Ready for closure
I see all the men I have loved laid neatly on a flower bed,
wrapped up in coffin clothes, reeking of places they’ve not entered.
Tick tock over the sleeping devils.
Liquorice fate circumnavigating the high-strung clavicles
with pockets full of posies.
Rage returns with empty coffers, waving torn shirts over its head.
A dramatic upswell of purpose and meaning.
Tonight, I don’t belong anywhere. Sentiments can go home to roost.
Wet mud, pale clothes, putrefying bodies. Amicable climate.
The spirits can finally close in.
Two people
Sometimes between people (two people) after eternity drips into
a catchment of water waded through,
there comes a waiting, like plume freshly plucked,
a waiting for the other to die.
It never ought to have arrived, but here it is,
like a thief’s hand that plucks lightly, and over time.
When they descend the stairs, I wish
the creaks crooned like a rotting mound of shrapnels.
When they stick their feet into the pond, I think
of creatures that bide their time.
When they disappear, I wish it was irreversible magic.
Twine dipped in oil
Why does the fire keep burning the more I dampen it with my cold sweat?
The less it rages, the more it smoothens into the sharpest of all elements,
the blue flame with octopian yellow fringes, the deepest of all curves
any shape can stretch into.
The percussion returns, and sucks all cracks in, crisply decked,
dark, where light buries itself.
Yet I stand at the dawn of it all, about to walk into the soot of all dreams real,
the realest of the real, and the fullest of the full, the merest of mortals – you and I.
The world and the shitty remains of that which flings itself into fire,
keeps raging, and rarefying, the thinnest of the thin, this miserable tempest,
my twine dipped in oil.
Melancholia
My melancholia waxing and waning is a tale I cannot tell.
Neither can I remember the lilac surrendering its arms
nor can I place this tilapia, and its two hundred
and twenty-five embryos – some curdled and others
transparent and pulsating, little droplets of incipient fever –
into my graphs of causation and correlations,
vain creatures dancing to pitiful melodies strummed by moonlit cicadas.
All I know is that I contort my weird forehead into a sloppy angle,
boniness of my skull, and crack open the little lizard egg
that sprouts metaphors and I just cannot resist anymore,
the charm of the unformed that flows out, the perfect ickiness
of a metamorphosis, the temptation to call it as it is –
my perfect home this luscious grief, a creature that has
come to rest weighing the right tender amount.
Party
I could tell you that there were three of us –
the inquisitor, adjudicator and the one willing to wilt.
By knowing this, you purge me of my peace.
You come alarmingly close, but remain distant
when thunder comes as a sliver of the thinnest blade,
some criminal knowledge of the ghost child.
When will I return to her, to the basest of all beings?
The one I need to meet.
I wonder what can come of this meeting.
I imagine talking to her as I walk around the city.
But she doesn’t come through.
Three lisps, three players mutating into one another.
This is a bigger band, a bigger party.
This child sees herself in the mirror in the washroom.
Glassy-eyed, cataract, too old to crawl.
This was the time to plan my future, she might have said.
The rectilinearity of it all. No room for ricochets.
Only small screws to play with. Tiny hands, tinier tools.
I imagine her recalling this as the moment she trifurcated.
A party for lack of one.
I wonder, if I invoke her, will she return,
like a strange shadow on water, a phantom lily.
Or perhaps, as three shadows, three phantom lilies,
joined at the hips.
Perhaps she knows what will become of us.
Limerence unmooring
These days, I see the ship leaving the harbour, the one that we built, weighing loyalties,
infidelities and lurking intentions,
floors of cotton and sails of iron, we wondered why the ship wouldn’t budge, or whistle,
when all we could find for the breeze
to flow through was the circularity of our confrontations.
I see our sailors, and in fact, the whole crew waiting for their faces to be painted, arms made of oars and legs of snow,
we wondered whether the sea had them by their throats. When I see our ship unmooring,
I think of the life it made for itself at birth.
I think of the things that were that way, when they were, and unclench my palms to let my imagination rest where I stand now.
I see you on the ship – leaving quietly the way you came – from the waters we broke from ice.
When you leave, I shall learn to draw this ship, right here, where the water receded, for good.
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About the Author
Kalyani Bindu is a post-doctoral researcher at NIMHANS, India. Two Moviegoers was her first poetry collection. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Fauxmoir, 45th Parallel, Better than Starbucks, Half Empty Magazine, the Indian Express, New Asian Writing, Guftugu, and others. She served as a poetry editor at Variant Literature Journal. As a columnist for White Crow Art Daily, she penned articles exploring various socio-cultural themes.
