Ishan Sadwelkar's Poetry Journal
Started in 2017 when I was writing one poem a day. No idea how it'll end.
At the beginning it was mostly dark,
inconsistent hazes of a torso, flickering,
a page moving, inside it, a promise
cut
across seats plastering faces, inside
every brain, depositing sound
-stored, and erupting, a memoir
seeks the screen’s depth
at either end of the film
the unseen and unfelt
play tug of war
Reading it aloud:
You
Your whims, your hormonal rants,
The part where you sneeze
The moment you finally cry
I read it all out, your eyes open
Like two journals on either side of your age
With you in the centre, present in the present
Mute as a photo
Out of focus
Your nights
Your breath
The bits of you leftover
In text messages and friends of friends
Even music you forgot
Comes around unasked
The wall holds your face
As you fall asleep scarred
Read it all aloud, like a play
We’re listening to each other age
The clock waits for you
The taxi drops it’s meter, the new year
Opens and calls for an encore
There is the creaking ceiling fan, there is
The line of crumbs along the table’s edge, your face
Tucked into the blanket as a mask
Hidden from a soft blue window
Quoting an untranslated author, dreaming
Of her verse in the dim silence of your sleep, you
Breakaway and enter the world again, reborn
From a night’s sleep devoid of tense
Elsewhere the town yawns, crawls
The carts of fruit and grain drag, the streets thaw in
Mist exhaled by the mountain over us, your white
Shirt and your reflection in the diary counting
Another day passed by lonely, not knowing
How to meet the evening without an answer
your hair rivers onto the bedsheet
tracing movements made by the rest of you
your eyes move nervously in a dream
viewing their own private cinema
your fingers gently tremble under a moist breeze
I plant my warmth at your feet
adrift in you earlier I discovered forested lakes
in me your voice echoed across endless mountains
eventually water-falling over my shoulder
and turning the room into its lake
then birds flew out of us one by one taking turns
as we gazed upward with closed eyes searching for a sky
collapsing onto rippled cloth you became a range of dunes
awakened by the stillness of night
I witness you take new shapes beside me
the scent of our time passing grows gradually
buttoning myself I let my palm speak to your forehead
a soft fluorescence robes you like an ocean
I understood the premise, but before the curtain fell,
the ending passed through and left me empty, hanging
in the dream I left behind at twenty – you scurried across your stage
the white starlings hopped about wondering
who the man in grey kaftan is, you
how I ran into the salt pans, the mirages
deftly slapping me one after the other, the vultures
eating away at my debts – you never surface, in an exposed corner
you typed away into the sky, both friend and father
today in the audience, darkened by the mask of not knowing
what is before and after me, I felt you finally
as man and soul – you gripped your portrait and caged each word
in your voice, I understood how you’re here but then you’re not
living in stories you wrote before your final drought
Water
Stars spark
Over its surface
Getting lost and found
Erratically as the lake ripples
Becoming a shimmering mirror
Breaking the moon
Who sets
Slow
formal, the response
to all questions asked
that tinker images of the past
swimming deep within the mind
on shutting of eyes, the sound
of memories flying from one building to another
over the noise of growing traffic
a city of thoughts
dissected, by watching
each experience dissolving
into the next, a chain of scenes
growing into a cinema, the
dream without the dreaming
a viewing of the views, on opening
the eyes, each image
a decided meaning
but within, each moment
the start of a stream
7.2.17 – in reference to cinema as a meditative art
