Kushal Poddar – 3 Poems
The taste of depression wakes up my tongue.
I wipe the corners of my mouth, sniff
my hand, the rancid, toothsome, brine...
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.
