Arthritis And Other Poems

By Kushal Poddar

Arthritis

You will realise -
sleeper agents from both sides 
jog with you every morning.

They try to solve you,
dissolve your front,
sleep with and convert you. 

One sun has set; 
another has crossed the sea. 
The other day your daughter
called from the hem 
of the towers' periphery.
Silence. Gossips. Silence. Beep.

Your retirement
suffers from notice
of your friends' partings. 

You pretend electing both parties,
stroll and jaunt to catch up with
those younger shadows,
talk about the goodness of yoga
and neutrality in a war.

I understand, believe me,
the reason you tease or when 
the rain sinks a boat 
you begin to fold the newspaper.

A Tale From The Dark Leamhan Library

A deadman steadies himself
against the tree. His skin reads
the flakes, folds and wrinkles
inch by inch. 

The dark leamhan library 
has a wide selection of ants,
has a long centipede climbing up.
Rain is written on the clouds.

The deadman leans and 
straightens his fleshwork.
He must walk the endless length.
At some point 

his frame will crumble. He will forget
why he began his journey
at the house I live. He will forgive me.
I'll do the same. 

The Bloody Emoji

The half closed window casement
displays a dark rectangle 
and a faceless head. 

Some days instinct guides my index,
and it imagines
that the world is a touch screen interface.
It sketches a laughing emoji.

On my good days everything grins.
Dad days bare their teeth,
bites off my profile.

A Hymn of The Rain 

The parallel waterfalls
plunge from the corrugated tin shades.
My third world gray 
canopies the market. We wait for the bus. 

One arrives and leaves, and then another.
None ours. A hearse 
and its following mourners shatter 
the early morning hush. 

The shop behind us opens. Its owner 
is religious for the first
half an hour; he tunes the radio, listens 
the litanies, switches the station

where a hymn of the rain moans on and on.  

Railyard Sermon Shoots Silence Up the Veins

The evening sun pushes down
a few headless coaches and some
bodiless engines and holds them 
in the red. Light baptizes the railyard
and leaves the sermon to the crickets.
All night long they go on.

The kids nearby sail high and dive deep.
This night one of them sinks; 
his forehead rests on a bar of rust; 
his skin ripples around a needle;
breathing forms a slurry line flat in the end.

The evening in the yard feels hot. 
The metalwork releases the heat they stored.
Now night perfects a chorus praising cold.
The ghost of the last winter anoints the space.
The silence blunts the whistle from the live lines.
Sleep absolves the sin. 

The author of ‘Postmarked Quarantine’ has eight books to his credit. He is a journalist, father, and the editor of ‘Words Surfacing’. His works have been translated into twelve languages, published across the globe. Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe