Dibyendu's WallScript

I lift the pen — angry, lazy, foolish friend, half-loved, half-hated, good for dreams, quick to break.   It whispers nonsense, spills fire and air, hides in its root, stops in rows, a release, a freedom unnamed.   The pen speaks for itself, no microphone, no patience, only drifting thoughts and a pride in hiding.   Some days generous, some days cruel, writing love in rose-water, forgetting the road, hearing the world’s lament.   Where is hope? Who will take me across? I lift the pen — but close the page, staring at the earth’s road, waiting for someone to know the honesty of the penman.  

The grey afternoon sank, exhausted, into the lap of dryness, and yet in the south — clouds gathered with the menace of a lover’s unspoken word. From the miles of road never walked came the beckoning — the dangerous promise of what the body had not yet tasted.   The sky blackened. Darkness pressed in on all sides. Droplets, lovers returning in layer after layer, slid down the skin of the earth, unbuttoning its blouse of dust. The clouds’ touch loosened the garment from her face — a secret pain escaped like the sigh from a long-clenched thigh.   They fled in torn directions, tears from the rim of heaven, rushing into the towns, the hollows, the open mouths of rivers. Where will they go? The lips of the loveless tremble in the wind. Channels, creeks, and waterways shuddered, the whole body of the world quickened under the whip of rain.   In the dark sari of the clouds — humanity, love, wordless power became messengers drawn by the deep plough of some mechanical passion. Lift...

From so far — a drowned world walks toward me, I lie upon it, feeling time leak through its veins. An unspeakable sea of monstrous intimacies laps at the mind, at the body, its current weightless, chill — for in memory, nothing is distinct from what we have seen or merely dreamed.   I dream of existing in untainted delight, without certainty, without the piety of science. I interrogate the blurred petals of this half-song, suspecting thirst itself is an axis around which lips, imagined, revolve.   The sky — oh, the sky will be a dark chamber, and in the pupil that stares at its own knowing-line of light the hand closes upon itself, cradling all that can be taken into the open chest’s lament.   And when they seal the coffin, or when a letter, like a sword of sunlight, rises to blind — then slowly the dark will unpeel, like the wounded blemish of a moon, like a veil that hides nothing and guards no door.   I wonder if the mournful song of this heavy earth touches him —...

The time to come has fallen asleep, caught in a deep net of dreams.   I hold the poem to my chest— that old promise from the past, those far-off days of love.   Have you forgotten? As if my thirsting heart were left in your courtyard.   The advancing days— they’ve arrived at my grave, breaking it open.   A song without language, left behind by someone— did they sing in joy? Did they dance to the rhythm of unpaid self-consolation?   If you remember, then keep it— One day I’ll bloom like a leaf on the branches of Chaitra.   When, where— the moment will slowly open, letting my existence float in the circle of life.   If you hold today’s rhythm in your chest, it will never fade, never die— that ancient season when love was all.