Once There Was… Poem by Anuraag Sharma

Once there was a he -
a mowed inkpot
fingers were little holders
with broken G-nibs
destiny wrote him with.
I was his palimpsest.

He took me out on a cycle
Sang ‘charminars'
Puffed out - ‘Aankhon aankhon mein hum tum…'
and nuts in the basket jumped into
my little slit
wide open under my nose.
A boot crushing with rubber silence soled to it.
He showed me poetry - a dicrescent
lightning falling, mud - cracking
the celestial wall - the cardiogram
of a rainy day, just above the Govt.
Inter college. He told me painting - topless
nudes and nipped my complexes
before they budded - a part of the
game he called EXPERIMENT.
He got me Wattsman sheet
water colours crackers and
candles and books, too.

Then he married me to
and thus all to's gradnally were
tossed away - the ‘to'
of togetherness, of towards
even that one fallowing a
mutual belonging and the wheel
moved on - centrifuging his own
ventricle away … away … away. The centre
began to become a black-hole
parabola turned into hyperbola. A
mute mutiny held his heart down.
Down fell his hand from my young
shoulders which had promised him to
support in his growing age, once! A
limp in his gait rather became
his sole shore.

He invented me
and lost me.
I could not discover him
and lost him.

It is death without death
when there is life without life.
The child in him was me
the old in me was he
Once! The adult abattoir butchered us both.
Once there was a papa…