After Apur Sansar

On some nights —

I imagine the trains in a faint telephone
ring;
escaping a hundred landfalls, disappearing
stars, and potheads.
The rotary dial coughs a half-moon
Hamsadhwani for a wage of disfigured
murmur.
I drink the omen in local time —
Late as death ploughing the disquiet defeat
of your lips.

Trap. Choke. Trap. Choke. Restrict.

Only a few scattered clotheslines sworn
under a communist manifesto —

Plays dust-cuddle in a fist of domesticity.

And then on such nights —
The loyalty of a 100w light bulb dwindles
its protest —
Exhaling a raspy lung of air; exploding
paper bombs.

A torn window piles up in the stomach —
where foreverness meant a medicine
From a partly left tenderness in a
mundane shape
I become your clingy lover around deeply
incomplete places.

You entangle me in the smoke of a roughly
tied hair bun;
We become provincial as the rains —
Memorising the compound and the
complex
In the silent clutter of frightened moles;
fiddling organs.

And — we precipitate into Ashtami’s

darkness, carrying silent leftovers of the
tonga ride.

I am a stranger in your letter —
‘aari…aari…aari…’

…

Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario lives in Calcutta. He writes stories, poems, and essays. You can read them at: https://linktr.ee/ronaldtuhindrozario