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1.9k · Oct 2018
Rambling, 2
Anurag Mukherjee Oct 2018
Words are made of thoughts.
I wish they'd intrude. I am lonely,
unemployed with a nine to seven routine
of various activities.

A malignant trend courses through the head.
Broadcasting it outside in the realm of trust
where I am blank but set to go, it would have
the appearance of a finely ambient glass of chocolate milk.

Sometimes I'm asked why the relevance hinges on me.
If I had to say, it's because I keep getting vignettes, like something
out of a beggar's bowl, a wooden saltiness
that becomes increasingly less involved. And, like, everytime
I think about it, it's something similar to trying to walk
on John Carter's Mars; and all of this trivial, like, asinine
things can never match up to the draw, the pull of
whatever has been dropped, whatever has been shorn
unevenly like a badly eaten candy-bar. Or something.
I don't know why it has to be about me.
I don't, pull my weight, and recently I feel cold in the summer;
I have slept under a bedsheet since June.
That's not what this is about, or what I, want to project.

This isn't a prerogative, a jarring hiss of due-dates
incoming inevitably. I just ****. Which is not a surprise,
like organic web shooters is a surprise, or, thinking up
something like a dead polemic of a sewer draining
the sordid leftovers of a consciousness.
Anurag Mukherjee Oct 2018
Truth lies like a truncated branch
blocking the door of a junkyard mouse's flat.
That is a very jarring notion indeed.

Hesitant to staying truth, hesitant to lodge;
the informed call on past gaze and past phase
for their feeding, the new individual
perfecting a new utility belt.

The new individual may be simple and torn.
Torn, because what is considered simple
could be pooled in the gap between the wedges
at the bottom of the Milo milkshake tetrapack
which the straw cannot find no matter how meticulously you jiggle it,
despite its stark authority, and you're undecided on  
whether you should throw the packet away.
Simple, because your motor function,
simply put, needs to be less awkward.

Does not make my cluelessness at functioning any less true.
I was struck immobile because I almost got run over by a mouse
(or a rat, I have not googled their difference),
but I admire the schoolishness of that terror,
its being real.
734 · Oct 2018
I am never running empty
Anurag Mukherjee Oct 2018
I am never running empty, honestly,
but catching up is difficult, catching up to light-
light, that political, exquisite meal.

I have not puzzled out whether adding what
needs to be said must conform to what should be said.
My ideas are arbored, but they are also acetylene torched.
These unbitted days of rose cough up a pus
that evolves out of a naked trauma.

I wish someone served me my brain on a plate
with a ribbon tying it to a viral video.

Evaluation of faith in squares needs to be considered.
As a possibility. I am thinking in possibilities.
I am thinking I can live long enough to know
if I can live long enough to know

