404
Clock in.
Your shift starts at the loading screen.
Enter your password. Try again. Try again.
Verification failed. Are you a robot?
The coffee machine is broken.
The girl at the register mouths “help me” between smiles.
The manager doesn’t blink.
The lights flicker like Morse code for escape.
Clock out.
Sync your exhaustion to the cloud.
Your body is a pop-up ad for efficiency,
your dreams buffering in the background.
Rent is due.
Click “Agree” to the Terms & Conditions of survival.
You are not a person, you are a productivity metric.
A warm body in a cold algorithm.
Clock in
Try again.
Try again.
Try again.
The History Teacher’s Hands
Chalk-dust fingers tap the desk—
“1857,” he says, “Revolt or Mutiny?”
Outside, kites wrestle the wind,
boys chase them down with dust on their ankles.
On the board, a map—
Countries and borders,
borders drawn and redrawn.
He rubs a word clean with his sleeve.
I look at his hands—
they shake, slightly,
like history does when touched too much.
The Fields I Once Knew
I remember the smell of the mustard fields,
golden tides bending to a winter breeze,
the rustle of the paddy,
its soft, dry murmur against the bare feet of those who walked.
Back then, the earth smelled rich—
of rain, of wet soil, of life.
Now it reeks of tar and forgotten roots.
There was a pond, clear as polished glass,
its edges fringed with tall grasses
where dragonflies hovered like tiny sentinels.
We’d sit by the banks, knees in the dirt,
skipping stones into its stillness,
counting the circles they left behind.
Today, the pond is no more—
filled and paved,
its surface buried under bricks and plans.
Even the seasons have lost their rhythm.
Summers once ripened mangoes on trees,
their fragrance wafting through open windows.
Now the sun burns too hot, too long,
and the mangoes fall too soon.
The monsoons, once steady,
arrive unbidden—angry, fleeting.
Their rains neither soothe the soil nor fill the wells.
The wind used to carry tales—
of far-off hills,
of rustling bamboo groves,
of nights when jackals howled in the dark.
Now, it carries clamor—
machines, horns,
and the endless chatter of men in a hurry.
But sometimes, a scent—
of wet earth after a sudden drizzle,
or the soft cry of a koel at dawn—
takes me back.
And for a moment, the fields return,
the pond ripples,
and the earth feels alive again.
POEM AS MONSOON YEAR
We drown in the floods, year after year.
First the streets, then the schools, then the houses built on borrowed
time.
Every year, they say it will be better.
Every year, the floodwater learns a new way to enter.
The chief minister arrives in a boat.
The reporters kneel in ankle-deep tragedy.
The relief packets float towards a headline.
Someone’s grandmother is carried out like an offering.
Someone’s daughter cannot find dry ground to bleed on.
The sky holds its breath.
It will rain again tomorrow.
Metropolis
Streets throb under sodium haze—
gray veins, iron-rushed, stitched tight in asphalt,
lights like pulses caught in concrete’s gaze,
rust eating the corners where cables halt.
Somewhere, brick hums a fevered tune—
steel chords snapping against the night,
cranes angle above, tugging stars down,
clawing cities from sand and spite.
And from these edges, people bleed in—
mapped paths pressed flat beneath glass bones,
their shadows lost, fed to the grid’s skin
where time scrapes loose, memory drones.
Underfoot, the gears grind slow, pull tight—
each rivet a minute, each hour a screech.
We’ve wrapped the earth in barbed wire light,
its steel ribs bending in our reach.
Yet in these walls, in the metal’s strain,
a rhythm persists, tense, yet humming deep—
a beat, alive and relentless, sane—
that pulls us closer, through wires and sleep.
Museum of Dust
Behind a door that hasn’t moved in years,
the air is thick and smells like paper rotting.
Shelves hold objects nobody remembers,
a glove turned hard, a spoon that’s lost its shine.
A cracked lens tilts on its edge,
glass clouded with grease from hands long gone.
