Alien Skin
How is it this chalky enmeshed wisdom of bones like
A wintrous rigidity feels slushy with its cage at times,
This body prying
Open like a treasure trove on some days,
in half-shade, half – shelter
A real alignment
Yet abruptly changes form
Becoming unknown, unveiled –
Alien skinned,
Non aligned
When I yearn affiliation.
How is it when
I seek refuge it’s comforting at times blooming like
A Lotus in a Godly land,
Welcoming into the core, really chanting something
As mantras of devotion,
Echoing of the being called God
Self – Portrait as Navigating consciousness
After deep – delving conversations
We are dreaming the fetish, to be wholesome,
To grasp things together,
Piecemeal, not smitten by delirium or defences
We are weaving cocoons that are safe, warm
Finesse, which is to say,
There are spools of abandoned threads that
Demand association,
And midst the test anxieties
We hold the creaking visages – of light with our fingers
Our friend indulges in curiosities – abysmal, uncanny
Everything can’t be known of the heart – it
Is indeed a perilous space,
I collect unforeseen realities, visualise them
In pink phosphenes,
Preconscious, subconscious deliquifies
Fades in facets of incomprehensibility
What remains is the dust from heaps,
Postcards to the nebulae settling within us
They are rupturing other paradigms,
Politics, primeval states, walled grounds
Vasant charms vehemently, as I give
In to this intersection,
As an immense froth, fulcrum of demands
The swishing silence dissolving everything.
Ceased Time
It is the intestine of night,
Secreting the fluidity of all its brackenness over,
I solve riddles, peeking through the jaffri arch work picturised
As a village scene from Mature Harappan decays.
Grabbing the slant light, reaching me from the
colourless bodies beyond, I clutch them as tearing knots of
Love
Time suspends, tapping and scraping my consciousness
– my
incapablities to fathom.
The texture of this quandary hunts through me, piercing
uncanny cuneiform though history chapters,
Eerie and despondent and vacant,
As a despondent focal point – falling away and shattering.
There’s an urgent prayer, somewhere, I am searching through,
the
reeking ruins like heaviness that lifts over my stoned chest,
The beaten being of love hiding under the bushes,
Weathering in the collapsing hours, in the succinct rhythm of tireless time.
Can’t have enough of you
I remember the first day we met,
Aurora, the daylight in the canopies, falling on my cheeks
Flattening —
I remind myself often
How all these years, I have paraded through anomaly.
I can’t just get enough of it.
I am tired of the desire that knows its impossibility. Its imagined
Inimitable self. I am exhausted of nothing but your memories,
Nothing else, never you.
I let the curtains of night fall on me as
A cloak in blind.
Times when I know very little, ambiguity
Pricking my body, introspecting,
How I had never known you
Well, nothing to remember than a
Word pulsing with life. Nothing
To treasure than a sweltering gaze
Thick glass petals, broken imaginations.
I know not how to dissociate you from my imagined
You
Some thing as inexplicable as depths of mysticism fading away.
How can I even love without knowing?
How can feel this pressing urge without touching?
What can I term this terrible meandering,
This search for the shore never getting enough.
S. Rupsha Mitra is a student from India with a penchant for everything creative. Her works can be found in Monk Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, and Dhaka Tribune. Her website is www.srupshapoetry.com.