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CROWS ALSO SING
 
Amidst the smell of sickness in Kolkata's intricate allies,
I perceive how crows' songs create the chaotic vortex.
Although it starts with hunger,
Greed for flesh.
Their voices persist
Sabotaging the mind-scrapes.
Their cruelly distorted rhymes
Hold the sense of hollowness in some symbiotic ways.
Their choric refrains would
Delude you
Mesmerise you
And consume your toxic structure that you strive to maintain.
 
ASHWATTHAMA IN A BAR
 
You emerge again when the messages in my android synchronize with the lost memories.
The red liquid has started to play with my nerves.
Measuring the meanings with footnotes,
Sense the hollowness in some symbiotic ways.
Like the vague reflection in an old mirror,
The crumbled glimpses assemble like an ‘Autumnal Cannibalism’.
Savagely deformed.
Then Ashwatthama walks into this bar and sits heavily beside my arms.
The stain of pain that his forehead has restrained through the ages,
The poison of curse still runs through his vein.
His eyes radiate the archaic numbness
Endlessly waiting for the end.
Silence creates margin

Yet I perceive your stain.

[Ashwatthama, in Mahabharata, fought for the Kauravas in Kurukshetra. Once he threw Brahmastra to the womb of Uttara who was carrying the child of Abhimanyu, the deceased son of Arjuna. Sage Vyasa compelled him to yield the ‘gem’ with which he was born in his forehead, and Krishna cursed him to be a chiranjivi (immortal). Ashwatthama, after the war, exiled himself, and was fated to roam for eternity with the wound in his forehead.]

THE SICK ALLEY
 
The indexes at the sideways mock in cruel ways,
Hollowness vibrates some silent ailing sound waves,
The occasional barks and harsh caws 
Bring back the consciousness of this dying alley.
Momentarily. 
The walls mingle with the rotting hazes,
And create the numb images with ordered equipoise.
The smirks of the hoardings tell the chaos resides only a terrace away.
Drifting memories sew the time like some tattered cloths 
Pierced with the persistence of waiting.