A cocoon, dry as a dead leaf,
sticks to the corner of a frame hung crooked.
The clock on the wall has no hands;
its face is blank, like it forgot how to measure time.
Books slump on the floor, their words dissolved,
and the walls seem to breathe in their absence.
Dust doesn’t settle here; it moves—
a quiet swarm rising when nobody’s looking,
curling through the cracks,
erasing what’s left.
Stratum
I buried the voice beneath the earth—
not to keep, but to stifle,
roots entangled in red clay,
stone left to ferment in the heat,
while the sun slashes the world clean,
as if bone were a blade.
That was the plan, or so I told myself—
yet the mouth breathes, ragged, soft.
Below the surface, thoughts bruise and darken,
bleed into sand, calcifying the melody.
Beneath my feet, its breath unfurls—
sharp fingers tear through shale, devour quartz,
pierce the arteries of the earth, snap its spine—
a language starved, yet coiled
in grit, each grain a tremor.
Tremors speak and we sway toward them.
With each shift, another fracture splits;
I feel it clawing at the grit below,
dragging fault, bending fault.
This depth wasn’t made for holding, I know—
but the voice presses in, seeping out,
rising to the surface, claiming
the soil cracks beneath my weight,
its syllables raw, metallic, tasting of copper.
The Last Cigarette
It’s always the last cigarette
that feels the heaviest—
as if the smoke rising from it
could reach the places you’ve tried to forget.
You light it,
watch the fire flicker
and die,
its orange glow, a warning
you’ve ignored too many times before.
Some nights,
it’s the taste of ash in your mouth
that makes you remember
things you didn’t want to remember.
They say it’s the silence that kills,
but it’s the things unsaid
that weigh down the air—
the pause before a door slams,
the look that lasts a moment too long,
the way she said your name
like it was both a question
and an answer.
You try to remember
if it always felt this way,
if every word was a weight
and every touch a goodbye
The cigarette burns down,
its ember crawling toward your fingertips
like a last-minute confession.
You pull it away,
drop it into the ashtray,
watch it fizzle out
with the sound of something
breaking just beneath the surface.
You press your hand to your chest
and wonder if you’ve lost something
you never even had.
There’s nothing left to smoke,
but the smoke stays—
its bitterness,
its promise
that it will always be there
for the next time
you need to burn something down.
The Chair
I remember the chair,
how it sat in the corner by the window,
where the light always seemed to fall just right.
It was a simple chair, wooden, with arms
that had been worn down over the years.
Some nights, I would sit there for hours,
watching the moon rise,
feeling the cold settle into my bones
as if the night itself were trying to tell me something.
But those nights are gone now,
like everything else that slips through our hands.
It wasn’t always empty.
There was a time when someone sat there,
when the chair creaked under the weight of a body
that was more than just flesh,
a body that held stories in its bones,
a body that laughed when the world didn’t seem funny.
But even the most stubborn of stories fade,
and the chair,
like all the things we think will last forever,
was left behind.
I still remember the way the chair smelled—
old wood, of dust,
and something else, something that wasn’t quite right.
The smell of things trying to remember
what they were before they were lost.
I never moved the chair.
It stayed there, in the corner,
because if I moved it,
I’d have to admit that it wasn’t coming back,
that the stories I used to tell myself
about how things would be
weren’t true.
So, the chair stayed,
as a reminder of what had been
and what would never be again.
There are still nights when I catch myself
looking at that chair,
as if, for a moment, I might see someone there,
just sitting, staring out the window
like they used to.
But the chair is always empty.
And the silence that fills the room
is louder than anything I can say.
It’s funny, how something as simple as a chair
can carry so much.
How, for years, it stood as a witness
to all that we were,
and all that we couldn’t hold onto.
And now, all that remains
is the shape it leaves in the air.
About the Poet:
Aman Alam is an English Major at Jadavpur University passionate about literature, history
and cricket. He enjoys writing poetry, and his works have been published in various journals.