Poetry from Satya Dash

Photo: Clay Banks

Photosynthesis

The closest I got to myself        was when I tried slitting
my wrist        with the blade of a shaking leaf
unfurling like a long finger’s curse        only to find
a wreck of the world’s errata       at the entrance sat Orpheus
singing        only poetry makes sense of all this
in poems I wrote after      I gasped through stanzas
corrugating the plastered past        skies heaping borderless
doom        how I quivered hot in happenstance’s tub
why amidst the mad laughter life didn’t feel pro life
poems morph into stony forecasts       rain gathers
claying pebbles in the good farmer’s well        baby
tomatoes turn to mirth       and even songs rise
from dots of earth like decadent worms         good things
taking more time than usual now        a consequence
of diminishing attention span        see even love gets
hoary in winters        nature of the beast’s tongue
it sustains until told to sustain        I became words
I wrote        and the sounds I didn’t        so ferocious
was my valence towards you        it strapped a stole
to my throat        your gait raised on my toe’s benediction
tell me how do I disembark         recently I coughed up
blood on my palm        I thought it was mine to drink
swallowed it back        to realize transaction’s aftermath
when thigh veins gleamed neon green        the musk of you
in melancholic glow       a phenomenon understood
by animals that kept moving       photons riding a pony’s strut
this is how light is sluiced     by one writhing body from another
.

.

Satya Dash‘s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Passages North, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Florida Review, Pidgeonholes, Glass Poetry, and Prelude, amongst others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator too. His work has been twice nominated for the Orison Anthology. He spent his early years in Odisha, India and now lives in Bangalore. He tweets at: @satya043.