The Land of Spices and Pearls
“Hear me, you, I am incarcerating people into poetical prisons.
This is the last call.”
- My First Tongue
“Perhaps these are not poetic times at all.”
- Nikki Giovanni
Between the lost the disillusioned the happy
The begging the raging the unputdownable the floating
My home dismembering the constitutional handkerchief
Blinding the legs of my second country you
Read between the lines
Can you tell the ferociousness with which
They move between each other's prescribed names
Growing
Into an untitled effigy like a corrupt angry deity shot
Metaphorically carelessly
Drawn blanks
In their wounds now fester the crutches of time they drag
Besides whatever else they must
But the lines
Read without warning fester seeds in my stomach
Like mangoes ripening out of my most ill season
Here Hear me you
My voice tide the minutes like wheelchair rides
Plucked for children like stampeding stones
Clawed open for the message
Come now / have my guts burn in history
Come now / crawl to my ashes and invoke your name
A poem will rise like a slaved tongue
Escaping the crippled embers of my mother’s throat
Agarbatti
I blow my god his incense every morning
He comes up tired of all the cacophony.
It only gets dirtier from there: the willy mess
All over the sheets, he leaves and pulls on me
His nilly tantrums. So I sit there, say nothing
Cross my legs and just listen. His word is holy
He says, but mine smells smoky, essential oils / far
From his type: jasmine on days there is love
In the air and sandalwood once the routine jog’s done
And dusted. It all but lasts ten seconds —
His bickering, count my fingertips. From then on —
It's all sleep. No fooling, no mischief. He wakes, devotedly
Early morning. And religiously he wakes me, scolding —
Hard, the butt end of his incense if out. Now carefully, I stay
All ready the night prior: shot fumed, awake, smelling, in bed.
Kishan Gusani is an Indian poet based out of Mumbai. He is currently pursuing B.A. (Hons.) in Psychology from IGNOU. His work features or is forthcoming in Monograph, Verse of Silence, Bound, nether Quarterly.