
The porcelain breaking under your feet
Like a winter death,
Sudden and cold.
Broken bangles,
The window between us
Melts into the vermilion.
This caged freedom struggles
To taste the numbness of the night
As these days get darker.
Love never tasted this bitter
And sanity —
Never was the monopoly
Of the guiltless till date.
This emptiness will devour the night
And no one would remember
Even a word of that letter
Which talked of death.
Death just could never find
The right door to be knocked
And slid letters of longing
Under the wrong doors every time
But you —
You somehow found just the right door
This time.
You curl around my ankles like anklets
And remind me of everything that is beautiful
And everything that is chaste.
You hand me a book of dandelions and daisies
So happy, chaste,
Yellow and white memories.
A few lines from Garcia's work on
Love in the time of Cholera blur into
One of your drunken nights
And mixes into the darkness
Leaving behind a few letters
On reminiscing about a death in the time of Corona.
The discomfort of hearing
Denim rip apart, —
Thunderstorm and deafening silence
Of art and age old bitterness.
Bangalore roads drenched in longing, —
A subtle lack of belongingness.
Emptiness like shards of glass
Held together through the kiss of a cyclone.
The novel cracks through walls
Bring in dead dampness into the dark room
But the cracked window
Lets a blade of light peep in
To slice through the emptiness
Of the sour morning.
Death —
The sweet release of the oppressed;
The sound of the knell
With a sweet after taste.
You are a wreck —
More of Bukowski
And less of Gibran;
More of Hughes
And perhaps a tinge of Plath.
Just drunken nights of rotten infidelity
Left with nothing but rust
And sand in your eyes
Burning salvation soaked castles.
The discomfort of holding pennies
Between your fists so tight,
You smell the stinking metal.
You never know which photograph of yours
Turns out to be your last one.
This is a whirlwind in the Arabian sea
Leaving us grenades in our hands
And an aftertaste of alcohol, gunpowder and grease in our mouths;
Blasphemy and a catastrophe with no
Escape.
An ardent debater and MUNer from the Odisha circuit, Mr. Sarbanga Mishra is pursuing his bachelor's degree at Christ University, Bangalore. He hails from the silver city - Cuttack. Being a student of journalism himself, he is no stranger to national and global affairs. He loves exploring the world through reading and believes very strongly that this world is made of everything hauntingly beautiful that art has to offer. A man who is well known in IITs, IIMs, NITs, and DU colleges for chairing and winning various national level competitions there, Sarbanga is a name synonymous with anything intellectual. Other than being a public speaker and writer, he is an academician who has various research paper publications and the best research paper awards from reputed institutions in India. Beyond that, he's also a well-known spoken poet, national-level martial artist, sterling wordsmith, enthusiastic chess player and published reporter. Furthermore, he takes a keen interest in International law and International relations. He claims that reading and researching would always be his "metaphorical crushes".
