Upanshu


Cardboard

I was lost between alternate realities
when a small piece of brown cardboard
grabbed my attention.

Like cascaded holograms,
earths appeared before my eyes
overlapping each other
in a battle of dominance.
Some red like china’s heart,
some green like an environmentalist’s dream,
some grey like Mussolini’s wrinkled skin
And, the rest were black, as usual.
Surprisingly, the cardboard
was only present in this one,
while rest could not boast
Of an invention of such magnificence.
After all, cardboards can cover anything!
Your closets and the skeletons beneath,
Your broken windows and the glaring sunlight
that roast your perfect alabaster skin,
and let’s not forget the face,
Oh! The angelic face hidden by the useful piece of brown,
when you have to shy away from the Brother!
The cardboard was the proof,
Of our superiority,
Of our failure,
as a race.
It was, after all, the most human thing,
I’d seen,
being lost in this labyrinth of redundant planets.
And so I tore off half a piece from that piece,
 to make the black earth green.
And thus became a witness
to the instantaneous ‘big crunch’
that consumed the reality supreme.
Far away in a distant land,
a child murdered the mother,
while coming out of her womb.
Like the father of the murderer,
I abandoned the cardboard in disdain,
flitting away into oblivion,
forgetting his only child
on an earth darker than
Thomas Moore’s grave centuries after his death.


A poet (for Osip Mandelstam)

 I’m a poet
and I am counting my last breaths.
But unlike other artists, who shift from this plane,
my life doesn’t flash before my eyes.
May be because my art is already dead,
Just like the abstract almighty has been,
for the last few centuries.

I’m a poet,
and I wrote with red ink.
The ink is responsible for weakening my already frail constitution.
I am not meant to be imprisoned,
Yet, here I am, a caged parrot in a forest.

Yes, I’m a poet,
and I’ve thrown away the blue ink.
(Blue was too close to black anyways!)
As my words now fail me,
and my love lovingly hates me,
eyes that have dried up,

threaten to flow, showering the same blue ink,
that seems black due to saturation.
Mourning as my art breathes her last.

But I’m a poet
stranded in a field of daisies,
morbidly watching poetry pick
the yellow suns for my crown
(Or my grave…)

And so I’m a poet,
Trapped in this white space,
Manacled by the crimson chains,
Locked behind the cerulean bars,
Happily scribbling with white ink
all over the white walls that surround me.




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