Post Mortem Poem by Sridala Swami

The brain in its jar floats and dreams:
streams of memory, consciousness, preserved.
The two halves, like breasts, grieve
for the softness of skin for the reserved
whisper of touch. All this has already happened

and will never happen again. The brain curls
itself up, hits glass, ricochets and remembers:
foetal, an echo of shape, a pearl
of desire - his body holding the other one
that burnt away and became ember.

There should be a question here. A ‘how' or a ‘why'—
a way to understand linearities. Instead, there are ridges
and convolutions, the repetition of blood beating,
the raising of hair along an arm when a finger follows
vertebrae down the spine.

Brain body umbilicus. Our bodies stretch
within and without to accommodate life. But
without you without you without you
I am only a dissonance, an object adrift, a wretched
longing for the pain of being alive.