Saturday 7 February 2015

Letter to a Dead Poet

Dear Pessoa,
I think you are fine with my settlement on this name. After receiving the right mosquito bite on my left leg I decided to write you this letter. I felt it as a sign to let you know that your poetry has never come across new to me, not even the very first poem I read. It was there always, as far as I can think of the days I started knitting an endless muffler of some twisted memory of myself. It was there when a raindrop on forehead felt like a giant watermelon; when occurrences passing by became so still that I could feel the earth revolving. It is still there when little kids start knowing that all events are just lonely leaves getting blown from one place to another in any pattern.
Anyway, nothing is new. So may be it is alright to live countless myths. It is alright to let a hundred streetlamps pour red wine at night on women and men who suck tender mahua from each others breasts. To crush almonds of eyes into an early morning paste as offering to gods who hang from beards of the priests. Gods who just want to wipe off their sweat.
If days and nights don't work then one can let talkative inner sparrows deliver lectures on silence to clocks. Or one can lean on a wall and create music in smoke. Once in the neighbourhood there was a gang of cows who sat in a corner of land only to watch the shape their pond took when tiny clones of the sun fell on it. Then we ate them or peeled off our eyelids or they went to a new pond. I don't remember exactly what happened but we did eat up each other.
May be it is fine to make and bury corpses breathing in a subtle rhythm. May be not. Either way I wanted to ask you if you could deposit some money in my account. My pockets have eloped from my pant again.
Take care.
Love.