By Raj Shekhar Sen

Confessions:

and
if you ever touch me now
like the winds floating from the sun do
you will see
I am not skin anymore,
but a juxtaposition of scrambled words
taped together,
that my words do not rhyme
but only cover my soul
from loneliness
and as you slowly undress this garb of words
from me
I would confess to you
the only crime I commit:
… poetry

[Insert: Date]

today,
while you sip your coffee
and run to the train station,

when you walk into your workplace
and put your bag wherever you do;
when you think of a poem
and plan to reread it when you reach home

today when things all around you
pass by like waves in the ocean;
pause but for a second
and realize
that you do all of this
to avoid the loneliness
that cages your soul.

unpretentious:

it’s 12 in the noon,
you look out from your large office with a wall
as a window that opens to random skies and a whole lot of highways,

and it rains and rains and rains
till the roads are as black as a smoker’s lungs
and the skies as pale as your dead grandma.

the office as large as it is, seems meaningless
as the walls hold a hollow inside like the word, gaunt.

you look out while you are actually looking in
and think of the poems that you haven’t written and will not,

you count hours each of them and time feels like the gaunt office
and you wish you could write and write and write like the rains

and suddenly Bukowski walks in through the doors
and before he jumps out the windows
he tells you like he would,
all great art is horse-shit,
buy tacos.

Author:

Raj Shekhar Sen is based out of San Francisco, California, having lived the majority of his life scattered around cities in Central India before renegading to the US of A. He considers writing to be primarily a hobby but has been fortunate enough to be published in a few journals, including Nivasini and Aquirelle. His day job is internet surfing and sometimes business consulting.

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Read the latest issues of Cafe Dissensus Magazine on ‘Disability: Art and Culture’, edited by Shilpaa Anand, MANUU, Hyderabad & Nandini Ghosh, IDS Kolkata.

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