top of page
Writer's picturesouthendstories

Poetry by S. Rupsha Mitra

Updated: Jan 25, 2023


a photo of white delicate flowers close up and clustered together with greenery in the background

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.


 

A photo of Rupsha, a young Indian person with long black hair pulled back, brown skin, red lipstick, sparkly dangly earrings, black shirt, and bright pink saree smiling at the camera.

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.

89 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Self Care

Comments


bottom of page