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.