For humans, freedom has been the focal point of existence. We associate happiness, growth, worthiness of life, to the point of being able to breathe right, with freedom. However, time and again, we are restrained and by either society or our own emotions. Let's dive into the feeling momentarily once more with some great poets and our find Hansika Goel. But first, an eye treat by Personified Headache (art name).
Pandemic
By Avinab Datta-Areng
If my breath is now afraid of itself,
blueing at its own thought and arrival,
as a bruise gathers among bruises
in a faraway ground, aphids bustling
above them, picking at the sweet scabs.
If I am now foreign to myself,
removed, dispersed into the sleep
of others, rousing them momentarily
into a dull fear like a fine web settling
over their skin, their eyes; then they find
and trust the milk in their minds to lull
them back. If your sleep is the only sleep
that recognizes me, resists me, because
you too have become foreign, floating
where our nakedness is no longer
the kindred, watchful clouds trailing
our blood. If what you don’t recognize
in you is my breath afraid of itself,
as this growing apart mulches and now means
only to the ground; more and more we’re
asked to isolate our bodies, until what
might remain is what we never began with,
but was supposed to be, what was only
and always asked of us. If that formlessness
is what I’m asking you to see in me,
as your silence spreads and invades
through me. If the only way to you now
is by giving in to this disease, let this silence
grow where I’m not. If I let your silence lie over me.
Inside
By Deepankar Khiwani
Everything’s contained, in something else.
Our genes ferment in little cells, our habits sit dour and sulking in those genes
uncertainty totters within each assertion, and the acid vodka
is lucid in my glass; which sits by me in this failing restaurant.
O and we Empty Out and we Transfer. Vodka trickles into me, and
my wry disdain of everything permeates the bar like the gas left on
by a fin-de-siècle suicide. Inside the vacuous barman’s iris I see flecks of green
and exasperation, there’s a question in his head as he sees me staring at his chest;
and so soon I’m trickling out, into the street again, jacketless,
Last January and I fight for space in sobriety,
contending, we stumble through the street, then lingering like smoke in the lift,
to then distil within the rented despair of this motel room,
its curtains lurid red and green. Standing at the basin, I put on my wedding ring.
I see I’ve displaced the man who’s left
his false teeth on the counter, in a half-full glass;
he’s displaced me in a world of phantoms, left his smile staring at me,
looking for home. Oh everything’s contained, re-circulated, trapped,
transferred and abandoned and can’t be got rid of,
and an old raw laughter rasps out of me, like a cough,
and echoes within a wholly missing room.
Perspective
By Sudesh Mishra
Whether a jet unzips
Or zips up the sky
Is, as things go,
Six of one and half
A dozen of the other.
Not for you or me
Or the jet perhaps,
But to the sky
It’s one and the same.
SLAVES
By Hansika Goel
We are slaves, slaves of the society. Slaves of loneliness, drunk on love.
Fearing the new master, obeying the old one, the one we're used to,
the one keeping us in a loop.
We are slaves, slaves of the loop, drunk on something different, something new.
Maybe a change, fearing it.
Slaves of the fear. Conquering it, we visit the society's prison.
We are slaves, slaves of the society. Slaves of loneliness, drunk on love.
We are slaves, slaves of the loop drunk on something different, something new.
***
For the love of art,
Charuvi
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