Every time I sneeze
Within and beyond
My morning allergies,
I feel like I am losing
A little piece of me.
Every time I cough
And irritate my palate
Irascibly rough,
I wonder when it’s going
To be enough.
Every time my sinuses
Swell up and clog
My passages,
Only time can soothe
The intractable ravages.
For pain is pain
And itch is itch –
Sharp or dull or faint – as such,
When all weapons fail,
The touch
Of familiarity
Becomes the de facto
Crutch.
– Akanksha Gupta
Could I wait forever
Watching them drown
Holding in tight
Our smiles, our frowns
Pain sets in deep
Rises with the sun
Beams on the lips
Slides off the tongue
Days slip by nights
Edges blur with cries
Shadows dim and dig
The corners of my eyes
Mirror stands still
To the ravages of fear
That I untiringly wipe
With hope and with succor
Should I wait forever
Time will play my hand
Slipping past my fingers
Clouds, rivers, sands
– Akanksha Gupta
I can breathe,
But with each breath
Unease
Sweeps through
Guts twist and churn,
Conscious thrums the chest
Off beat
At every turn
When empty,
Hunger gnaws
With claws
That painfully feed
When bloated,
Even the rot of despair
Clots
To never weep
And when breathless,
Though gusts of air
Flail piteously
I can still breathe
I can always breathe
But the still in the air
Waylays the mind
Distills the spirits
Consumes the soul
Dreary dispassion
Threatens
To possess
The body whole
Eventually, it weaves
A frighteningly hypnotic trance
That grips the unwitting senses
In its maddeningly deathless dance
– Akanksha Gupta
Dip into History
Etched onto every crenulation
On either side of Ganga’s might,
A relic of truth - a piece of history
Mired in faith and legend and mystery
Resides; quietly, contently, reverently
Burning day and night fervently
Cremation
Waters brim with the black of night
Still with the cold of death
Weep endless ashes and dust, and yet
Echo the warmth of undying embers
All reflective, quiet, solemn faced
Sailing past Harishchandra, Manikarnika Ghats
Reverent and disquieted in equal parts
Sandhya Aarti
Melted drops of a long-gone sun
Burn the wick of every prayer
On the ghats
On the boats swarming the ghats
Mesmerising chants of song and dance
Fill the air
Breath mingles with oil and incense
Headiness of lights and sounds and scents
Harmony of Dasashwamedh and Ganga
Symphony of souls swept into an orchestra
Of carefree precision, of piety
Intoxicated with sobriety
As time crescendoes;
Halts to a moment,
Ensnares,
Dusk darkening, night lightening,
Heart tightening,
I wonder how aarti at dawn compares
– Akanksha Gupta
Faith pours artistry into simple words
Conviction cauterises the beginnings of doubt
Wisdom lends belief to the beholder
Goosebumps brush tingles inside out
Richness of history delights the senses
Depth of knowledge astounds
Stories impress the spirit with wonders
Unearthed from ancient grounds
Wellsprings of sounds bloom in the chest
Rushing of conscious shuffles closer to mind
Peace combs through a restless strength
And waters the soul with wealth beyond time
– Akanksha Gupta
It’s never gleamed tears of sweet delight
Mess of scars beneath my dreams
Twilight draws curtains close
Darkness sweeps in at the seams
Mere memory of your canny smile
Chokes and charms the cheeks of time
Pink blush splutters graciously
Gold flecks more and more my eyes
My sanity spirals in and out
Churning oceans deep and wide
Yet tethered to my many blues
I feel no dread pull at the tide
- Akanksha Gupta
I am what I am Exactly the way I am Varnished, unvarnished, Tarnished by tide I gleam in the morrow Swim in the today The night is nigh Tomorrow is another day And unlike yourself You might find me staid But I am happy to keep up With me at my own pace The race never dies Fatigue sets in sometimes And I kip in the boulevard Of my mind There right across the corner Between sun-kissed trees Where the hammock stretches Oh so invitingly I lie in thought In waking dream And knock upon my reveries You knock upon my reveries I curl, and sigh And squeeze shut my eyes But the reel escapes My memory I groan and rise You needn’t knock twice Tomorrow has come I know Life beckons only once
– Akanksha Gupta
I haven’t rested in a while
