There wasn’t a day … Naleswaram Sankaram
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There wasn’t a day without me getting hurt.
And by penning the ultimate word-wound
I don’t intend to rake it further.
When the wound itself begins to voice
Every swoon that lapses down its lips
Accentuates it.
Life is inured to a fiddling tick ticking.
The chappals that bear me
The shirt I don and the pant I enter in,
The food I eat, the water I gut, the air I breathe
And all the rest that help and sustain me
Have all been bubbling with vitality
Are propping up this fruitless bod.
It’s only me that continue to remain
A waxing waste weighing down the earth.
I couldn’t become the crescent of revolution
Nor stream like its philosophical strain .
How long a nameless me should duck under like this?
Languishing in this spineless weakness
I can’t bear subjecting these limbs to hardships myself
.
I wish I were blown to unidentifiable smithereens by some accident;
I wish I were deported severing myself from me;
Surrendering to a wakeless sleep
I wish I were prostrating before my body tabernacle;
I wish this somatic substance gratifies itself
Identifying with clods of earth .
It’s criminal that the system that incites suicides
Itself doesn’t cease.
But how can I help it when
I am stalled from becoming something,
Just like a relic in a museum
I hang on to this system like its futuristic photo,
And I cross myself everyday and watch?
Of what use is this body
When it can’t meld with the wounded and conned
drenching in blood ?
Why should I exist at all
Committing outrage upon myself?
I entreat you, my friend,
Instead of abandoning me
In the lap of this pampering system
Won’t you care to hang this wounded thimble vitae
On some noose of time?
I shall be grateful to you and your time.
I would rather remain a wound
In the history of slave word-wounds I chronicle
Or a refrain of
The wound-composers .
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