INDIEN / TRIPURA
I get too muddle headed and tell my mum not to speak.
Thoughts disappear the moment I start writing. I am not supposed to do this right now.
My keyboard perpetuates the dilemma of choosing the words to bolden.
My mother tries to see what I write. I tell my mother not to speak.
I ( shall ) never write in foggy letters. Do I ?
I never write in foggy letters. I do not write in my mother tongue. It does not let my letters be foggy.
I do not write in foggy letters.
I try to hold and capture my best/mesmerizing/impeccable/fantastic thoughts by arching my back so much. It certainly gives me a backache; but I must capture them.
One of my best/mesmerizing/impeccable/fantastic thoughts tells me about how much of poetry could be pertained to this in my mother tongue.
I do not write in my mother tongue. It does not let my letters be foggy.
(Continued)
I clench my jaws ( unknowingly ), I arch my back ( knowingly ) to hold my thoughts.
It’s over;
I must not be muddle headed. I can think straight.
Sentences lie in lines. Everything is read the same. It is time to open the door and move. Consoling the night sky stars is an honest immediate turn of events. It doesn’t make much sense to write it down.
Alike the brains of mummies, thoughts drain out of my nose. My back aches. I don’t know what to do. I am going to write a letter to the Egyptians who stared at the same night sky. People from other parts of the world would work too.
I see, I see you. Draining thoughts though my nose works. Egyptians were great. My math teacher goes on and on. My father once said, if there were no turtles one day, I would die. I
was fine this moment but now my eyes tear. Turtles... Turtles are nice. Do they have a shell? Or are the ones with shells called tortoises?
There are no more tears. Oh wait, there are. There is no grief. My tonsils rebel. Time of the past consolidates in my ears, closed with wired earphones.
I finish my work. My toddler, like the earphones, continues to ring.
This piece doesn’t end. My ears ring. My ears ring.
My ears ring, my ears ring, my ears ring, my ear rings.
With everybody trying to make things literal, the night always deepens to the poets. Maybe it does for real, as the urge of feeling the numbness always seems to be a constant. I rather try to scratch my head to make it into a template.
I try growing out of the box of templates but somehow end up using the same templates, for they work pretty well every time, and to be sure this is my favourite one.
I try growing, I try growing independent of that numbness, trying to do things structurally blurry, for it’s the best template they said. It also works.
As I keep trying, they grow one step further, making mine look like even more of a patchwork. So, I shall use my templates once more, for the numbing feeling is just an approved template.
The mirror is not a muscle.
I sit on a blue chair. I wear a red dress. I don’t know what many words mean. I don’t know many.
I force meaning to mundane things. Just like what my lip balm does. To impart meaning or not to, I make things blurry.
I fear losing:
”Describe the wall clock.”
Really, there isn’t any. That is why the writing doesn’t proceed. I am stuck.
This is a cliché. I rearrange the lines.
Otherwise, it is a wall clock.
I may never be on anybody’s list of those who wonder about feeling pathetic and miserable, unable to recognize their face in their own mirror, or expressing the bittersweet comfort that the night sky may bring to all ever-loving or not-loving people, to all people who ever loved or never loved, and to all people that just existed to love or not love, and to all people knowing or not knowing how to heal a bleeding heart ~ it being theirs or not, I use my backspace key without looking, let alone grasping the concepts of wondering about the face in my mirror.
Rupsa Sengupta lives in Agartala, the provincial capital of Tripura, India. She is a high school student, passionate about theatre, space and writing. She has published two collections of poetry: Jwolonto kofir kobor and Tar oter rong in her mother tounge Bengali.
