}} The Unbearable Tyranny of Not Knowing |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










The Unbearable Tyranny of Not Knowing

Then one day a young man,

just married, clean shaven

returns home

built by his father’s sweat and cunning

climbs a chair,

dismantles a fan off an iron hook on the ceiling,

slips a rope through an old spring scale

with the cold precise hands of a surgeon

tugging at the nylon to measure the load tension,

dips a handkerchief into a bottle of chloroform

his head is a cloud of sleep.

 
In the time of the jade green river

when it took all his might to haul that beautiful beast-

its gold-sliver scales blinding his eyes.

Cries of joy mingle with the sweat, sun and salt of youth

a bronze body splaying the cool waters

to gather in the abundance of his arms

a thirty pound mahseer.

Its tail swinging and slapping wildly in the air,

clinging for survival in a fleeting world

even as life ejaculates from its enormous mouth.
 

A shard of light breaks through the window

his faint blue veins pulsating under a porcelain chin

above a grey shirt.

A photo frame on the mantelpiece

is turned sideways as if to avert

the three of them freeze-framed in his bulging eyes.

Here now with a broken smile, jammed fists

a half bitten tongue that mocks you

as if to say something but won’t

because you will read him wrong again.

 
This long night wet with the slime of fear,

you try to clutch onto anything

your palms drenched from holding your face.

The coming days will melt us all into islands.

The unbearable tyranny of not knowing

will crush your hands with roses.

Nothing you hold will ever have meaning-

so mark your footsteps with ash

and burn all your broken things

burn them without a word.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Note: Sikkim has one of the highest rates of suicides in India. In the last statistics of 2012 it has edged out Pondicherry and is second only to Maharashtra.
 
 
 
← Guru T. Ladakhi