Girl On The Train Tracks

Let my ripped dream, my lover and my battered heart alone.
I drag my body’s burden through the scarred edges of the platform
Where the last local train of the evening has blown
Its perennial whistle, and scurried past me,
When I stare at it, dazed, nursing my own wet borders.
Time, the blessed poets, as they see it in its winged chariot,
Is only the smashed whistle of the body of a disappearing train
That leaves me, fettered, looking around,
For the leftovers and chewed crumbs of the earth’s children
In the train station.
My lover guy, you have left your masculine musk
In the tracks, and I lose my body in those unnamed tracks,
In my scavenger hunt of that musk, all the while, in that living hell.
Here, I bury my body’s mass, and know not the blazing wants,
The carnal hunger that threatens to usurp my being.
This fierce onslaught burns me, shreds me into pieces,
I squeeze the pieces with my fists, stuff them into the pockets
Of my own silence, but my feet refuse to leave their imprints
In the worn-out tracks.
Have you ever walked by those frayed edges,
Smelt like coal and the rotten flesh of desires that graduate
In time, into placards in these lovelorn tracks?

Let my ripped dream, my lover and my battered heart alone.
I know this falling and peeling off, this hunting and burning
Will overpower me till the last platform I know, and then
You will find me, in smithereens.

For Wuthering Heights and Heathcliff

#GloPoWRIMO

My dedication poem for Catherine and her irresistible love for the dark and sinister Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, loosely based on the tideling form, invented by the talented Daipayan Nair.

We collide, burn
Our fire, and smoke
Did you die, unburied, Wuthering Heights?

Heathcliff, the dark-skinned gypsy
Nibbled on my being, me, a mist of his particles.
I died. Did you die, unburied, Wuthering Heights?

The landed gentry, my conceit, my injured vanity
Stabbing my singing throat. You owned me, smelled of me.
I died. Did you die, unburied, Wuthering Heights?

In the moors, we, the hot lilacs gathered and tore apart,
Our torrid air and salt rippled, in a point of no return, no start.

Did you die, unburied, Wuthering Heights?
Heathcliff, your demonic master usurps you, and my piteous clan.
I reach him, a cold ghost, crooning amid shattered glasses, and pregnant sighs.

All Rights Reserved. Lopa Banerjee. April 18, 2017

Between a Sip and a Cup

 

Image source: Google+

Note: For the love of COFFEE, the magic word, a beautiful poetry prompt initiated by The Wordsmiths, a poetry group in Facebook.

Between a sip and a cup, here I stand, a mistress of your desires, brewing in your coffee with my own feminine juices, a dash of my own spiced up wants gone awry, a tinge of your own fragrant clouds, blowing the mist of your long, wistful years.

I don’t get the thick broth of your molten voice any more as you sip the remnants of the cup with an intent oblivion, as I still long to grip your hands around the coffee mug, dull, blunt, practiced in traversing the known route now, the route of a ripened home where love is not a sonata anymore.

But then, between a sip and a cup, here I stand, housing forgotten echoes of lovelorn voices, the musk of my shimmering remnants spewing a beautiful venom in that one coffee mug, a concoction that might still glitter in the pastures of your throat as you pass that one dart of a glance and kill me yet again, kill me with your red velvet mouth, your brazen kisses, whisking me away.

Between a sip and a cup, here I stand, threadbare, coughing up my staccato wants, waiting to become a doomed fairy-tale.

An Ode to ‘Ijaazat’: The Final Approval

Note: My poetic tribute to the haunting, melancholic, yet the beautifully touching saga of love gone awry in the hands of destiny, the irresistibly deep and unforgettable chemistry between Mahinder, Maaya and Sudha in Gulzar’s timeless love saga ‘Ijaazat’, based on the Bengali story ‘Jatugriha’, by Subodh Ghosh.  The film, unforgettable till today for the tenderly crafted lyrics of Gulzar Saab composed with finesse by the phenomenal R.D. Burman,  followed the story of couple who are separated and who accidentally meet in a small waiting room of a railway station and discover some truths about their lives without each other.

 

Like weary travelers, lost in the waxy orbit of time

We lose our shores, and then, keep coming back

To where our stories began, the Ground Zero

Where you slouched against my caramel skin,

Lost in the deep, blinding maze of a past, passionate, drunk

With the lyrics and heartbeats of Maaya, the wandering girl,

Her eyelashes, soaked with the salt and oil

of the forbidden randomness of your wants.

“Ek akeli chhatri mein jab aandhe aandhe bheeg rahe they

Aadhey sookhey aandhey gile, sookha to main le aayee thi…”

The raindrops pelting on the window where she stood,

Forlorn, dreamy still, asking you to return the cloudbursts

Of your memories in spurts, were mine too, the clouds which I stared at

Like forbidden turrets of your leftover dreams overlooking

Our half-baked love songs, yawning with an emptiness

As I had rinsed off their remnants from our rooms, our plates,

Our cups and dishes, our breaths, entwined, yet not whole.

