Poesy

- Shamik Chakravarty, MA(First) Philo

Sincerely yours, dear octagon, sincerely

Soiled are your creases
Great Octagon,
Soiled and sallow in surrounding laughter;
Honorary annotations have defiled you.
But have you not realized your third-man-destiny,
the morrow where you can never be inside?
your eight edges will never be engulfed, dear octagon,
they will never enter their resting place;
their shape will always wave like weasels in dim water
murky in their onslaught of pears and fruits and other bananas,
making horrific fruit-baskets
to wake up the dead.
No dear octagon
Cezanne never loved you
and never will.

Him

"Nothing really belongs to us but time- which even he has who has nothing else." -Source Unknown


Past the haunting winds in my mind
Is a vast expanse
A desert hitherto unnoticed.
Ahoy! I see a man sing
His favourite 'Clementine'.
"O you clamorous fool
Thirsty and sick
Why do you fart through your mouth?"

My dear sir, oh sir,
A creaking door slammed on my face
I found myself in this dark place.
What was it?...
Ahh a grave-

There I saw this lovely sand,
Glittering in the melting light
And in the crystalline grains
I saw my lineless face.
I'm a ghost.

Your Man only said
"There is no joy but calm."
Time is mine.

The poet

He thinks disconnected thoughts,
Under a disconnected bower:
A master of the poetic condition.

Pristine rays of slanting sunlight engulf him,
As he overcomes...

Overcomes hesitations.

The stark rendition
Of overlapping glades,
Harmonizes pastel shades
And crayon colours,

And the wilful pessimism of sounds engraved
Upon his epitaph.

"Here lieth the man
Who hoped to transform
An apple and a worm
Into metrical verse."

He grips his pen and writes
His own fate
And ends
A thousand misfortunes
Abruptly.


Oh Jealousy!

O undesirable desire,
unwanted thought
Let me parody you.
Let me count the ways
and shine its sonnet rays
o let me, lemme please
fathom the height the length
the breadth the depth
or whatever barrett browning said
and find my sodding way.

O gratuitous tumult
green eyed monster
cliche ridden beast,
tickle me till I rot
and let me laugh, caterwaul
till I reach elfin grot.

On Pedagogy

In the deep sleep of the concrete-
layered class
abutting some abounding gargoyles and translucent brick-colored fantasies
Was a collective bench of imposers from within-without.
Grass-tinged and fine-leaved,
they accessorized the summer.
And perhaps their pied lines could've told you stories from your grandmomma's womb,
or a few remaining bildungsroman narratives;
and if you believed that people can or could be educated
or fermented in between layers of cut glass,
if you believed indeed that some dear rascals of yesterday could've
bounced off wall and clip-board spaces,
to reveal a non-water, non-coded non-buff coloured precipitate,
you could've
(perhaps with a balloon-holed shirt
and darned unholed tweed socks)
you could've gone up like, like
some duck man,
some duck in some penny-pudding world who wasn't merely some semi-flying
now turbulent and now rippled skygazer.