Poetry from Satya Dash
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
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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.
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