Sudeep Sen Poems

An envelope arrives unannounced from overseas
 containing stark white sheets,

perfect in their presentation of absence.
 Only a bold logo on top

revealed its origin, but absolutely nothing else.
 I examined the sheets,

peered through their grains —
 heavy cotton-laid striations —

concealing text, in white ink, postmarked India.
 Even the watermark's translucence

made the script's invisibility transparent.
 Buried among the involute contours, lay sheets

of sophisticated pulp, paper containing
 scattered metaphors — uncoded, unadorned,

untouched — virgin lines that spill, populate
 and circulate to keep alive its breathings.

Corpuscles of a very different kind —
 hieroglyphics, unsolved, but crystal-clear.
...

drawing a breath between each
    sentence, trailing closely every word.
         — James Hoch, ‘Draft' in Miscreants
1.

some things, I knew,
were beyond choosing:


didu — grandmother — wilting
under cancer's terminal care.


mama — my uncle's — mysterious disappearance —
ventilator vibrating, severed
silently, in the hospital's unkempt dark.


an old friend's biting silence — unexplained —
   promised loyalties melting for profit
abandoning long familial presences of trust.


devi's jealous heart misreading emails
hacked carefully under cover,
her fingernails ripping
unformed poems, bloodied, scarred —
my diary pages weeping wordlessly —
my children aborted, my poetry breathless forever.


2.

these are acts that enact themselves, regardless —
    helpless, as I am,
torn asunder permanently, drugged, numbed.


strange love, this is —
a salving: what medics and nurses do.
i live buddha-like, unblinking, a painted vacant smile —
   one that stores pain and painlessness —
someone else's nirvana thrust upon me.


some things I once believed in
are beyond my choosing —
choosing is a choice unavailable to me.
...

Under the soft translucent linen,
  the ridges around your nipples

harden at the thought of my tongue.
 You — lying inverted like the letter ‘c' —

arch yourself deliberately
  wanting the warm press of my lips,

it's wet to coat the skin
  that is bristling, burning,

breaking into sweats of desire —
 sweet juices of imagination.

But in fact, I haven't even touched
 you. At least, not yet.
...

Ten years on, I came searching for
war signs of the past
expecting remnants — magazine debris,
unexploded shells,
shrapnel
that mark bomb wounds.

I came looking for
ghosts —
people past, skeletons charred,
abandoned
brick-wood-cement
that once housed them.

I could only find whispers —
whispers among the clamour
of a small town outpost
in full throttle —
everyday chores
sketching outward signs
of normality and life.

In that bustle
I spot war-lines of a decade ago,
though the storylines
are kept buried, wrapped
in old newsprint.

There is order amid uneasiness —
the muezzin's cry,
the monk's chant —
baritones
merging in their separateness.

At the bus station
black coughs of exhaust
smoke-screens everything.
The roads meet
and after the crossroad ritual
diverge,
skating along the undotted lines
of control.
A porous garland
with cracked beads
adorns Tiger Hill.
Beyond the mountains
are dark memories,
and beyond them
no one knows,
and beyond them
no one wants to know.

Even the flight of birds
that wing over their crests
don't know which feathers to down.
Chameleon-like
they fly, tracing perfect parabolas.

I look up
and calculate their exact arc
and find instead, a flawed theorem.
...

  1

A bright red boat
Yellow capsicums

Blue fishing nets
Ochre fort walls

  2

Sahar's silk blouse
gold and sheer

Her dark black
kohl-lined lashes

  3

A street child's
brown fists

holding the rainbow
in his small grasp

  4

My lost memory
white and frozen

now melts colour
ready to refract
...

The heavy drunken aroma
of fresh guavas
is too sweet for me to bear.

Instead, I drink its nectar
not as liquid-pulp
but as raw unsmooth fruit.

I bite its light-green rough skin
the way I used to
approach a sugarcane stalk

as a child
crunching every fibre
to extract their juice.