if I can change my taste, my raunchy grace.
323 · Dec 2018
Senryu, 6
Anurag Mukherjee Dec 2018
Paper-sunlit heart;
whimsical superstition-
love is a doomed rest.
297 · Nov 2018
Bang on the heart
Anurag Mukherjee Nov 2018
Nobody told me how much stronger my hands are
than I anticipated; I have been composed for
so long that I underestimated the weight of the cricket bat
I used to drive the ball away with on the dry ground
near my house every evening. I can smell the perspiration
on the handle. I ****** it firm against my chest dead centrally
where under the skin and flesh my ribs meet and **** the beat
was so good that I couldn't help persisting; made a fist
with my right hand and beat it hard where the bat struck,
and suddenly I'm moving like a streetcar with its jerky clanging act,
bam and the edge of November bam and the duality of breath
bam and the corrective range of tears and bam and the pressure
of reddening spots and bam and bam drop of bam you bam assurance bam a space feud bam a rivalry bam of delicacies bam he's back and bam bam bam bam sneaky tom who goes there bam parched bam ****** bam oh death oh stop oh word oh letter oh fruit oh seed oh diesel oh Rayban eyes oh bam oh bam oh bam oh canon fodder that is true and oh bam oh bam oh bam oh bam a civil service due to be silent,
to be quiet.
I know, hey. I know. Sleeping well and good.
Well, well. I'm sorry it took so long.
296 · Dec 2018
Alfaaz, 4
Anurag Mukherjee Dec 2018
What sad concoctions can we table tonight?
"He said as he typed, back sore from being stacked
against wood"; inexplicable surges pay
for what is one of the last sites, but
holding own in the throat-
a part us, a part I, a cut high,
all in cool, soft as toffee-
sour fun detonates like a gust
from a passing subway car,
jolting hands slap on a turtleneck
as prudent insurance
276 · Jan 2019
Sunday quickie
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
I drink water like no other sunday-
the afternoon, grouped together
with light tease-breeze, an impending
dog-eared sundown, we ruck up in languor;
a kid carrying carrots bicycles on the road
that's an overturned, sweaty, scabbed hand,
although they may not be carrying carrots,
and they may not be a kid; but there definitely were wheels
that moved slowly with limited grace
(no way to make sure), and the washed clothes
left hanging are almost dried.
269 · Nov 2018
Mealtime
Anurag Mukherjee Nov 2018
Mealtime 1.45, whereby scores
of wind material run the shop
of slowly suffering, dense cold,
like a bulge in the history of sores-
all I thought was a tinny spore,
a fraction of love to tear down the robe.
Azithral in small doses, calmed down
with tap-food. Hour of the gods.
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
Tonight, the full moon looks so beautiful
that I am crying. I have lapsed on my knees,
the pulp of every love- shared. subscribed- streams
through follicles of unpardonable zest.
Nobody should know, but they end up aware
of the malpractical jingling pulling us
into the cartoon turbine that wants us first,
into the scratched longing poised in our collars.
Nobody should know, but they end up aware
of the unplanned lobotomy of wrong-
with opaque grunting, sure, maybe,
the necklaced ash-bath, the causal antibiotic for dummies
who dream about a bite instead of the consequence
of our bodies.
There's a full moon, and nobody should miss
on the engine-knock of our throat;
we've not loved for a while, but we still hug warmly
before we leave, smile at the odor of food,
spill it like the children we have never hated or loved but were,
clean up like the hankies we became.
235 · Jan 2019
Alfaaz, 5
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
Can't abstract the blood, parked in a cozy spot
as a gift from ambient indifference to proactive smiles-

