Why do I feel for them?

Is it because
they remind me
of me—
these bacteria?
They move slowly.
They hide out.
Build small.
Stay unnoticed.

They’ve been with me
longer than I’ve known.
And they don’t have an intent
to ****.
They just wanted a home.
That I might die
was never their goal.
It’s just a fallout.

But me?
I have intent to ****.
Every day I wake up
and take pills
like they were warheads.
The pill has no motive to **** either.
No ammo does.
It is always the man behind.
The pill—
It is just a chemical configuration
that doesn’t know why it dissolves.

I take note of the dynamic.
The one without intent dies.
The one with, decides.
I pop the pill.
Then it's the germ versus the pill.
Germ survives, I die.
Pill survives, I live.

Wonder where else I have seen this.

Nations— vetoed into silence?
Children— bullied into submission?
Friends— who were docile, forgotten?
Me— or someone like me—
who took a call.

It is strange to feel
unspoken companionship
with microbes that ****?
Will it feel strange
when they’re gone?

I think about that.
Like how people trying to quit
miss their cigarettes.
Not just the nicotine—
the mateyness with the stick—
Here just now. Then gone.

Will I feel that?
A weird kind of postpartum?
Not grief, exactly.
But absence.
Silence where something lived.
Once.

I think illness does this to people.
Brings delirious thoughts, that is.
Imagine befriending or mourning bacteria
or weighing up their intent
in your right minds. Eh.

Why did they choose me though?
Because, I too am quiet, like them?
It angers me to think.
Then I feel a tired, grudging respect for them,
as if finally learning self-respect.

They, the bacilli, have no malice.
They don’t even know I exist.
They don’t feel guilt.
Or regret.
They just are.

But I have to end them.
Each day.
Like heartbreak.

I wonder if they could speak,
what would they say?

Maybe nothing.

Maybe like monks in the hills,
they’d bow and whisper,
“We only came to live.”

And I would say back,
quietly,
almost ashamed,

“So did I.”

The majestic days of Czars and Sultans
with their immaculate royalty

and those of Barons and Khans
brimming with stainless primacy

have long since gone.

All their embellished repositories
of capital, jewelry and gallant armies
stand looted, ravaged and plundered.

The struggling proletariat of those times
with their humdrum lives, rife with strife
have also bitten the dust

      expired, forgotten, crumbled

since days beyond recall.

Now we, the successors and heirlooms
live on with kindred joys and glooms

as communities, creeds and nationalities

recklessly defending close-held foxy illusions
of defunct oneness or mythical deities.

The more tolerant among us even feel dignity
in misplaced, romantic nationalism(s)
and mostly off-the-mark, drifting democracies.

❋

But this time or that
summate a few more gimmicks or subtract,
all we have gifted ourselves
are some arbitrary lines on the map

slashing the earth to pieces
then claiming its wiggly, volcanic geographies
as slices of ever-dodging Elysium
enshrined in fragile master-bluffs
of precarious, cut-throat politics.

Another dull winter day painfully crawls away
       into garden-variety biography
          just a run-of-the-mill résumé
          filled with antecedents whilom
          and to top it up
          a corrosive impostor syndrome.

I lie quietly in the flickering, yellow light
of a jaundice-stricken forty-watt bulb
trying to think about something superb
which would somehow improve
the way things do (or do not) move
in my achromatic life.

Nothing worthwhile emerges.

Only some vague urges act out
from their stingy hideouts.

The clock pushes the evening further
into the dry, arid chill of the night so still.
I sigh and switch off my ghost-like
sleepy, vapid eyes
into the ancient time-line
of a vast, un-bridged solitude
in my quarantined, immotile life.

© Chandra S., 1995

Passion is carefree, often buoyant.....breezy,
and is absolved perpetually of prohibitory rationality.

Being logged in to it for a little over eternity,
this is exactly how I have felt:
intense, steamy
...maybe a bit frenzied.

Passion is also a sudden, swift salvo.
On many a fleeting occasion, ergo;
I have come perilously close
to suggesting my maudlin ardor
and poetically propose
an incredible romance,
which if you dismiss;
shall break my heart in two
and if not;
shall break a home or two.

It is like this therefore,
that I have come to feel
like an outlawed fugitive
and as if in the wink of an eye,
a million lonesome nights have passed,
sorely bruising and tearing me apart
between the hearth and the heart.

Tonight:
the first one after those million;
I am transcribing my thought
to tell you that I am hooked,
as though in a playback loop -
      a weary, age-old vinyl record;
      pitching forward, skipping backward
      in a pestering, irksome Xerox
      of scratches, static and blips;
      all in the same little sector
      where there was once music.

❉

Maybe that is why I surprisingly realize
the pain of passion, and slowly capsize
into a drifting, dry sleep

devoid of all dreams

of you.


© Chandra S., 2013

We track the oblique, sly fireflies
that keep popping fitfully by.

While life swarms invitingly by the side
we remain rabidly hustling
recklessly trailing
those brusque cracking stars
      ...shifty, deceptive, volatile
in onyx-bronze, raven nights

❋

We: the tenderfoot novice
bulldozed on many a graceless trip
half-cocked, peripheral, ******
and profoundly ill with pitiful

short-sight.

Afterwards, we will dolefully miss our unlived days
and stay vainly entrenched in unskillful, effete ways
to discard stiff hangovers and to naively refill
famished days-before-today

      with crackpot mirth and being oddly spry.

❋

Like an enduring remorse, life trickles aside
bequeathing wounds that refuse to cicatrize.
and now towards this passing eventide
there is no volte-face
no dice.

At the foothills of vintage age
you feel perceptibly less somber
for there are only meager remains
of mostly forgotten days -
      little to smile, rue or cry for
and an amorphous
yet obligingly finite future -
      trifling to put together or fight for.

So dear Chandra:
here is a congratulation:
It must be awesome -
this imminent privilege of geriatrics
and this stolen bit of transient freedom;
      the real laissez-faire to yearn
      and to die for.
timorously cajoled
from time’s exacting, puritan dictum.