Back to Issue 5

Shadows and Selves by Avishek Parui

Have you ever been
In a tired tram that seemed,
To glide slowly, into the city's silent night?

Have you ever smelt,
The faint fumes of death, shaped like a cage
In an angst-ridden lie?

Oh have you ever shuddered, seeing a sudden-you uncovered
In a fragment that frothed up
From an old nightmare inside?

Have you ever seen,
The murder of a dream,
Dashed against the hard rocks, the ogres of life?

Have you ever lied,
On a broken temple's side, with

"I think therefore I rarely am
with my scarred manylives,"

As a soft drizzle fell
With the long-forgotten tale
Of your raining gently, on your purest yourself

Beneath a blue bending sky?

I had these visions and the spaces
Touched the pains and bore the traces
Of these sacred shadows as I walked with time...

Some day I'd play with a rain-washed poem
Sitting in a tired tram again,
Gliding...
Slowly, into the city's silent night.

Sacred Sacriledges by Avishek Parui

Time has its cruel way;
To deflate the once-deep dreams;
Thoughts you had transformed...
Into a consciousness...that you loved and lit.

The deflation occurs through repetitions
Of the faces...the distored forms of the moment
You had thought to be solely a space between you
And the timeless,
A moment bathed
With the fragance of serendipity,
You lovingly read as a sacred sign...

The repetitions mimic...kill
A little bit of the alltime you had felt...still
Hanging on one corner of your word-well
As you began to write...about the new youness inside.

The space returns...recurs
It's like dreaming the same dream many times
Each time a lesser sign, a fainter chime
Until you are left with an famished image
Perpetually undreaming itself...

A ravished bride of dead quietness
That tells you there was too much time, too many times
Breating in...drying up
The word-wells inside your mind.