By Indratapa Routh
My father likes growing stuff.
Yellow dahlias,
Big as the sun, big as the burn,
Of the breath, I try to steal.
Fighting mania-conquered bronchioles,
Closing inside my slouched form,
Engraving itself on a paralysed toilet seat.
Gardening, he calls it, a hobby he loves.
Gives him joy.
Gives him a bacterial infection on every callous,
Of his manure-worn hands.
Flaking skin, oozing fluids, excruciating pain.
Some dermat prescribing to refrain.
Yet, growing flowers, he calls it.
Growing. Growing on him like a parasite.
Microbes and I.
Is flora bright enough to make,
Wordsworth swoon?
Really worth the decay of oneself?
I wonder as the whip by me,
Strikes me for the trillionth time.
In an attempt to convince,
An apparently uncaring circus,
I deserve the laurel of the verse.
Been letting it make my heart spurt red,
Since prior to the collapse of my uterine walls.
Been bearing the torch of my generation,
Unsolicited, flaming my spine.
To scout my potential turns.
Staining my family line.
Flaming my choking, closing oesophagus.
Expand! I command. Expand!
Nevermind. Cannot expand on it.
Lost track of that gardening metaphor already.
Been walking, running, losing track.
Breathing, wheezing, losing track.
Tripping, slipping, slashing my ankles off.
Stumbling downward, losing face, aesthetics,
to the grainiest cement.
Twisting up, scrubbing forward,
Leaving blood trails underneath my knees,
Losing track.
4 am. Eyelashes stuck to seething eyebrows.
Utter waste of lash glue.
Utter waste of time! 5 am.
Clock-dongs, so deathly offensive!
The grandfather, even more so.
How many moons he must have skated through life!
How many moons I still have left to tumble through!
The contrast pierces jealous craters,
Into my putrefying ankle, now detached.
My guilty knees, still attached,
My guilty brain, still wracked.
Still haunting my body of bleak futility.
Mirror. My father's corroding knuckles on the other side.
Here, mine too!
Maggots crawling out of holes,
In my rotting phalanges.
I use them to finally pick up the pen,
Having failed, successfully,
The first hundred times.
I make on the reflector's slippery surface,
A comprehensive list of all Sisyphean endeavours,
Undertaken in my lifetime.