Kushal Poddar – 3 Poems
The Cardinal Verb of Being
Mother was the house.
She became the room,
her bed towards the end.
Sometimes a whisper would open the pane;
she would read the novel adjacent
scrivened with audible bricks.
Since my birth I knew she was leaving,
and it had been her ignis factuus,
her lavender essence, medicine, being.
Sometimes I almost outran her.
Then I didn’t. She would hate
her room empty of grief.
The Taste
The taste of depression wakes up my tongue.
I wipe the corners of my mouth, sniff
my hand, the rancid, toothsome, brine hints
from my skin.
Sitting on my mother’s caved part of the bed
I trace how she witnessed the fence in the pane,
yellow spotted feline’s occasional strolls,
adventures of the wind in the singular tree that holds
the entire history of a forest uprooted in this block.
She witnessed the clockwork of the sun.
Watch-hands says nothing about the time, only
a way we measure it. I sniff. Sniffing remains mute
about my psyche, says a lot about the odor
must feel, and how much it suffers with its inadequacy.
Mother Left Him A Grown Poem
Every time grief visits growth
augments him;
further he grows more he bears
grown men within;
their weight dwarfs him; every time
pain comes shorter he becomes –
a monument tall and puny,
a raven shitting it white.
Duty Of The One Grieving
The table shoulders the bottle
all day for several days.
Its sense of duty nails the way
it is fleshed – to last for a century at least.
And I reach for the bottle, topple it,
press my hands on the table,
plummet my head amid my chest,
the bend of my spine solves a Conchoid of de Sluze,
my shoulders desire to shift the onus of my head
upon the table I cleaned and cleaned with all my marrow of OCD.
Obscene Tales
My wife chronicles slang tales
only in her mother tongue
I never quite master.
Tonight is a night to spin such lore.
When I go to piss the ceiling of our toilet
looks down upon me with all its monsoon clouds
of darkening fungi. Portable night sky.
I mutter something obscene in semantics
alien to my brain.
