Australia, 2019-2020
When winter went into ember
wherein you lived your sleep?
I had a flaming kangaroo hopped between
my eyes, and I had none
until my aunt called me to tell the news.
The cold sat on our porch.
The beer bottles left for recycling spacies
refilled themselves with undyed.
Aunt turned up the news. The wildfire
crackled in the newsreader’s throat –
world just dipped south. Kaput.
I opened my sight to the life leaving lives.
Where were you? Did you see
winter fluffing the orange and red?
Our porch spread across the other dimension.
White covered our trash in another world
where I had two eyes sewn beneath,
and winter, alive, weaved a quilt of fables
for those miracles that could have been.
The One Arrested And Later Left At Our Doorstep
The missing one is restored to her apparition,
disoriented, oozy-blood,
smelling like a marsh; two days’ve passed
since the protest fired up from the gully to the alcázar.
We ask the silence to nurse her.
Tim answers the media in waiting.
We blame the throne obviously.
The air stinks of conspiracy.
The missing one, reinstated, exists in flickers,
now here, now beside the basin, a hologram,
a substance, now a totem archaic,
now a numen, Jesus.
The protest flows with the paradigms.
Tim and I ask her what happened inside;
she seems to miss herself if only by a smudge of soul
or some slogan half finished.
Silence bandages her; strings her together.
MediaMedia disappears to attend another somewhere.
Monkey’s Paw
A teargas shell tore off my bro’s hand;
since we called him a primate in childhood
we kept the hand, nicknamed it ‘Monkey’s Paw’,
presented it before every guest in our house,
cherished their shriek; the severed limb
just wouldn’t rot; the second hand revolutionists
often borrowed it for their demonstrations,
but no one asked my sibling what the paw
meant to him. Probably a missing link
in the evolution chain between Adam and Cain.
He wouldn’t have answered anyway, rather
scratched his arm’s end the way one alley cat
scratches the blind bricks when cornered
in dire need of some magic.
Artist:
Kushal Poddar authored ‘The Circus Came To My Island’, ‘A Place For Your Ghost Animals, Understanding The Neighborhood’, ‘Scratches Within’, ‘Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems’, ‘Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems’ and now ‘Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse-A Prequel’ (Alien Buddha Press)
Follow the Artist:
Author Page – amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoet
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe
