After An Argument
We cross the mid-needle point
of our argument. I leave the words
fallen. I leave the room, apartment,
tenement and toddle toward
the wide road that begins where
this city ends. I do not know why,
besides that is the whole point.
I walk. My ears ring. My eyes see
nothing unless light screams
at them, ‘See and survive!’ I see
that I can touch a lorry carrying anger
rushing toward me with my index finger
and that it falls apart into a hundred arid petals.
I walk, walk on them to the broader side
of the evening. A cloud of dust drinks me.
Some Dates We Remember; Some We Don’t
A pool of skin and calcium starved bones
sunken underneath swim upstream;
the staircase riddled with termites shakes.
The shivering hands hold a bouquet of budget orchids.
From the light filtered through the filthy panes
and the setting you may call the time – past afternoon,
albeit the old man will call it dawn or early morning.
No one lives up there. Not any longer.
His memory repeats. He remembers only
what his heart desires to hold, a shiver,
a bouquet of flowers, and again he tries
to win the heart that stopped beating
two Springs ago. Her coats and clothes
still hang in the closet, although they took her
empty bottle of sleeping pills from the dressing table.
There remains a vase on the wooden surface,
the flowers still fresh from the last date.
After The Funeral
The wall with your family portraits
and intimate moments ascending,
opposite to the fragile staircase rails
slipped away from your grip as you
fell back, head first, downstairs, bled
out alone, and died, contrasts the tale
your smashed bedroom mirror tells
about your married Springs, aunt Rose.
I have tried to find and remove the glass
from the floor since I have arrived here
for the funeral, and still a few shard steals
some beads of blood from my feet.
Strange, uncle perished years ago.
How much time does the bitterness need
before it thins away? Even after two lives,
it seems, the words pierce.
I watch the shadow if my face on the glass
of a photograph where you two look happy.
My uncle holds an airgun and a dead duck
that bleeds between you two smiling.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: KUSHAL PODDAR
An author and a father, Kushal Poddar, editor of ‘Words Surfacing’, authored eight books, the latest being ‘Postmarked Quarantine’. His works have been translated in eleven languages.
Find and follow him at: amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoet
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe
Image generated on Magic Studio
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