animals,
other animals.
Mere drillings into the stuff do not let you learn what is not so random
about this gaping gap, quite experimentally discovered, but of course
all men get less surprised who believe in the filling. Just filling, no text
no major aloofness or suitable crescendo,
no trope-like adventure – only filling. Patches beautified this way,
how every dark symphony takes on nights and galloping stars,
how moon belongs with a daily pretender’s obsessiveness and our neat
comedian makes the entire sky mooned. Then there’s no hollow at all,
only a rooftop expanded to your incremental growth, your ambition
of thumping, your dream of living free, combustion-proof,
light-hearted – a light.
You are now able to see: how among a million teachings one is to
optimistically close every book or mouth. How not to find music
in the ashes, only to collect soundlessness when a mother in an urn,
not a mother, bones no more bones but cherish of a mineral, kept,
optimally, as food for the soil. Meanwhile, another mother,
the mother sparrow, is busy teaching the baby sparrow what a food
is all about, without a fear when a fear is whether a body is just too
blunting, dust-proof, dust-free – a mother bird teaching a baby bird
what a body is all about, eaten, slowly, more slowly, or fast,
without necrophobia.

Let us stick to this seasonal soil and stand under this singing
tree’s silver shadow This Christmas, we shall celebrate our
failures too, our share of scare hidden in the current annual charades.
This year we will push our light bit slow for our next goodwill trip,
being the unperturbed contemporaries of hope, – really, I wish certain
hopes wouldn’t look like the bus-terminuses on the net – being the
eyeballs socketed so correct, never running through the
unterraced height of some anomalous clarity – being also like a
twig’s weird augury never known by any decadent botanist ever –
like the most recent edition of mind seeming as if a motherly
acceptance of samsara or whatever told by the beauticians after
they change all the black spots to the surprising butterflies on your face –

being just the humans, without the epicenters – being a verdict of this
year’s polythene lily, its no-smell issue such a bad year of mannerisms –
being so much locked under a curious skin – being a body susceptible to
a saying so venomous in the air – being the member of this year’s
learnedness, no, we shouldn’t breathe free more, no, we shouldn’t
unmask our faces even for our mirrors

Being still in the freedom of what you never have known by a name

This Christmas, we will decorate every tree as if each leaf this morning
a galactic green drop
Every time I utter it for every moment is my day and my night

Every New Year begins in my eyes with a drop of
water you call an ocean of life

I read myself. This oomph of rationality. How the oddball
silently skyrocketing inside my body, its diurnal
science always unsettled

How the rest is not struck, at night too. But lettered. Insects pull
themselves to the bastion-elements of, oh, the
poor fire    That    becoming the best screenplay, written for
a prejudice. Me-&-Us, sitting in a reactive row, looking at
the open fire, vs unshaken moths, out in the window

We then grow metal roses out of a short curiosity.
Without plucking their smells, the road goes ahead. That’s how
ninety months like April tell me to walk on. Roads and roads and
roads of wasteful logomachy thus making the circle complete.
Which, essentially, means they let me spread the galaxy again,
with the legs and wings of thirty mythologies.
And I finally get the river coming out decoded, decoded

In this river, it is my global birth fishing. On the bank, a magic
word, falling neither from the sky nor blackboard, manifests in
the most living creatures. Disembowels creations to prove
my premature salts, papyrus, woods, dreams and urban wishes.
Then prepares a bagful of alphabets free to burst to my body

You know you can only fuse or abandon me, never read

It’s very much a long, lavish bench one fine
Sunday in my mind, you sitting on it, reading a
newspaper striped in yellow crossing magenta,
the first page always me.
It is always an imagination being so kind,
making ruins separable,
making them connect the day you finally never find out.
As I imagine I’ve crossed those, day and night,
the heart says it is sheer a plank made for a deck-party,
the hollering constant upon it, but the strange
faces and disdainful miracles busy swimming below.
I know there’s another unknown day in a week,
and you lift your face from your paper, your face jittery,
like it reads why a love looks like a
subtle mammoth, it is always so much active and in flurry,
because it’s always so much brightened with helplessness.
One day the bench starts growing long,
unstopping, long enough to transcend globe-mapping,
me sitting beside you, jittery again like we’ve no hearts,
we’re only the seekers of this world with
an orphanage beating inside the ribcage in us

I believe it is always raining inside a heart
water brimming up,
and the night
waits for the world to be flooded.

All is an inevitable quotient
between emptiness and memory-flash

Think of a house wending back
and webbed in grey
Think of how time written in a bold font
on the backside of a garden-patio
Endless soil soaked in a water-coloured ink
You can best sense all as you hear the
dying sound of a horn kissed by a horizon
As you open an old basket,
fossils of the vacuum turn into
the continuum of pages and flowers.

I believe it is fascinating
to be lost in the talent like meadows.
Your eyes are the biggest metaphor
The reality is only a secret lane. A bottle of
perfume is lately broken in your name
Anesthetic fogs come out as I tell you, yes,
come, tell me it’s that, that,
nothing can change the sound of
downpour in my heart, but you can at least
know that one sitting deep in me with a
hard acquiescence has nothing to do with love