A Voice in the Dark | Shubhodeep Pal

Stay! Stand a little Life’s passing away— Sleet’s turned to spittle You’re going astray. Snatch what little you can Talk less, speak vacuities Lauding the lame race you ran— Let life provide its gratuities. Sit on the open field Soak up the drenched grass Harvest this macabre yield— Life, my friend, is crass.

Our voices are numb The black sun creeps unwillingly across a myriad stars— There is silence in twinkling… In burning, in hating! Silence seeps through the grass balming our cacophonic lives— creating calm, caustic euphony of hope and a contradictory despair. The clock cannot be heard But it ticks… Life slips into a labyrinth of purple twilight. Twilight does not speak… Our eyes are still The wall is rigid, and the clock’s stuck—shattered. The dials are haywire in the tormenting silence, the room is dumb, reason has turned blind There can be no speech No return: just suffocation and an anesthetized passion. Life runs on without the usual drone of its less than one horsepower steamless engine: life is silent in its fetid hopelessness…

Stand on the air open your arms feel the earth rotate on its demented axis— you’ll smell the breeze, the flagrant verdure, the glory of life, the passion in love, bliss promenading inexorably through the stunted trees, grief ebbing to inexpressible multi-layered joy of being, a gazillion blessings…. Reminisce those unforgotten halcyon seconds… Taste this earth: there is happiness in being who you are, for joy masquerades in the unlikeliest of charades. Touch yourself knowing that your skin is enthused with eclipsed passions and a long-forgotten tenderness. Feel the whispering leaves, Tame their chlorophyll tongues: you’ll hear what you want to hear, you’ll know what you want to know. Sense the dewed grass burgeoning under your naked feet— drench your soul in this macabre, senseless milieu. You’ll know there’s joy in living yourself— in living as you want to, in loving whom you want to.

scattered poesy grains now shimmer uneasily in the parquet light

He holds his pen, poised, sedulous, For the tarmac conflict, to strip His dreams from bloody, circuitous Biers of thrift; his sweaty grip Wavering under the red, fermented Smell of clay - monsoon soaked - Beneath the gray outside, shirted With the overwhelming, cloaked Odour of gutters overflowing - As with the shreds of limpid sunlight - In conflict, he senses the burgeoning Night through his forty-watt sight.