SICK LIT MAGAZINE

Stars and struggles of love

The little cosmos inside you

had died a million deaths, and

like big bang

you’ve woken up from the comatose

hands that surrounded you.

Sex felt like a cage.

The body ached hence and forth on

a dying afternoon. The verandah

stood still, like the city

with yellow cabs and

a blackhole of

love.

Blood

on the floor, inside, outside you.

I was just a soul; a lost balloon

wandering across. You were

the blade on my vein, kissing.

Promising me utopia.

We both lost, but the

stories remained. Dogeared memories

quagmired into lullabies. Unshaped

forms of existence

ventured into nothingness

to become someone else’s

elysium.

Dopamine

Hello, are you

the one? The drug-filled psychedelia

runs amock in the kid lying on the station benches.

Because death is a bliss for him.

Hunger is but another mate.

Pain another

passion.

The little streetbulbs twinkle on

a pitch black suburban night

like long lost dreams saying

goodbye. Hello, are you

the one?

We are soulless husks

swaying to and fro – like the

mindless boats floating across

a grey river. Our entities are ever

depressing, ever scampering,

ever so never fulfilled.

Like that station with fifteen platforms

and five million crushed

destinies, we are playing on a loop. Hello,

are you

the one?

Bukowski, and the dog-eat-dog world

Universities filled with fire, and

student’s hearts with napalm.

Outside, eerie protests sparking day and night,

waiting for an explosion. There’s no blood in sight,

yet there’s gore everywhere.

Masks of happiness and facades of

anger is being shown in television

like soap opera. The local dialect

is a cache of bullets, the casteism

a burning weapon of mass

destruction.

The Himalayas is silent tonight. ’tis a year

since it has rained thunder on the

humans and spared none, but now

it laughs at the darkness

that spreads the valleys. For a purge

is about to commence; Bukowski’s love poems

are propaganda posters to freedom here,

speaking in languages unknown yet

familiar, marked in bullseye,

covered in venom.

A war is being fought inside our minds

and a plague dominates our physique with

its brutish will. We are waiting for a spark,

inside the walls of the university.

***

Suvojit Banerjee is from India and the United States.

He started writing early, but found his niche in his early twenties. His works have been published in many Indian and International journals and magazines and featured in several anthologies. He currently works in a software company, and has worked as a lead writer/reviewer for a technology website.

He observes, sometimes giving up consciousness in return. It is a dangerous thing, this silent stalking of nostalgia, but he has a maddening urge. He follows the trail, from decaying jetties to swanky corporate buildings, picking up little breadcrumbs of memories and then giving them their due place in white and yellowed out papers.

He continues to juggle between poetry and prose, not deciding on where his heart lies. May be it lies in both of them, may be in none.

Find him online at:

*Featured image provided by contributor Sara Codair*