by Abin Chakraborty
Preparation
Silences shuffle
Like fall-rustle leaves
On streets that unfold
Like papers unused
Here, in the stillness of our dawn.
And all my selves,
Of hours, minutes past
Flock to our lanes
With designated dress
And jostle for a place
Among particoloured rows
Anxious and eager for a call.
Casting all done, I linger over tea
And wait for the cauldrons of noise.
Memory
Rainwater weaves tapdance of needles on skin;
Wakes a few frogs in the wetlands of time
And muddles all the linens we'd saved.
Synapses beat and string together now
Touches buried deep in our cells.
Resurrected thence, they dance amid stars
And dapple our canvass with tears.
Stranded in the causeway of hopes without faith,
I stutter amid shingles and temper my bones
And swim towards invisible shores
Sighs and Wings
In the stillness of dawn, to sighs I've asked
Their lineage and destiny untold.
Flitting among shelves full of papers and books
They've whispered me tales full of petals now torn
Amid debris of silence that piles along walls
Or cleaves our bedsheets with barbed wire lines
In these our dawns full migraine and cough,
With concern now caught in its bluff.
Foreclosed with too many of dues still unpaid,
We scrape for the ounces of trust that'll loan
Perhaps a few bonds to us still.
Jumbled in fractions of aggregated dross,
We gasp among compounded interests of loss,
As idiots in ponzies of heart.
Spanning over ebbtide of dark deeper night,
Unbroken wings of cranes soar in flight.
Midlife Advice
Properties of heart do not act
As coupons just valid for once.
Instead they recur
as comets or quakes
That live beyond realms
of calculus or cards
And topple our castles in sand.
Practice your lessons and swim
And beware of currents playing false.
Quixotic
Heart’s little radar would seek
Traces of forgotten quests
Deep within far distant lands.
But songs from the casements
Of castles forlorn
No longer quiver in the air
For heart’s little quixotic rides.
So you tilt at the windmills in dark
And commune in motley with a cup.
Splinters
Splinters of memories at times,
Avalanche of feelings would loose.
But even as phalanx of ice
Rush towards seas’ torrid tides,
The peaks will never ever hear
Sighs from the far-lying shores.
So you rupture your bases and wait,
Till peaks are all sunk in your waves.
Café
Glimmers through
opalescent antics of glass,
sprinkle over silence and cups.
And all of my stirrings
with sugar or cream,
fade to a series of lukewarm sips
as words like expired coupons
now flap and trail beyond
traffics of sense.
The blank chairs gaze at my eyes
and read through the receipts
of longings now lost,
which pile as newspapers sold.
Someday, I might make more sense.
Someday, you might be more present.
Question of Purpose
And all of this farce to what little end?
I am the chronicle of half-men’s struggle,
An aptly named bin of mutilated hopes
Where abdicated calls for unfulfilled dreams
Grow with the abandon of weeds.
Reliance on polysyllabic words
Only can mask an agony of void
That fears things simple or true.
Mannered to the core,
my constipated voice
Musters but an army of pose.
Perhaps like Gogol I should
Incinerate all of my trash
and duel with the devils instead.
What lower depths are left to be scraped?
What loss there is yet to forbear?
Abin Chakraborty is an Assistant Professor of English in Chandernagore College. Regularly relying on Eliot, Heaney or Rilke to carry him through, he also hopes to reach out to others through poems of his own. He lives in Saltlake, Kolkata.
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