Autobiography of a Joker

Dr Sudhansu Dash

I know the magic of unlocking the lips

Burdened with calculated smile

Mathematically designed as one minus one is equal to zero.

I am the man of an unknown geography

Where the shadow speaks only in confidence

To the people I value.

I know the art of spying my shadow

In a redefined relationship with it.

The ground opens up and envelops each time I walk with my shadow

Fighting a long battle throughout my life

Just only to lose it.

You feel the wanting of this unwanted being

Unrecognized from the beginning to the end.

My signature is on water escapes your eyes

But I am always there

Faithful to your presence.

Can the attachment of two lips measure the depth of love?

You look at me but I look at myself.

No matter what you think about me

But it is my life to go

With the confidence of missing the self from moment to moment. 

The Invisible Darkness

Dr Sudhansu Dash

In the stomach of darkness

Countless cities small and big

Searching the self

The signature turning back on the back of water

Melts down time and again

The ending start where it began

The discounted tombs under the breast

Repeat in the compass of a naked breast without a heart

Yoked with a number of confessions

No trick in plain and simple trust.

The darkness is enough to hide the smile

They tell stories

When life is in the frame of a name plate

Hanging on the wall

Shining with the twisted lies of ego

Life is not a noun

It is a verb as it is in a process

‘Rest’ is wrong

Nothing is at rest; everything is in its process

Is there somebody who is hungry?

No,

There is only the hunger.

No center is there but only the circumference

Standing on the Platform

Dr.Sudhansu Dash

Odds are I’m alive

 There’s a cunning on the length of neck 

 An animal under me running

This, if I can hold on, will not stop.

I’m waiting for the A train,

Reading a news paper published years back

 On the hot platform. 

Visible stars and beers with dangerous-sounding names

 Sleeping with piles of newspapers, stained blankets and dirty clothes

On the sidewalk underneath them

Under patches of light.

A place that used to exist

That never existed

Eyes are sewn open day and night. 

Painful deaths leaking from exploding fake breasts.

 The woman who can’t close her eyes breathing like a cat.

They’re oddly soothing,

Full of gentle statements about the way the brain does things,

Taking drugs

 For problems of rejection of sensitivity

 Beauty destined to end in tragedy

 I don’t know what I believe about destiny or endings.

The question makes me think about a biological image

Of a distorted present

Where it lays it down like a blood-soaked flower.

All alive today is living after everything

That’s happened so far.

 Still murdering and torturing each other,

 Imitating each other, fondling each other and doing the human things we’ve always done. 

As the stains on her clothes showed

Defiling every part of his body with some unclean perversion.

She invents a new amusement,

 Released from the skin of a wild beast

Killing people by the dozens

And getting her toilet paper monogrammed with real gold.

No one struggled to think them in a prison,

As if thinking has never been dangerous.

Forget it.

Don’t tempt yourself with tongues

 Blood is not your own.

I’m looking at the inside of my unmarked   empty hand

Maybe it’s beautiful, maybe it’s tragic.

A Communion with a Mute

Dr.Sudhansu Dash

Dump, deaf and blind

She stands alone unmoved from the soil

So many storms have left signatures of grave

Some have cracked the bones

Some have soaked the blood

Her heart broken into thousands of pieces

She gathers them again

Rearranges them with a confidence

Lest, it will be losing its tolerance for another storm.

She expects nothing

Just some drops of water

To fill her womb with a life for her child

Standing under the shade.

She not indebted to any

Showers her whole being in a thousand and one ways.

Her breathing spreads to every dimension

Crossing all the boundaries of discrimination

To feed the vital.

 Life emanates from her

An unidentified oneness she chants throughout

The wood cutter cutting half of her body

Resting under her shade in tiredness

To gather strength for the next half.

The unbounded dimension of her grace

Rains on his body from head to head.

She knows that what nobody knows

She speaks that what no one can listen

She sees that what no one can perceive

The music of her leafs reach not the incapable ears

She knows the secrets of life

The art of giving herself entirely

Converting each suffering to a virtue.

I take but a chance to feel

My life is a part of her life

The vital that vibrates in her

Shares my core.

