The Simplicity Of My Congenital Thirst Poem by Sachin Ketkar

The pale fingers grow
Like hair
On the edge of my amnesiac
Skin reaching out
To the dried skeleton
of sky

The simplicity of my congenital thirst
Branches out of my pores
Shedding
Its eyeless brown leaves
On the famine
Of my earth's black mouth

The parched sky peels off
Like a cheap blue paint

The decrepit arteries
Of the desiccated soil
Crumble like the ruined drainages
Of the extinct civilizations.

My stultified heart is a palm
Whose fingers have come off
But it can still hold nothingness
Like Shiva's translucent semen
It can still keep count
Of my deaths with its mute thumb.

I have planted
The stillborn foetuses
Of my eyes
Near the ancient roots of peepal
The male rocky hands
Of the last earthquake
Will awaken
Their disfigured faces

They can still startle you
By sprouting from unlikely places