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Arpita Banerjee Apr 2019
Misty little corner
In a blue Room
Calls out to the mourner
Immersed in doom.

Grey furniture makes
Greyer memories
Faults, taunts and insipid
Fallacies.

Blue is the colour of the eye
It's inside is filled with a neon so fly.
The pink tree of life ******
Venus flytrap dissolves in juices.

The eye looks, the eye appalls.
The eye resigns, the eye dissolves.

The pink trap reopens again.
Lust curls into the corner in vain.
The misty blue corner like a white canvas,
Fills with all its colours again.

Pink is the monster,
Blue is the perpetrator,
Green is the debilitator.

And I, the wild colourless mind,
Sits by the wall and conjures this mishap.
All dreams are flies,
And I, the Venus flytrap.
Arpita Banerjee Jan 2019
A mutilated corpse in the middle of the city
Frothing at the mouth
A suffocating hostage
A sacrilege
A sacrifice of religious anonymity
You flow and stagnate
Making us all ruminate
What life has created
Is nothing but destruction in its wake

In the hustle of the city
You remind me of pity
Not for you
Not for your desperately dark waters
Not for your absence of tethers
But for me
You remind me how small and insignificant
Is the mind that dares to see
Dares to write
Dares to referee
Against your will to end
No destiny can revoke your decision
No human can make you bend

In your twists and turns
Your tortuitous burns
You are resolute
That the ones who killed you
Will not play the immortal flute
Or their resonating glory
Of conquering what you are

They tried to claim you
They tried to blame you
They tried to reduce and maim you
But from your eternal sleep you may never wake
The city may run
The city may burn
You will support no flora
No fauna
Rest in peace, Yamuna.
The Yamuna is one of the most significant rivers in India, a civilization that is historically dependent on rivers and attributes them a divine status. For the past few months it has been covered in industrial froth and the dark waters of the severely polluted river resemble a scene of heaven, with soft white clouds covering the deceased soul. The poem is a reflection on the ghastly vision of the transcendent glory of the river, whose waters are now a toxic propagator of death. Yamuna could not be brought back, but Yamuna's death is a protest against the vile species that inhabits its banks and turns a blind eye towards its writhing crawling tormented journey with an aching will to survive. Yamuna is lost to us forever. Rest in peace, blessed river. The human race never deserved you.
Arpita Banerjee Oct 2018
It's that pretty time of the night
Where I would sometimes lie wrapped up in you
And the smoky sky and the wispy clouds
Would wink down at us
In plain sight
Far away in the oblivious distance
The mountains would call a peripatetic wind
And my heart would respond to your indistinct whispers
In that pretty time of the night
Arpita Banerjee Oct 2018
Suddenly it feels numb
My body restive
My words gone dumb.
Muted grievances against the window pane
Are wiped away as insane.
Something inside, yet miles away
Resonates a perfectly eternal dismay.
Sweet are the tears that embrace,
Coursing down the contours of the loving face.


I ask myself,
“Why can I never write about important things?
About Philosophy, Politics and similar meanderings?”
Reasonable things.
Inklings of promising meanings.
Instead I struggle with my tempestuous heart,
Unimportant to the world, yet the most excruciating art.
The pain and the glory
Is the never-ending selfish story
My childish mind can recall.


Despite all this wondrous melancholy,
I always choose to repeat my folly.
Up and about to write I go,
There’s too much heart material to forego.
I lie under those dry lifeless branches,
Sit, stand or walk around in hunches.
Only the grass understands
Under the skin in innumerable strands
Pain is the only conspicuous poison
Reigning the veins, arteries,
Defining the venison.


I couldn’t look at you much
Since you drank from my cup
Travesties of my past break-up
And chose to inflict it upon me again
To see if our old life
Could be regained.
But nonchalance has a way of defeating you.
It looks odd on you,
Like an unaccustomed parvenu.


Love wrecks your heart like the shivering of an earthquake.
When my insides tear, shrivel and menacingly rake.
You realize that your nonchalance was odd indeed.
I was the friend in need
You fled the deed.
That could have saved me
From depression.


