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This is a poem.

This is a poem about a poem – about all the poems, clogged in my mind, entrapped by my mind – lurking beneath the cracks and crevices of my mind – incessantly toiling – to come out and see the light of this laptop screen

This poem is not long or profound, no redundant rhetorics, no mindless metaphors, no meanings of no words masked and hidden by ambiguous euphemisms – and thus – this poem is not beautiful

This poem is not beautiful because my understanding of beautiful has been stumped – again and again by the overwhelming tumult of this – world which is subjective, but also surreal; constantly establishing, but also subversive; breathlessly questioning everything, post-reality, post-finality, post-totality, post-truth

This poem, is however the truth – mine

This poem is about how my father died, and left me with only his death to write about

This poem is about how my chest broke open after his death, letting the illness of the world seep in and fill up my entire heart – with nothing

—      stealing my language, my words, my parts of speech, my urge to personify my lover as the wind             in the lonely road I walked on last week- all that is beautiful, all that is poetry

This poem is about Sertraline – that I consume every afternoon at exactly 2 PM after lunch – three sips of water to gulp it down – three sips and all my poetry escapes me

[if the cure for illness means existing with an opaque mind – like I am standing smack in the middle of an field open on all four sides – but paralyzed; then I might as well be ill, ill and insane, but insane with words – words that help exist prior to my father’s death]

This poem is about the absence of poetry in my body – the silence of this absence is louder than the silence of death

This poem is my abject apology, for there might never be another –

By Amarabati Bhattacharyya