I did look for you and long to hear the syrupy strains

Of those lovelorn lyrics, which you had once hummed to me.

I did look in the hand-delivered letters of the postman

For the silhouettes of those sullied memories and burnt out poems

Which never reached me, as I settled down, colder, less rippling

And more permissive, in a new mooring.

Forgive me, today, as I dried off your wet hairs, drenched in

Our once-familiar raindrops in an unfamiliar station,

Waking up to dig in the dust of our forgotten, forsaken days

Waking up to your frostbitten face, bursting wide, crooning

In the smoked mirror of this tiny, clumsy waiting room.

Forgive me, like Maaya, the sad, wandering girl who gagged herself

And was washed away in the crossroads of your tyrannical trails,

The sky, drunk, sunken, taking in both our salty waters, and crackling.

Forgive me, today, as I seek your approval, for one last time

To drive off to my moorings now, as you will drive off to your own,

The smudged lines of our story, hanging loose, askance,

In this Ground Zero where we had stumbled upon, and burnt.

 

All Rights Reserved. Lopa Banerjee. February 17, 2017

 

Watch the full movie here:

An Ode to Silsila: The Star-Crossed Lovers’ Tale

Note: My poetic tribute to the passionate, all-consuming love between the two star-crossed lovers in Yash Chopra’s blockbuster romance Silsila, which had put the silver screen on fire in the early 1980’s.

The poster of ‘Silsila’, released by Yash Raj Films in 1981.

Betwixt the twists and turns of life’s uncertain miles

The pastures of love had tempted with a painterly vision.

‘Love’, the oft-committed, dazzling sin testifying in its fullness,

‘Love’, the beguiling light, irresistible, blinding,

One that soon engulfs in its maddening darkness.

 

The scent of their silken touch, the frantic movements of pleasure

In their entwined bodies, unraveling, squirting, unabashed,

Out of their neatly packed matrimonial boxes, to whisper

The esoteric lyrics of a seductive, silken reunion that lingers,

Tears to shreds, burns to ashes the salt and pepper of domestic bliss.

A pair of star-crossed lovers, seeking a pound of solace in

The lyrical ferocity of their swan songs.

 

The mad refrain of the desperate artist lover,

Sucking the moonbeam of her jingling bangles,

Nibbling on the wafting fragrance of his paramour’s body,

A scorching story of the boundless seduction of old flames

While estranging domestic ties, and the sad, silent tears

Of a demure, resilient bride, waiting to reclaim him,

Sowing his seed of a once vowed proximity.

 

And she, on her turn, carrying those lovelorn songs still

In her bone and sinew and blood, pan-seared in the surging lust

And love, melting, like the old, familiar salt in his luscious wants.

Her other man, bonded in vows of a holy matrimony waited,

For he too knew, the smell of her lover would wane away

From her chiffon drape, in the inevitable downhill climb,

The destiny of this perfume-soaked, transient saga of love.

 

‘Love’, the salt that perhaps had stung in their lips still

Would strive to settle in its familiar homely mooring,

From where there would be no leading astray, after all.

 

Lopa Banerjee.  February 8, 2017

 

 

Dear Poetry

Dear Poetry, have you left me, deserted me for good? So many scars, so much of venom puked, so many unwritten lines, so many lumps in the throat, not yet gulped down. My stories are drowning me in a pitch-dark, bottomless pit every day. The thorns of prosaic truths scraping the inner core in merciless, relentless bouts.

My life, the most plain travails, shut unceremonious between the folds of recycled beds, dark, drab parlours and the missing music of the dining nook, wants to reach out to you, crossing the uncertain miles of the distant spray of juvenile mirth, crossing that little slope of the setting sun where you had sprung in my arms once like a truant, confessional kid.

My eyes sting, I seek the old, weeping willow tree where I had found you once, stroking hard at my blank, surreptitious womanly canvas. Come back my ‘wings of poesy’, let us find each other yet again, and hide from the world in a crushing, sinister curl.
Come back and penetrate me, spill all your juices inside of me, as the barren woman wants to be fertile, all over again!

 

The River Dark, The River Deep

The rivulet, the gushing stream bounced and swayed

Like a colicky infant. 

Didn’t I love you, sleeping in your banks, pure?

Hiding myself so deftly in your little pockets of silence?

Why then, today, when I ran to touch you, hot, raw, burning,

You ran away instead, fearing my coagulated blood,

my frozen tears, my milk stuck on your door-frame, my breath,

shot up, in spurts, that has known you like the grandma’s old tale,

Like the lone, dazzling truth?

 

Come, enter through my rich brown, derelict doors,

Still open for you. Settle slowly amid the thickets,

Soaking in the smudged, docile light setting in,

The skyline of my wants still eager, firm with primroses,

Brown, yet not dying still, with music, sharp, yet blurry,

The details obscured, yet the pleading, the little lightning

Robust, plump, hammering.