Earthquakes don’t mean any harm.
They simple do their job
And leave destruction in the wake.
Naïve.
Nonchalant.
Dilettante.
They are not exactly wrong.
No culpable intentions.
Only humming a deleterious song.
Yet
We seldom recover when the grounds from below
Shake.
I thought you were the soft breeze, drizzling rain.
But turns out,
You are an earthquake.
Arpita Banerjee Jun 2018
There is a certain injustice
In the way this life unfolds.
The beauties of birdsong,
The tapestry of nightfall,
Eludes the bustling hunger of life
That survives only during the tragic monotony
Of light and days.
Nothing balances the weakness,
Or the misbalance of joy
Giving simplicity to have-nothings
The pleasant sweetness of no loss
And directing every woe, every jealousy,
Towards the one that has.
This injustice unfurls,
Myriad patterns of thoughts;
Where the thoughtless discrimination
Of black, white, yellow, red and brown
And all the spectrum of colors that the rainbow has left unadulterated
Gets tinged in meanings,
Meanings the hues never intended.
Myriad meanings dictated by space
And spaces in time,
Meanings that lurk behind your eyes,
Towards the way I look.
How the two meet to create a wonder
That violates every injustice
Which had crawled on this earth !
That half broken gleam,
The crack between your lips,
When you part them to smile,
Reminds me, why every injustice,
Is a pain worth bearing.
… Or is it?
Arpita Banerjee Jun 2018
When I first thought of your beautiful eyes
Opening up to my waking lids
I expected a certain compromise
A shield against the impertinence of probability
But you shocked me
Your gaze met mine
And in a moment I knew
That every shield of immunity
Every grain of apprehension
Every instinct of war
Had condensed into a transcendental wonder of powerlessness
There was no armor, no protection
From the raging defeat that permeated both of us
Incessantly
In a moment I knew
There is no victory
Without loss
And loss indeed it was
The loss of consciousness, the loss of pride,
The shredding of each morsel of doubt
But ultimately the loss of mortality,
The defeat of time,
Because when your beautiful eyes
Met my waking lids
An eternity had succumbed
And we lay in the ravages of war.
Alone and victorious
Us against the world
Us against space, time and continuum
Despite the unreliability of victory,
One certainty reigns supreme,
There is a war.
Arpita Banerjee Apr 2018
Breathe in the rustling leaves
Hide behind the unwanted plants that arise
From the creaks in the concrete.
Perhaps they have discovered a source of life
Far sublime than the one you dwell in.
The wind, the wind,
The wind blows opposite
To where the bird wants to go.
The wind, the wind,
The happy eucalyptus oscillating in unison
Bidding adieu to the birds in flight.
The wind, the wind,
Making fishes out of thoughts,
Myriad corals and hydrae out of trees.

The water tank
Formidable in its all absorbing blackness,
Contains the most lucid, transparent and fragile,
Of man’s ultimate conquests.
Water.
Which drips from above sometimes
When the sky salivates
At the hot porridge
Of a lifeless mess
Beneath itself.
Birds are like kites,
Leaves are like fingers
Dexterously typing whispers
Like signals to the wind.

Limited is the vision
Where we sit now.
Our backs immersed in the restlessness
Of the occasional writer;
Our eyes fixated on the botchy
Grey watercolor work of the sky.
Everywhere we look, wherever we see,
A band of seven colors break the reverie.
The enthusiastic trees type harder
All leaves in the virulence of a martyr.
Close your eyes.
Step beyond the panorama which
Refuses to bare itself before your soul.
Step beyond the boundaries of the visible,
Into the consolation of the miscible
Voices.

Moribund shrubs,
With faces of the half dead,
Half faced creatures of the unformed,
The cruel monotony of their demands resonate
Wildly with the marginalized.
How in their knots and hunches,
Leaves drooping intoxicated
From the light stolen away by
The more representative, the more vociferous,
Lies the silent acceptance of their abandon.
Here and there taller branches,
Crane towards the sunlight,
Hoping for the winds to listen,
Or perhaps,
For the sun to burn them away first.
Old cranes and their ignominious hoarse throats,
Can only coax words that are coarse.

The dull, blotted uniform grey
Densifies at certain places
A somber sleep indulges the sky.
The winds now,
In their frightful fancy
Scour the floor of your feet
Touching you soles,
Your shoulder, your spirit.
But the playful naught of the wind
Derives insatiable pleasure from
Tickling the trees,
Rocking the eucalyptus,
Till the moonlight washes away
All the eccentricities
Of the frivolous day.

After a joyous revelry,
The tree laughs less
The vigor in its chuckle realizes,
That it is time to retire.
The sky rearranges its clouds
To cast a pallor
Loses the yellow
The grey, for a darker, almost impenetrable
Black.
The water tank camouflages
With our beady eyeballs.
The transparent water fills up
You and me.
Our eyes dilate, staring into the sky
Bidding the dusk good-bye.
Come, live with me, a little
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