Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










Burning Education

(contrapuntal)

The boy knows rain douses A magazine wet into tissue paper,
sun into fluid candy he loathes the knowledge of titillation
There runs a calligraphy of tenacity etched in pleasure from pain
in him – a need out of evidence and vice-versa
to prove he was once here teaching him the force of paradox :
Be it the pithiness of onionskin, the gentle flaying of a Spartan dream
the pestle God made of his elbow a bow
grinding light into dust in twilit desert shooting arrows from shaky fingers
transforming struggle to sharpen vision that uncoils
into the joy of unlearning, into a flight of watery stairs dredging up
or descending down a well’s riverine heart scooped from bottomless
throat, he never can drink enough jugs of inherited blood
to rewrite the hieroglyphics of veins writ over valleys of daughters and sons
No matter how much he reads― The rock scriptures carved by lovers state:
enlightenment remains beyond him He won’t give in
at any point now, so he learns hymns He rides the wave of fear
of grooves, trades uncertainty for sweat, lurching past wild blooming
fantasies for the tenderness of hybrid roses on the haunches
of prayer, he lifts from a smoky caravan of airy foxes that swallowed in slow burn
the ash-lipped old polaroid left overs of the dear world
of a beloved where what remains of love is blurbs
Clawing away a road’s rubble, he finds― The ores of indifference melt
evidence that is quixotic, candles that never flamed
the trampled weeds beneath his feet on the altars where meaning is made to
brew a compelling consequence― he will gesture a pantomime of simple arithmetic
nurse a heart on a tinderbox of perfumes writing down questions in inflammable ink
to improve the climate of human scent on palms that will witness his fate
in the orchard of apples spun golden if this land survives the lava of his betrayal

← Satya Dash