}} A mass murderer’s ghost confesses |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










A mass murderer’s ghost confesses

If you can call it living– one
intrusion after another, one
invasion after another.
Excelling at carnage.
Excelsior.

Always the peaks of evil
rose higher, and I couldn’t
stop climbing, yet at last
killing bored me so much,
my execution was a mercy.

The pull of earth at my heels
was no punishment when I considered
the terrifying everyday with its banal

tyrannies:
substance, granularity, weight.
Weariness had made me dense.
To bear the heft of my self

was hard. To hang
by the neck was easy.
To die was to be light:

the wordlessness that births songs,
the void from which colours spring
the smoky mask that spews substance
the tree that rustles rhythms
silence with its private logic.

My present state is welcome,
more transparent than a glass
more insubstantial than a whisper
more harmless than a shadow:

when my fingers grasp things
not even air yields.
Imagine my relief:
I am incapable
of evil
which I long for
desperately.
 
 
 
← Suhit Kelkar