aware of brackets, their tinge on your face,
your eyes made out of the dark blight on calendars
from bygone years that were never removed,
the fact is we checked out and racked heads
till the press caught our tones to suppress what
in their heads makes a coffee bean
out of an idiom.
Effulgent acid,
like a broken heart that builds
a cottage in the throat,
burns the basis of our nap.
228 · Feb 2019
Alfaaz, 15
Anurag Mukherjee Feb 2019
They are done. I am an anagram
a terrorized, tangible motor recoil,
follow their steps with no haste,
wallow in the lapse with no taste,
swallowing the rapt kiss but no wait,
something out of the rat-noises under the bed,
something out of the sarcophagus of dead film clips
(the film in their eyes),
sunken, pouted mouths which press the buttons
of thrill to mesmerize my motions
with cycling pain, tumbler's pain,
the pain of airless strobe lights,
engraving etchings of a bad bird
on the pillar of my neck.
221 · Oct 2018
Senryu, improv
Anurag Mukherjee Oct 2018
alternately staged;
loved you like a spray can mist-
let's just share a plate.
202 · Feb 2019
Alfaaz, 16
Anurag Mukherjee Feb 2019
Apocalyptic opportunity operating on obversely open,
oblong abortion-addiction, analogous of an upturned
episodic aporia apprehensive about obtuseness-
an opportunity inimitable in essence,
its assiduous attribution apparently evident
as economic edifices advertised as assistance-appeals.
Obviously, opportunities as enriching are essential
on account of existential affirmation,
otherwise all's apoplexy, ethanol ornament,
an altered evocation understated and escalated
obliviously; absent absinth; am armor arrayed
especially as assured; aerial oogenesis;
asymptomatic aphasia; acts of elegant appetizing.
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
When I headbang- and we do headbang
since as far back as we remember-
my hair, shaking like clumps of phantom pom-poms,
has its fun, evading a spotty survivor's guilt,
making good use of training and conditioning
under diverse climates. But it still chafes
against a comb, which is understandable.
I don't relish being grabbed by my throat
although I have been, but very safely,
in the good humor of a modest Tropicana-
188 · Jan 2019
Alfaaz, 14
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
Meet the boy standing on the stump
of a tree, (species undisclosed) lopped because
of reasons unknown, on the sidewalk,
towering over his shadow unrolled tenuously
like a policy behind him on the road littered
with mouldy cups, hired ants, ****** breathing-
you cannot find him on a GPS.
That would be delusional.
You can't meet him either. He's a service,
a tangy satisfaction that doesn't want dinner
until he goes back to his house,
plonks his backpack, bats his way to consequence-
rounds up his Kinley heart,
that limpid stare-ahead.
177 · Oct 2018
Ipso Facto
Anurag Mukherjee Oct 2018
Woman, nothing too absurd, ipso facto -
no captcha to code, my bankrupt support,
a jolt of skinny-dipping in LED lit river before breakfast;
let's go overboard, woman, in Mr. Big's world
where the afterimage will be a little wildly stitched cloth
with creases full of memory of hot-chocolate spills and coke
because we were running amok, fighting over pillow-talk
and in retrospect, we are not generally forced
to find the roots while on square one, which said, I've gotta admit
the ramifications of turning off the cell phone
are miraculous, like the genius of drinking scotch
with ice broken in the reception hall,
perfect place to pose for retrica in limited doses
unless sunlight throws me off guard to leap
over your red sandshoes for formal introductions,
an uncanny causal anomaly the size of a golf-course.
Anurag Mukherjee Oct 2018
The sense of an undirected gaze,
sincerely removed from the air
by a willing, polished chassis,
stirs the battery soul of a governed look;

budge upon budge, dam upon dam,
wrath compounding over the wrath of starved formulae,
ribbon-sent, shocked to bonus pay.

Terrible the blemish,
terrible the potato-skinned impulse,
the labor, the pen, the dragon-light torch
meant to replace the tri-pronged street lamp,
and to light the robbery in progress near MG Road.
172 · Jan 2019
Alfaaz, 13
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
When someone calls me a frantic baby
I call myself spontaneous because
my lunch discourse is nonpareil, entering
the vacation of filling motive-
to them I say yes, yes on the call
we whisk the happydent-chewing sky,
pull the sweet water off the stem
with stock pumped breathy initiative;
if talking is ever cumbersome
we loop around the cream-fills
with the authority of 25-watt-dust lamp,
all the good stuff pulverized skeptically.
163 · Nov 2018
A very cheesy sonnet
Anurag Mukherjee Nov 2018
I do love you with aphasia- to wit,
in brief collages that intervene and string
merry hands to gasped current acts of beat
grasped through a foamy mad bedspring
with a blanket spread for the hiding of the tests
that are ranged from the edge of a queue-stretch
to the census of mites on the fan above the head
who agree to shift their scales, but circumspect;
and in unforgotten deals made with the plate
with melting butterscotch shipping the remains of smell
of your shoulder where the friendly promise was made,
besides the impressions of wings of dazzled grace
under the shoes, while fingers remain calm.
To wit, I love you in the deepest pockets of arms.
158 · Jan 2019
Something sweet
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
Something sweet left on the bedside table,
not within arm's reach, but I stretched anyways-
adipose weight alliterated against the sheet,
pectoral garage grunge sounds because the sand
is still puckered in my eyes which adjust
to the helix of light over time;

light, like lavender talc branched in.
My wrist flinched from the cold metal ****
of a compartment under the chestnut top
with papers spread expeditiously.
With my hand scampering for a sign
I splintered the squeak of a rickshaw.

A shy crow pretended to dodge a bullet outside the window;
right thumb still wasn't ready to draw the pattern
that unlocks my phone, but we do things
when we wake up and look beside ourselves
for warmth. We hadn't exchanged numbers,
but you'd left yours in a text, with an invitingly pale font.

