I started
Talking to myself
These lockdown months.

Loud and lonely.
Peremptory.

Get the work done
Don't worry about not
Having any fun,
Lucky COVID ain't killing you yet ***.

I started
Singing french songs, making French toasts, listening intently
To Scottish ballads
Irish ditties
To lose myself
In foreign shores.

Locked in.
I seek your world.
Which may never be the same.

Locking out my world is easy.
Migrant workers and homeless people locked out. Feuding and duelling
With death by
Starvation
Courtesy Corona.

They can't take it one day at a time. Time is their tyrannical despot.

Living life bite size
All at once.
Loving family from far away.
Walking home to them.
Eyes bent on the road.
Back bent with baggage.
A child perched on top.

Call me crazy.
I envy their courage.
Even as misery engulfs.

Call me crazy.
I shudder in fear.
When the world returns
To its new normal,
Will I wish to abdicate?

I have found my tribe
My valley of flowers,
Poets and artists
Online.

There are the poets of life
The live artists offline
Who spread pain thin and fine.
To outrun a virus.
Too real, and too many.

Call me crazy.
I want to make them count.
The countless nameless stars
Of pain's poetry.

(c) Amrita Valan 2021

Sometimes the mind is still
The eyes take in every detail
The glass half empty, water stale
The ears catch the faintest sound
Was that a bell rung due south?
Sometimes fingers tap
The keyboard clacks
Mind is still
Absent.
Who takes over
the vacancy?
The poem writes itself,
The mind has divergent
Tectonic plates.

(c) Amrita Valan

I light an incense stick to pray
The smoke spirals ascending slow
O I have nothing left to say
I dread my nights and dread my days
Fly away with the smoke that sways
But there's nowhere left to go
I light an incense stick to pray
The smoke spirals ascending slow
I turn this way I turn that way
There's forever left to go.

(c) Amrita Valan 2021