u/Background_Bell_411

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​He walked out into the scorched noon of late summer. Overhead, someone struck flint and torched the sky. Sunlight floods across every leaf. From a widowed aunt's rosary, out grazing goats, the infant Jesus stepped down into an abandoned suburban church, smearing his skin with noon dust.

​He is spent. Not hunting for Cain. Just someone like clay, fresh off the potter’s wheel. Mute, cool, detached—a mother’s breast to an infant. That is all he seeks. Midday glare, stupor in the air. A slow gravity dragging him under. This hour is red, blood-thick. A killer. Just done killing. Patricide humming in the nerves.

​Ahead, an ancient wild fig. Roots hanging like the fringe of a shawl. Children hanging from them, swinging. The sun leans west, striking their faces into verses of Scripture. Reaching to choke a child, he freezes. Numbness locks his fingers.

Into the river the sun drowns, scattering scripture across the current. He wants to go under, die with it. He cannot. By nightfall he surfaces in some drunkard’s eyes, descending as rage.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/vcJ6bqnTzf

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/lti2mB6Luk

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​After all these years, my father’s shirt has found my frame.

Half the buttons on the sleeves are long lost;

near the armpit, it has frayed raw like dry jute fiber.

Across the desert sands, over the footprint of a camel,

another camel steps—

wiping away the footprints of the past.

​#

​Against the dusk, a chill spills like casino coins;

the moon burns away like a cigarette.

From inside my father’s shirt, an ogre lurches out to ask:

“Keep any track of your daughter?”

​#

​Resting on an armchair, I drift upon the water of the lake—

the earth turns from a youth into an old grandfather.

Coiling in the cold like mercury, I see

how small and shrunk I have become.

The underworld god of the lake slips a lollipop into my hand

and says: “Farewell.”

From my shrunken frame,

my father’s shirt sheds away like sloughed serpent skin.

​#

​Desperately, I try to pull my father’s shirt back on.

A vortex of wind circles and traps the lake;

the shirt spins in the whirlwind.

Once the storm dies down, upon the lake with a stone-cold face,

sits the predatory moon.

​

​

​I know of a star or two in a pregnant dusk. Then, a falling star descends—getting lost somewhere within the sprawling labyrinth of the Milky Way. In the monotonous, damp air of late monsoons, melancholy and mist-thin raindrops scatter; beating against widowed windowpanes, trickling down the glass only to die—their weeping remains unheard. Fresh from a bath, wearing a red bindi along the hairline and draped in a red-bordered saree, she sits upon the sofa. Only the pouring rain senses that primal, essential woman-scent clinging to her skin. Defying the fury of the downpour, Geeta Dutt’s voice plays through the speakers in a hushed, gentle rhythm.

​She is listening. Or perhaps not. The freedom to weep spins endlessly inside the melody. The window swings a fraction open, yet the room stays suffocating. The tunes seek escape through the sill. Her eyes remain shut. A tailless lizard clings to the wall, as if deciphering the stillness. A sudden violent gust rattles the pane and crashes toward her. Like an audacious stranger, it tears away the fabric covering her chest in one swift sweep. Two sanctuaries of affection, lying dormant and pilgrimless all this while, are suddenly laid bare. She feels no desire to shut the sanctum doors—just then, a few fire-craving moths drift in, perching upon the altar of flame. Perhaps this was the last thing she saw before her eyes closed.

​From afar, faint Sanskrit verses of the Gita drift through the air. The bodiless and the embodied—soaking in that same wet breeze—slowly break into a clammy, internal sweat. Sleep arrives. Heavy, long-overdue sleep, beckoning through the gestures of rain.

​Geeta Dutt sings, calling toward a final union. She rises from the chair. It is the faces of one’s parents that ache the most—whether alive or dead. Suspended between the ceiling and the floor, nothing remains now except Geeta Dutt, and her lingering song. The dusk, its rain, and that faint woman-scent listen on, perhaps.

​*Note: Geeta Dutt (1930–1972) was an iconic Indian playback singer, renowned for her haunting, deeply soulful, and melancholic voice.

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​The malady suffers from a great malady of its own: it cannot see itself. Fat or thin, black or white—it has no idea. Poor or rich, it remains uncertain. Yet, it senses with absolute certainty that it has survived through the ages.

​Not that it lives in much misery. All it takes is slipping from one body into another, and the fortress is won. Every cell of the body is a resort built solely for the malady. In front of the resort lies the sea; a beach swaying like an infant’s cradle. Swaying in the morning and evening breeze, it has no work other than hunting for the next body from the one it inhabits.

​Its inability to see itself relentlessly drives it mad. The moment it spots a human, it wonders—perhaps I look just like them. Without a breath's delay, it slips inside the flesh. And once inside, the game begins. It prowls about, bearing a blazing torch. Given half a chance, it sets everything ablaze, grinning back at the women and children fleeing their burning homes.

​Peering out from within the arsonist vanishing into the dark, the malady watches—

it looks precisely, entirely like man.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/8pvGGY0rTU

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​Those low-pressure evenings are as vacant as the eyes of a father returning from cremating his child. Like the conflicted heart of a Kirtan singer—surrendered to Krishna yet secretly in love with an outsider—those evenings seek deliverance, hiding behind the rain. In that lull, through untimely lit, drenched streetlights and drifting dust of drizzle, a floating road pushes forward, heading somewhere into the unknown.

​Like prisoners of war, the melancholic keep walking along that road, on and on. Men who still wear a soldier’s uniform, yet every weapon of war has been confiscated from them. Somehow it feels that, walking this road, one might stumble upon the secret hideout of mail runners, carrying sacks filled with letters of eternity. Letters no one has ever read; letters that seem to have been written, once upon an age, only for the grief-stricken.

​On low-pressure evenings, this road turns murderous, like the gaze of a Bhumihar landlord. It longs to drag everything toward hell. That is when, like tattoos carved across a woman’s back, the stars in the sky vanish without a trace.

​A suspension bridge lingers at the far end of that road, trembling with the indecision of a mental asylum. If one could only cross this bridge, there would be no traffic of suffering on the other side. Only a childhood delicate as night-flowering shiuli. The wheel of time, walking hand in hand with a mother. An autumn sun, ripe like red karamcha fruit, hanging overhead.

​Yet, the chaos always wins.

​The bus conductor barks out the destination. Wet light. A soaked city. Rain drowns the festive pavilions. Drenched to the bone, an old hawker crosses the four-way intersection.

​Contextual Notes:

​Kirtan: Devotional singing dedicated to Krishna, embodying absolute spiritual surrender.

​Bhumihar: Historically a dominant landowning community in North-Eastern India, often associated in regional memory and literature with agrarian authority and ruthless, unflinching gazes.

​Shiuli: Night-flowering jasmine; fragile white flowers that bloom in autumn and carpet the earth by dawn.

​Karamcha: A small, wild, tart berry native to Bengal (Carissa carandas) that turns stark, glossy crimson when fully ripe.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/c8oIo0tm03