Your lips left perfumed migraines where you kissed me,
but that's a good thing.
154 · Oct 2018
500
Anurag Mukherjee Oct 2018
500
But the power outages in Heaven,
or the concentrated sulphuric rage of a dog
that's denied it's pom-pom meal,
or the grit showed by a crown that faced a big blue bug,
or the achievements of the fallen cookie;
there must be room for the rusted prostitution
of God's vestigial hobbies,
for the matte personality trying to find a way
to not be a pococurante,
for the truth value of a fiscal year to be decided
over a game of arm-hair ripping,
for the civil gauze to allow its memory clot
to mature into a functioning worker;
not done with the perjuring aphid,
the bundled and slouching rose,
the anaphoric destitution of history,
the tiger's salivating mouth;
don't even bring up Count Chocula,
the tide of blinding, burning magnesium
that suits the ******,
the twine chairs and the feet rested on their heads
as they wait;
what's mizzling here, I haven't got protection!
Bad, bad son, running to the dust,
to the accounting that's hurt,
mesmerized by the cult of burnt meat,
holding up.
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
Velvet banal that importunes
with its whiskers on the run,
I see through your ruse-
consoling me with your game
won't work unless you paid the theft of light
adjacent to a lake where the shoal is wrecked
by a knackered, paper-snatching hand, that's wise.
150 · Jan 2019
Alfaaz, 12
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
Smell of (fantasized) cell number on a napkin-
wheat-colored, taking stride with the outcast wind
bouncing off the sleeves of Monte Carlo-
barks with attentive seasoning;

I remembered that smell inside the subway car
in the jute-fiber knot of flesh,
furnished myself with its contour,
mucus fondling of despair that unfolds
its sorry, coy sequence.

When we're asked about the imagination
we who can't smell it as well imagine
a ribald audacity on our part,
like a whos-who on a pinned up list, like
sunlight thrown like a muffler around your neck
149 · Jan 2019
Alfaaz, 7
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
What sorry semblance be this,
****** out of the upper-right corner eye
smoking a polarized forehead
(boundaries? dope)
balancing on a whim the tenuous gist
of a mocked grin, whose curved lips
is etched on a dusty Ritz's windscreen
out of a second-hand mercy,
like leaves lodging at the outskirts
of hair where they can be plucked from
without protest or curled ends-
this resemblance, an unnatural disclosure
makes you uncomfortably manage yourself
into the shower.
142 · Jan 2019
Alfaaz, 10
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
My my who tells the tales?
The elaborate johnny walker way,
corporal dodgeball stayed on stride-
my my who rakes the age,
who shapes the leg
for their cotton arms to pluck, to tuck
the cushion where my back will rest
though my arms won't stray
from the lethe of your soft leafing urge,
from the sap of your *****,
from the fireplace of your lips
that run flyby agendas
of such dark dignity that stylized
the breath out of caving sun-dust,
grabbed to deify, the only role
we've assumed is to die right,
in arms, shut-eye tight.
141 · Nov 2018
Joke
Anurag Mukherjee Nov 2018
They say that jokes are meant to gratify
if they're good enough. I said wow and
refused to return the call.
(Ask not what your modesty can elicit.)

Gah, for a shove, or a ladder to boot.

Assimilative effects will be assimilative.

Must be the plaque. Must be the beat.

Human souls are made of dead paper.

Outrageous, says the goat before playing her flute.

              no faith in        skin      betray

I dipped my nose in sterilized water and am clean,
ready to proceed.

Body hair falling like wall-paint, but not readily.