 

Will you burn it, like the rest of my thwarted dreams galore,

The pregnant ashes of my sighs

that once I had closed your palms with?

Like the stubborn, wailing infant, eyes rolling, fingers tossed,

You had wanted small tufts of the dried, golden grass

Growing mammoth, fleshy, in a mountainous pile.

Today, between my calloused palms, the ashes dwindle,

And let out an air, musky, choking, yet again.

 

The verdant spring, the primroses, the half-baked love songs

Burn me like the old, bloody embers, the fungi strong, shadowy

Smeared all over like a beauty in continuum.

Come over, do not run, what is there to hide?

Lie down, flat, on my back, as I float on your scalding waters,

Doused with the dark grey of our self-same songs.

The Destitute Verse

Image source: Morguefile.com 

Note: Trans-created in English, inspired by my Bengali poem ‘Gothroheen, Bewarish Kobita’, composed on Facebook, yesterday, dated July 19, 2016.

Acknowledgements: Mandakranta Sen (poet, novelist)

The heart, my dear, a truant, spitfire girl.

The fire burns, trembling, flickering, grueling embers.

The words lay, scrunched, shards of shattered glass.

dance daintily, prance and preen in the mind’s monochrome pastures.

Let them drift apart, and collide sometimes, rummaged,

unpacked, let them be freed of their planned lines, carefully carved chapters.

I wake up to their cacophony; all I can muster is refusal.

I refuse to pick up, chew on the cuds of commonplace stories,

lapped up by all others. I refuse to be the articulate novel, licked,

sucked, chewed, consumed to bone and marrow.

I refuse to be one more clone of the authors spinning around, in multi-colored masks,

Head to toe, crackling with vain, twisted praise, and sycophancy.

I refuse to be that succulent drink reveling on yet another habitual book release,

The decked up, charming whore of the artsy, snooty intellectual.

In my night sky, I dance alone, my sacred bits and pieces,

The slivers of my shattered glasses, my dying, indomitable embers,

the spoonfuls of my stained blood, the fragile chunks of my words,

my battered womanly pride.

The heart, a truant, spitfire girl,

and its unruly words will live on,

Let the birth pangs and the eager tears rise, and explode.

 

 

Impostors

Note: Inspired by a brilliant artwork by the supremely talented author of The Dove’s Lament, zen-doodling artist, the US. Presidential medal winner, social activist, Founder of Red Elephant Foundation, Kirthi Jayakumar.

Image courtesy: Kirthi Jayakumar

We do not lie when we swoop
From one store to the next, greedily
Savoring aromatic blends to hide that we stink.
We do not lie when seated at posh restaurants,
Lost in the shameless serenading of culinary raagas and soft music strumming,

We fumble for words,
Knowing each one, when uttered,
Can act as a dart thrown, an arrow
Ripping out our hearts, so we choose to be mum.
We do not lie when our car races
Like a mad hound dog, in the blistering summer heat, and we continue to gulp
the anguish, the helter-skelter dance of cantankerous words.
We cannot lie when the streets smell of old smoke and charred meat,
swooshing past our burning eyes,
Sentinels to our daily conundrum.

We have lied and bought home more lies,
When we have kissed and made love
And roamed, hand in hand in an imagined pristine light,
When we have danced, draped ourselves in silken drapes,
hiding the shadows of our own ruins.
Today, some of them I have stared at,
A man and a woman each, happy flames
Flickering in their eyes, swallowing the
mirth of their arms, entwined.
My stare might have been an imperious nuisance,
Even as I walked past them, knowing
Their eyes glinting, even as they chew the lies.
We do not lie when our unspoken wounds fester in cluttered, unlit rooms.
We only panic that our famished selves
Will pirouette in the open, like impure dirt, forbidden, threadbare.

All rights reserved. Lopa Banerjee. July 10, 2016

DeJa Vu

FOR # NAPOWRIMO #

 

You and me have traveled that tattered soil before,

Look how its nameless rocks beckon us.

The streets, like molten lava, the harvest moon

Bleeding, the chipped edges calling out our names.

 

You and me have drifted, swallowed our distances

of several different births. Had this land devoured us

When we dipped our rusty nails in waxy sands?

Look how we resurface, our unfinished story ablaze in the land.

 

Look, how the lamp still burns, I encase your warmth, flickering.

I track your musky breath in the city’s labyrinth.

The sepia temple echoes my grief in crushed ashes.

The vermilion, smudged, straining, awaits our hushed voices.

 

Look how the sand stones carve our last, intertwined breaths.

Look how the ruptured skins of our memories

dance, splutter around the wet, rainy fields.

Do you see those kohl-rimmed teardrops, pirouetting in the rain?

 

Do you see the jagged edges of the river banks where we slept?

Your silver touch, licking my dark spots, my sun-kissed orchard?

Look how the river song seeks us again, surreptitious, vicarious,

Come, let us hold hands and plunge, nude, surrendering.