Frozen in the expression of lassitude
Daunted by thoughts of endless toil
That occupy my solitude
A joyless haze of laissez-faire
Has settled so deep within my sinews
That a fledgling thought of raison d’être
Sends me hurtling down the icy blues
I now muse in silent interludes
The what-ifs have all but passed me by
And yet, for idle thoughts are idle not,
A weary passenger can still try
– Akanksha Gupta (poem)
I watch
A miasma of brush strokes
Trailing over
The canvas of life –
Dull, bright, warm, sharp
Their watermarks
Evade the sight
But those that loiter
I notice
The crinkly lines
That embellish their every stroke –
Bold, rugged, shy, sleek
Impressions that time erodes
But those that linger
I remember
The dots and crosses
That stagger each line
Big, small, subtle, sublime,
An expression that holds
The redolence of time –
A taste of vintage memories
That swarm
With an ageless, decadent grace
Yet ultimately
When everything fades
Period and pause
Everything fades
They say
Life is funny that way
– Akanksha Gupta
The apparent imperfections of life
Appear as lesions marring its skin,
Imperfectly veiling the deep wounds
Rupturing the will within.
What paraffin can then suffice
As fire for ice when ice afire,
What liquid strength can hold and embolden
When those icy cracks are clogged sepulchres dire.
And yet through them –
Through the little cracks in our souls –
We want warmth to seep in; to seep into
Each cut ‘n every fold
The warmth of recognition
Of acknowledgment of our existence
Of sustenance of our rights;
The warmth of appreciation
Of admissions of our successes
Yet omissions of our strife.
But those moments and that age
When we used to yearn for them
Have long passed our doorstep,
Leaving in their wake
Fractures –
Untended and unchecked
At the root of which lies
A quiet and visceral need,
For a tincture of the warmth of celebration
Of each moment of the life we lead,
Henceforth, to seep in; leaving
Each cleft-end to the other cleaved.
– Akanksha Gupta
Life is a story
If mine, I’m the main character
I’m the best actor you can find
In a pool of daydreaming narcissists
The rest are sheep; everyone that is
The occasional leader that pops up is not excluded
Though being a political animal,
He hadn’t even been included
But then I’m an idealist
Who picks apart the black and the white
I am also a cynic
Who caresses the gray left behind
But really, I’m a pacifist
Too concerned about my lazy behind
To actually pick up the chalk
But on the occasion that I do
I fill the canvas of my mind
With a cartload of chalk dust
And find beauty in the abstraction
The reality, however, causes an infraction
A world that never existed, shatters soundlessly
I feel free for a while
Without any labels, self-perceptions
Or impressions of any kind
Tis an alluring experientialism
In which I find freshness and novelty
And drown deep into it
Until the need to breathe supersedes
So I shoot up to the surface
And gulp lungsful of perceptions greedily
Some unaltered, some modified
And to study them
I dive
Back into the pool of daydreaming narcissists
This oscillation between radical worlds
Makes me teeter at the edge of normalcy
A piece of sanity dislodges itself
And pours uninterred into poetry
So do I call myself a poet now?
I suppose
It has taken years of writing
To gain confidence enough
To label myself
They say labels are empowering
Powerful and powerfully flattering
I say they are downright frightening
The standards they define
Mutate the potential
Garble the mind
Gradually I find myself
Changing my perception of me
A change should be welcome
But I find myself swimming
In a pool of doubts
Barely staying afloat
There are days I’m flailing
And those when I’m sailing
But I know I’m failing to hold onto an identity
At this interlude
You do recall
This is but a story of my life
And I, the lead actor
And thus, it is no wonder
That the plot does often twist
Into self-gratifying theatrics
Where victimizing myself
With labels
Gives the story
As though a drug-induced high
Whose hangover leaves me
Feeling like an unsung hero
But when you peel the layers off of me
My core is like everyone else; ordinary
By Akanksha Gupta
The Pluming PoeTree 