Nose is padded with consciousness, it knows,
I can reach my belly hole.
140 · Dec 2018
Alfaaz, 1
Anurag Mukherjee Dec 2018
Nah, the cold is fine for now.
Style-statements aside, knowing the contours
of one's own breath so intimately vows
to be an interesting approach.
The disgruntled bus plodded slowly,
hoping to fool the amber marker bulb
to posit a couple of rounds of sleep.
The counterdraft resembles the shape
of my face in collision; it wanted to tickle
the nose, to sabotage the box, but it failed.
I tried to backlog some wit instead,
but the atmosphere calls for itself
a ginger taste, and a slight tilt of the head.
Symbolic dither prays for us in unison.
It matches speed with the auto, whose
yellow (now glinting russet) shakes hands
with the green smell of wishfulness. Its
reluctant pauses (speedbumps?) does
make me think, of music being released,
friends under the spot, the runaway scents
that pay for every movement.
138 · Jan 2019
Self-hate #2 (Sonnet)
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
Although to write were a correlation
imputed to healthy inclinations,
rest assured, my disposition
is indisposed to sustain attention,
because I flinch at every mention
of creditable conversation
pretending that you need protection
from my sour justifications-
Holler at auspicious essays
Echoing manifold condescensions.
Let's never get ***** henceforth,
Pass by fetishist pretensions;
Made this out of me but I shall
Evade impulsive desperation.
137 · Jan 2019
Break
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
Every shelved poem (if there are any)
(and there aren't a lot of them, to be honest)
(when they exist, they exist like a barbaric
sizzling television static or what-do-you-call-it)
(but usually, there aren't any, and the rear
of my neck feels made of curd when I wake up)
(but yeah, there aren't many, which drives
me to make some monumental mess ups)
(because there aren't any I indulge myself
on my college educated words, inherited
from hours of labor, and I shuffle them, save
few hours of sleep, post like I know something
about the gravitons of regularity) (but, its cloying,
really, very juvenile, sappy-like) is annoying.
136 · Dec 2018
Alfaaz, 2
Anurag Mukherjee Dec 2018
Who cares, to be time among friends?
Give it a break, hon, be it the stubborn wood
Of my mold or the face of my force, no
Daring heroism closed in a fold or
Magical rope tense from the cold-
You'll fix the glass, raise the warmth of body, buckle your nose for the blush.
The boy who talks is a boy who cowers
In the frame of being uninvolved.
Always scream at the devotion of things before
You, let me watch you love the things before you.
Let me suffer the fatal sore throat.
Let the silence
Of a fish overcome my lung.
134 · Dec 2018
Soup
Anurag Mukherjee Dec 2018
Happy girl happy about happy girl clapping,
ecstatic to no fault, we'll be yapping in the loft
(happy girl) while they're snapping the locks out into a pulp
we can be chubby in our credit-hoarding books.
Take a look. We make a spoon, the concave shape in time will crook
into a tinny opportunity for ice-cream off the hook,
traipsing on until the bonafide jukebox hits the perfect tune
to which you move, be still my beating rust- this night's a swoon.
Each night is unevenly cheesed, grinded and sequel-esque soon.
I hurtle a lamp into the maw on the enamel of lonesome comfort
to fetch love in a bowl of creamy tomato soup.
Yes, love in a bowl of soup.
133 · Dec 2018
Alfaaz, 3
Anurag Mukherjee Dec 2018
Rear view mirror cornered me visually
and my eyebrows- landing strips for the flight
of fried-rice discussion and Videocon love-letter-
toppled under the weight of her who shuns
the medallion around her neck of a god whose gist
is that of a glutton with an attitude. So do not
get me started on the metro and the thin man
with the hair that seemed to bend right as if
attracted to the seat, with three (precisely three)
dandruff grains caught my eye.

In Russell street where the steel monument rises
the green and purple lights of rich people's rooms
tower over the humble good days in my mouth.
Dead queen's dream polishes the road with soot;
the death of magic upon us, the dead of loves
built a quarry with a door without a foot.
131 · Jan 2019
Alfaaz, 11
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
Heard him say "No no-yes-but-";
left the no-yes-but in the polyodorous mess
of the alley where the ardor of the brick
faced the lost yet hushed, holy counterforced stress
of dank tea-breath that pressed against
the soaring, dressed-up, early, out-of-it kid
whose face, buckled for the forced haste of a mollycoddling kiss,
strikes against an elbow. What a jolt,
we wonder. Of course. What a jolt.
129 · Jan 2019
Alfaaz, 6
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
Surface, cold-swept in touch,
unpremeditated serenity in the last fetching dress
that she wears at the superstitious tail of evening
that grates like a ladle scraping rice off a saucepan
and equally grey;
the laid said the made can't take their step until
the rage belts a faint rest, waist-bound and cased out
for questions that range from
whom the clock stayed,
whom the promptbook abandoned,
with whom the slippery sidewalk made contest.
129 · Jan 2019
While scratching my beard
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
While scratching my beard, I vacantly
warmed my face in the sunlight
infiltrating through the dross window.
Spoken about car horns many times,
will resume many times more
although they don't share their language
with me on any level, preferring to cleave
the jangling nature of bylanes, almost as if
to summarize the gasp of coal.

