by Kinshuk Gupta
We Spawn as Mushrooms
(for MAMC 2018 Undergraduates)
1.
The blood-streaked hospital walls
wear a necklace of sleep-necrosed eyes,
atrophied hopes,
macerated prayers,
cough at the metropolitan-diversity
of sandals, fungus, calluses at every footstep,
dream of a state midway
between life and death.
2.
The aching wrinkles, twitching faces,
suffering hearts tether
snakes & ladders
of their destiny
over our frozen shoulders.
3.
In wards, our patients chew
myopic relations three times a day,
with a rainbow of pills, piss, pinpricks,
remember leukemic memories of
a high-heeled youth—
its ellipses, commas, semicolons.
4.
We, half their sons’ age
aspirate the dextrose of ironed shirts,
starched sarees of nine-to-five jobs,
embitter their tongues talking of
collapsing milestones,
watch their blood turning
thinner than water.
They are case histories,
rungs of ambitions, brown bread
of our hyperemic lives.
5.
My friend searches for the
slenderness of fingers
that he felt 15 years ago,
geography of his wife’s breasts
in malignant ladies, warmth
of the pink flesh
that he may call his own.
How easily the pathology of their prayers sutures us with their guilt –
Our sagging bodies crumbled into
talcum of bones, dunes of skin
flaking as paint like them.
The Parabola of Age
Uncle’s death streamlines in our
arteries as the night deepens its
mongoloid slant. His images tiptoe
in our brain in a chronology—
Uncle with jet-black, mehndi-red,
lightning white hair.
Our grief takes a projectile—
A prey to beguiling words.
We head to Allahabad
which bribes tears every day
to Yama with its dead-beat heart,
grief-leprosied flesh,
life-roasted bones.
12 years ago, it used to sleep near
the confluence of khakhi Saraswati,
jade of Ganges, algae green Yamuna,
wake up on the beats of manjira,
conch shells, fluttering flags. Now, its eyes
meditate in an elegiac silence.
Why does a city lose its energy
when your tribe whitewashes from the
creases of its palms?
In this culturally-spiced city,
walnut-skinned Uncle lived. Every day,
he recalled the anthem of his life,
recited the preamble of sorrow,
spent hours on the Yamuna Bridge
watching the cars make golden frills
of different lengths on the Sangam.
His spine chills on an ice-box now,
his nose is cotton-clogged, a white sheet
of lifelessness wraps him.
His emery face is wrinkled with guilt,
stoned with complaints to Gods.
How age-claws
scrape off the thin layer of sanity
leaving behind a person
to mutilate the syllables
of his own name,
unroot the sockets of norms
from the gums of prestige,
choke the joints with pain
of a daughter whose womb
blossoms flowers
falling off like an eggplant?
As the flames crawl over his skin
unhooked from the shelves of the bone,
I watch Uncle cradling the last adjectives
of a life which he spent with the
holy chants, migrant birds,
ticking clocks that secretly
reversed their hands.
Kinshuk Gupta is a medical student, currently residing in Delhi. He uses the scalpel of his pen to write poems. He was shortlisted for ‘Chapbook Contest 2018’ by Rhythm Divine Poets, Kolkata. He was also among the top 50 best poets in The Great Indian Poetry Contest organized by On Fire Cultural Organisation. His poems have been widely anthologized across India and abroad.