The Ailing Poem
Everyone who has read my poems
Has at least once or many times asked me
If something is wrong with me, my mind, life, body,
And it's saddening how my poems have made my mother
Feel bad about herself because she thinks
It's her fault, her incompetence,
That has made my life miserable.
But none of them remember what I answered
When they asked what is wrong,
I said - nothing, it's just that I love my poems
As much as I love graveyards,
Something must have died in here.
My poetry stands just how a haunted house does,
Something must be screaming in here.
My poems are so torn, scattered but alive,
Just how my mind is .
And you must believe , you must ,
Nothing is wrong with me .
It's just that I believe in my poems
As much as I believe love ,
Something must be painful here .
A Tired Therapist Friend
Do not mistake me for a home
You can come back to and rest,
Neither think of my smile as a comfort zone
Or my lap as a happy space.
I am all about crowded roads, pending assignments
And murderous headaches.
I'm a strained puddle in a jammed bus on deadly summers
And a cranky customer bargaining for high price of onions.
I am the shocking electricity bills
And spelling mistakes of a literature student.
I am the never-enough second girl
And an embarrassing mess in front of the professors.
I am the never-ending line of rail ticket counters
I'm the dark circles and a lover of Insomnia.
I'm no meditative piano but all shouts to catch a taxi,
I'm no kind angel but a psychotic massacre
Wanting to kill the world.
I'm not your mother's lap, I'm all the tears my mother has shed,
I'm not your old lover's shoulders, I'm a loveless desert.
I am not your unpaid therapist, I'm all unsaid trauma,
Swallowed up pain that my family considers a made up drama.
Do not expect me to make your day better with wise words ,
I'm all a blank state of nothingness
Moving on and on , only wishing to stop
Like a dead baby unborn
But free
From a world where the first thing it had to do
Was cry and bawl .
A Love Poem to Poetry
The morning after I cried all night felt like a rebirth,
Like a deep dunk in an ocean of reality
And the crashing waves of the bitter truths
Hurt me no more,
I let it wash me away to anywhere but here.
Here is a place so gray, so dead
Where friendships must come with benefits
And love must come with conditions,
Where love letters are called obscene
And poetry is a luxury for people with too much time.
Here is a place where we name people with their flaws
It's always
The "lame" man, the "fat" woman, the" dumb" child
And never
The "kind" man, the "friendly" woman, the "funny" child.
Here is the graveyard of art,
A place where we burn beauty to talk about the ugliness.
Acceptance is one thing, meanness is another
So when we call the world ugly
It's probably us with the ugly minds,
And this death of art rips me apart.
I cried mourning the loss and this morning
Took my quill, dug the grave
And took poetry into my arms.
I embraced it.
This morning I wrote a poem
For poetry
For art.
Moumita Bhattacharjee is a student of English Literature and an explorer of poetry. She aspires to express her voice through poetry someday and make it her identity.
Three Poems by Moumita Bhattacharjee