I refix my eyes on the book,
find a beard strand on Partha Chatterjee's extract.
I, as it turns out, shed on the problem
of imagined communities.
My friend's laptop plucks data for her eyes
and its charging wire hangs precariously
like a ratty bridge that's newly renovated.
127 · Nov 2018
A Note
Anurag Mukherjee Nov 2018
let's not be doomed by the settlement of what we want
instead of discovering what we do now.

Light chickens out, light resists and
short-circuits accidentally. Light can,
supposing the time was passed
and the roast was forked,
it can draw us into a scratch.
Light proffers a skip, two skip
three skips away, leaves to question
those asking after the color.

Light bleeds out from a finger in the eye,
a nail in the corner of horrid sketches
that etch a late offshoot, a straight mongoose
chasing kraits for alimony.

Slurping love and licking our hands
sogged with a cream to soften the skin,
slippery enough to jinx action by type-speed,
bleached with complacency; such is the pitch.
and the turnless, sweaty scream.
126 · Nov 2018
Wash
Anurag Mukherjee Nov 2018
This mind is *****. Squalid.
I will begrudge it no more. I will swallow it whole,
I will follow it's role and dole out a more subtle close;
panelling the house, my cloth, I will bite into the pocket
wet from being searched for a stub or a roll
of cash forgotten to be spent and crumpled in a ball-
certainly withdrawn, a familiar accident of being thrown up
by the morning into the next day, into the next day, overall
a complete moronic dire wolf, a wire coil that slips between
shoes and causes a fall, like an omelet on a pan
(but I've run out of salt, chili, onions); waste of direction,
waste of selection, an eviction that tragedizes the *******
of a cause. No better to detonate- and let suffer the dogs-
or digest- and let suffer the bogs- but the only course left
is to study or perform,
unequivocally; supposed a dynamite tick-tock in the soul
is there's any worth left in it to mould into something
that can find a format for itself or a voice without a drawl,
a voice unlike mine, which can halt without a pause,
which can exalt without a cross,
which can vault without a loss.
Anurag Mukherjee Nov 2018
Strange, what tenors reveal about the quiet.
Repeating the chuckle, dashed about wicker chairs,
A cut set deep and probable in its bloom-
Many pleasures, many official corporealities to buck.
Some of us were printed with decorum.
Theirs was the lion's share of assault by the blinding glimmer
Of the closeted hope that many a star borrowed
And confessed to in assizes.
We could have been better selves as limbs who loved like parrots do,
With habits I do not know.
But I'm sure they have their graces cobbled up for the relatives, because graces do show
What the love I dreamt pledged itself to,
Or smeared drunkenly on a floor.
126 · Jan 2019
Alfaaz, 9
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
Intrepid   punked   my love

truant in dress, a true sucker
like him who turns an ear like a page,
a brute man who sides with the perched rage
eating with family and choking on news;


the stains of palm-grabs on the drainage pipe
beside the window where the branch chuckles
at the swan-traced latticework.
I don't remember when I'd seen a swan last,
but I know they are comfortable in water
(which I can never be until)
and they are rather sedate fellows;


this calls for a musty retreat
where no delayed trains can haste,
where ideas plank on to merge with the urge
to surge in the splurge of steak-
mixed sauces, the way we love
is a mix of tastes that smells
like a damning auto-tale.
124 · Nov 2018
Ah, a warm cup. Take it.
Anurag Mukherjee Nov 2018
Ah, a warm cup. Take it.
Winter's obscene coziness has brought
companions as flushed and running as the boats
where the cousins of my friend make their home
for a duration of heartfelt strokes, as the water
swoons to the prow's authorship.