I bleed when she is hurt

I live when she breathes

In a complete harmony.

The Story of a Silent Man

Dr Sudhansu Dash

His heart is made only to be broken

To thousand pieces

He had to break it in a torn darkness of a night

Uncalendered and undated in any page of yours

Sitting under his uncorrupted sky

Telling his story to himself

Awakes every night after everybody is asleep

He has dared to steal the  sins of others very carefully

To carry a tune for others whispering their name

You will only collect the sounds that beat around

The echoes of a pouring rain

Leavings the warmth of love at the centre

He never asks you a question to trouble you for an answer

You are not prepared for.

The remains of his pages are covered with dusty cobweb

A wintery cold settles on it for ever.

The self satisfying laugh of a blind boy managing to see the light

In the deepest darkness of his eyes

Standing before an angry mirror

How soft his night is

Where dark shadows fall so silently without a noise

Lest others sleep will be disturbed?

Prisoner of a lonely Tower

Dr Sudhansu Dash

He shares his self arranged alphabets with the other prisoners

The conventional signs that are

Not the same to others as to himself.

The feelings shared with convenient deceptions

Half said and half unsaid

Concealed under the broken breast

The words conceived from scars 

bleed faithfully inside the concrete walls of the heart

His love cannot see hope from any angle

Freedom is

asleep under the cold blanket

Of the error less sin of an humble wanderer

The heart compels to weep the compassion seen in the tears

Length mocks the breadth

Breadth mocks the height

In the solitary confinement of an unseen crime

To exploit the grief.

Dark blood and cold flesh of death

Have made undone all the sighs

Of the violet face inside the blackened walls.

Missing the last step on the stair case.

Dr Sudhansu Dash

It constantly reminds me
of my unspent life,
before my bones are plastered with time.
Everyone used to walk
to where they do not know
not because the roads are smoky
but because it is so.
It seems that excuse is just not good enough
anymore.
At times I think:
I still walk the streets
It takes me a little time these days
to read the signs and labels,
the easy  calls of the people
standing under bigger names and brighter lights.
Nobody courts nobody anymore.
Hands are held far too easily.
 Intimacy seems to have become
yet another commodity.
I remember my years I lived in absences,
sleeping with a lie in a life of compromise.
My eyes stared past the darkness of the room,
beyond to something, somewhere,
far from where I found my life to be.
I remember well amongst the ruins of my years.
How desperate were the days
exchanging futile words
 I meet over letters,
My  eyes scanning and reciting  an inevitable loneliness
And fear of never finding a place.

 Life feels little more than an emptied school
In the endless weeks of summer;
A  lantern left to bleach in the sun.
I’ll take the hit that comes with it.
If it permits me a moment of belonging.
The air is cancerous with the noises of the streets.
I used to stop and listen now in a near-silence.
It has been weeks since I spoke to someone
who did not rush me through my sentences.
I am trying to learn the patterns of today,
A way to bow my sad head and pay up for my goods
In a way to defy that I am old and slow
To kill the silence that forms
In the spaces you would have spoken in.
 Missing  the last step on the stair case.

A light he is not to himself but to everyone.

The Old man with Himself

Dr.Sudhansu Dash

Time exiles me to return to myself

Light to the deem eyes, speeches to the dumb lips

My eyes doubts all the seen and the unseen

My broken years laugh at me in the mirror

As I approach the end of this mortal frame

I make every care not to cease my decayed house

A dull head among the windy spaces

Signs are taken for wonders

The word within a word unable to speak a word

Dangling in darkness

To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk among whispers

My history has many cunning passages,

And issues of life have deceived me with whispering ambitions

Guided by vanities.

She comes only when my attention is distracted

And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

That What’s not believed in, or still believed,        

In memory only with a reconsidered passion.

The refusal creates  a fear.

I see

Neither fear nor courage saves me

 Unnatural vices are fathered by my heroism.

Virtues     are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

These tears are shaken from the eyes

I think at last

I have not reached the conclusion

I have made all the show purposeless

And I would meet you upon this honestly in the wilderness of mirrors

 And an old man, driven to a sleepy corner.