There are memories—
memories attached to food
and their consumption.

There are memories
about the rituals of intake—
how certain foods

are allowed or disallowed
depending on God's stance
and their place

in the lofty hierarchies
they create.
How misplaced these stations

are—God, Emperor, Man
all mistaken—proud errors
of selfhood, status, and ego.

Even under prayer's veil,
there is something about
eating guavas with unwashed

hands, tasting its taste before
masala, lemon and rock-salt
turn them into sprightly salad—

seed's bone-crack intentions
slip, cloaked—
buried before they fruit.
...

I meticulously stitch time through the embroidered sky,
through its unpredictable lumps and hollows. I

am going home once again from another
home, escaping the weave of reality into another

one, one that gently reminds and stalls
to confirm: my body is the step-son of my soul.

But what talk of soul and skin
in this day and age, such ephemeral things

that cross-weaves blood and breath
into clotted zones of true escape.

What talk of flight time and flying
when real flights of fancy are crying

to stay buoyant unpredictably in mid-air
amid pain, peace, and belief: just like thin air

sketches, where another home is built
in free space vacuum, as another patchwork quilt

is quietly wrapped around, gently, in memoriam.
...

she has no english;
her lips round / in a moan ….
calligraphy of veins ….
— Merlinda Bobis, ‘first night'

My syntax, tightly-wrought—
I struggle to let go,
to let go of its formality,
of my wishbone
desiring juice — its deep marrow,
muscle, and skin.

The sentence finally pronounced —

I am greedy for long drawn-
out vowels, for consonants that
desire lust, tissue, grey-cells.
I am hungry for love,
for pleasure, for flight,

for a story essaying endlessly—words.
A comma decides to pr[e]oposition
a full-stop … ellipses pause, to reflect—
a phrase decides not to reveal
her thoughts after all—ellipses and
semi-colons are strange bed-fellows.

Calligraphy of veins and words
require ink, the ink of breath,
of blood—corpuscles speeding
faster than the loop of serifs …
the unresolved story of our lives
in a fast train without terminals.

I long only for italicised ellipses …
my english is the other, the other
is really english — she has no english;
her lips round / in a moan ….
her narrative grammar-drenched,
silent, rich, etched letters of glass.
...

You carelessly tossed
the jacket on a chair.
The assembly of cloth
collapsed in slow motion
into a heap of cotton —
cotton freshly picked
from the fields —
like flesh
without a spine.
The chair's wooden
frame provided a brief
skeleton,
but it wasn't enough
to renew the coat's
shape, the body's
prior strength,
or the muscle
to hold its own.
When one peels off
one's outer skin,
it is difficult
to hide
the true nature of
blood.
Wood, wool, stitches,
and joints —
an epitaph
of a cardplayer's
shuffle,
and the history
of my dark faith.
...

(for psc)

Birds fly across the pale blue sky
cross-stitching a matrix in Pali—

a tongue now beautifully classical
like temple-toned Bharatanatyam.

Dialogues in the other garden
happen not just in springtime. Yet

you stare askance talking poetry
in silence, an angularity of stance

like a shot in a film-noir narrative
yet to be edited down to a whole.

What is a whole? Is it not a sum
of distilled parts, parts one chooses

to expose carefully like raw stock—
controlling patterns in the red light

of dark, a dark that dutifully dissolves.
There emerges at the end,

nests for imaginative flights to rest,
to weave our own stories braving

winds, currents, and the elements
of disguise. Fireflies in the grove

do not belong to numbered generation—
they only light up because line-breaks

like varnam keep purity alive—
enigmatic, disciplined, spontaneous.

Let the birds fly tracing angular paths,
let the dancer dance unbridled,

let the poet write unrestrained—
natural as breathing itself.

Matrix woven can be unwoven—
enjambments like invisible pauses

weave us back into algebraic patterns
that only heart and imagination can.

She walks porcupines—as you do—and
listens to the sound of the sea in a conch.
...