The smallest changes are brought over a sip.
Late night sabotage, academic arson because
of a lack of faith, geyser-treachery- with warmth
is forgotten the level-chested month of waste,
with warmth is forgotten the limitations of pulse,
with warmth is forgotten the cold lack of touch,
warmth being gainful exploration, tight-coiled breath
like the rower and their treatment of the lake,
paddling away dead afterthoughts that float
like the fallen, broken and ****** biscuit in Hades.
124 · Nov 2018
Out of a letter
Anurag Mukherjee Nov 2018
For all love is born out of a dark, out of a letter,
the persecution that spreads amidst the drained holes of choice-
out of a weary separation of head thrown back, neck craned against wood,
the true likeness of stone. The dark is an imperial gaze,
dandy, strapping and strong, munching metal-noise, truly noice,
obviously strung for a price. Dark can’t level, only analyze
the distinction between tears and tropes, the limit of a gimmick
that was clipped on a string, drenched and adolescent.
Dark is not the choice of photography but who has his mad eyes raised
to the fortune of automatism, to the terrace where blank steps hurtle ahead
to reach for a dusk that can be raged; over time,
strange accounts are opened. Office becomes a blade,
a staple with the scent of a lover trades itself for impression
(Love against the wall, tacked with thumb, pressure against the edge,
merciful arrogance, cocky cocky boy with whom I color my tongue
and my body, by clutching your neck closer and becoming the toucan,
in our dark and our ether, in our mouths and our births).
Soda gulped down the throat has its own morbid thought,
but not for long, not until the straw builds our house,
with a ceiling made of arms.
Rather, the risk has been framed, the blinds through which
horns intrude for duty summons remain winced as an eye with
dark circles, dark bringing for itself the juice of intent-
intent that splurges into love, intent that splurges,
far-reaching, intent that snuggles inside a blanket speckled
with strewn cloth, inside being the warmth, the heart, the shuteye
118 · Dec 2018
Alfaaz, Prologue
Anurag Mukherjee Dec 2018
Oh I train- then the desperation bakes;
myself. Myself. My grave. My bread. My strait.
Making a star out of a monster man.
A pain that bites the crocodile of sleep
says it is supple enough for the length
of digabamboom strides of a leg.

Pardoning umbilical jello.
Those are melodies. Mawkish, but spotted
to be watched while you eat;
endless rascalry of the stinking bile
surging across the olive rooms of the hide.

My my. Tore up, facing the fantastic oblige,
whole tones hovering to say hello hi, bellow
the brackish toothpaste smile; repercussion
of caws, repercussion of caws.
Anurag Mukherjee Dec 2018
It may be a Thursday of the muffled variety;
the plastic of the cup bent to the angle of your words,
your modulation drifting off along the rim
dappled with sprite. I guess that mostly sums up
the premise. Doesn't it? Cooling stomach,
atmosphere that can flake itself away
from the motor-cults, a serious crow
roving its neck like the search for a lost interview;
we shine in the baggy sunlight,
and I realize that I would make a house with you
out of legos, and you would sneeze if I told you.
115 · Jan 2019
Alfaaz, 8
Anurag Mukherjee Jan 2019
Cold gust unbuttons my warmth;
surprisingly, I spot a new restaurant
serving crepes. I am pigeon about
a crepe is. Wonder if it has crumbs
and if they're precise, contaminating
to tidy degrees;

a strange invigoration switches itself
to the sour vehicular horns, that reminds me
of a child who wanted candy off the floor
but was restrained by the threat of imprisonment
as the train cut through Kerala. But the insistence
of the horns is more insistent, their peal
course-correcting to petty nose squinting.
I can hear the metallic lip curl,
the engine revolting at the judgment of the pedestrian
(an opinion of which I'm innocent)
of a vocal car as a wanton idiot, the kind
that still believes that cheetos will come back.

— The End —