in the wake of a life’s end

a kind of gloom sets in the body,
that you can feel lying underneath
your breath,

your words careful, so that they do not
harm the light, your silence loud
enough to make your presence known,

not to counter the void left behind
but to embellish it with your steps
as you move here and there, and
speak solemnly in the shimmer of
another pain that may always stay
within, like a story’s sudden end —

death always leaves one astounded,
even if it is writ in the sky, and on
our fingers, as we touch and hold
each other, we know it is there in
our very blood, and yet it shocks &
deprives us of our effort to under-
stand its proximity when it slithers
inside the room like a voice caught
from miles away to prick our ear,
and say what was not awaited but
known, visible just as the stars are,

until they disappear in a blank fog
and the eyes don’t want to see or
be seen any more.

© Anmol Arora

Something I wrote yesterday after we got to know of my uncle’s passing.

Image source (MOURNING CHANT OF A WHALE, 2014, by Hari Beierl)
Linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads

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the thing about beautiful worlds

~
an unwarranted gloom sets in —

i tried to find a rug for my infantile,
bare room. my accessories include
doubly-pasted post-its, a yoga mat
unused for months, coffee-colored,
chocolate-textured curtains, and books
stowed in a cupboard atop each other
in prayer. i wanted something new
to add, to subtract despair from
this unmatched permanence.

i am emboldened by the monsoon
drains, how everything has peaked
into a kind of a nuisance, habituating
all my vices and sins — my world
is a beautiful place of longing, of
plastered cacophonies, of free agents
who take away from these chipping
walls, a piece of my unpleasant candor.

and all it takes to remind me of ugly
fantasies are the red lines that want to
restore my british spellings to american
ones — a hegemonic control over my
bearings. when did i start becoming
a product of capitalism? one too many
copies of me carried by bored crowds,
flipping through my innards, spitting
in my eyes to reach the end (for fuck’s
sake) already, of this half-way written
carrion story.

oblique — i resort to a redundancy of
words, and rusted thoughts — my world
is a beautiful place — vapid, stringent,
liquified to its last remains of nothing.

~

 

For Midweek Motif at PU.
Edit: Linking it up with dVerse OLN.

Image source: at the horizon of the strange world by Katja Reetz

***

I have been working on a new Insta handle for over a month now, for literary and creative posts: @anmol.ha.
For contact, you can reach out to me through my multiple profiles, enlisted here.