My Elevator Pitch
Jackanapes, that’s what they call me.
A whippersnapper, to be precise.
Nocturnal by all means,
thriving under the artificial Sun.
I bounce like the Coquerel’s sifaka walk,
clinging vertically, leaping anti-arboreal.
With fire on my tail, actions incendiary,
I subsidize departure from life,
dauntless of change or ache.
Ventricles of my brain, a bottomless pit;
where my thoughts endlessly linger—
buoyant, cushioned.
Heart’s auricles pump at a rate
wilder than a speeding horse.
My hypoglossal nerve eternally in action;
veracity—a distant, parching route;
mendacity—a cloak of grass abounds, growing green.
My brain’s barricade jams entry of light’s legions,
heart’s vessels prevent thoroughfare,
while my home’s main door
is always left ajar—beckoning, but frosty.
The elevator I ride—calm broken
by its hacking cough—
is with a faulty sensor I cannot discern.
I escape from life’s humdrum when
my work-time comes to an end,
once I sense dawn’s simmering blaze;
my eyes blind to its gape.
I sleep when all is bright,
curtains tightly drawn.
My Body Is a Living Car
Every morning, I dust myself off
the profuse heaps of yesterday.
My fuel lines—resistant to kinking
and splitting—sense the hills
built from the ever-shifting sand,
matted with ambitious weeds of want.
Dismantling the sometimes-rigid
structure, my throttle body
breathes calmly, poise as good as new.
But the dust requickens,
draping my mortal chassis with every ride.
My scratches and dents
mark my wisdom,
accumulated over the years in
battles—some lost, mostly won—endured.
My model mellowing,
stewing ages before long in the tooth,
my batter’s eyes wavering between
the ball—its seam, shine, and course—
and the up-to-date scoreboard.
My engine revs up on every mission,
beats akin to a refrigerator’s hum;
my genuflection to my mood adored,
true submission to the soul in the driver’s seat.
At times, I bump and skid on a road,
though my advanced safety sensors
as alert as that of a young tiger.
My baffled fuel pump bears the ravages of time,
intake–exhaust headers cough,
intake air filter sneezes,
clinging onto the ribs of my engine bay—
an inner spirit at work.
I steady myself,
my shock absorbers in play,
stabilize my ECM’s anarchic furor,
all the indigestion fuss,
escaping as a gaseous smoke
through the grille and tailpipe.
About the artist
Sreelekha Chatterjee is a poet from New Delhi, India. Her poems have appeared in Setu, Ninth Heaven, Fixator Press, Timber Ghost Press, The Candyman’s Trumpet, Ghudsavar Literary Magazine, The Argyle Literary Magazine, Blood Honey, Ultramarine Literary Review, The MockingOwl Roost, SHINE Quarterly, Fevers of the Mind, and in the anthologies—Enchanted Encounters (Bitterleaf Books, UK), 100 Poems for the 21st Century (Rough Diamond Poetry, UK), among others. Her poems have been widely published in more than forty journals, magazines, and anthologies globally across twelve countries, and translated into Korean and Romanian languages.
Facebook: facebook.com/sreelekha.chatterjee.1/, X (formerly Twitter): @sreelekha001, Instagram @sreelekha2023, Bluesky: @sreelekha2024
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