Idiosyncrasy

I have drunk in cups of tulip petals and spoken
to trees. The air has held my plain feelings in
ferries of clouds and crossed shores. Tides of east
and west winds churn them into an amber sky.
As little by little precipitation oscillated over a wide
distance, I stared at flags little ships carried, over
the horizon. While weary schoolchildren returned,
their footsteps created rhetoric with the music within.
I sought tranquility in ends of leaf and flower petals,
Sat upon beige sands with dark patches on an island,
And blushed so the world might not know the ebbs
Even only a sound within my clay mould body contained.

The Juxtaposition of Synchrony

Often Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist”
comes to mind and i think of an
unheard symphony that emancipates
from the blind man’s fingers as he
plays the instrument. These thoughts
are a dash against backdrops when
rain falls and the sun ceaselessly beats
and love alludes phases of syntheses.
Art is deprivation of the material and
the oil on panel is daily nourishment;
yet deprivation of love is the worst. To
dip in grief till grieving leaves no more;
to grieve within wide spaces of a blue
cast, with an apparently distorted posture
if even. The gallons of cheap liquor flow
in-between settlements of the rib cage,
the place from where feelings pull their
grasps and another nautical day begets
nighttide. Blue undertones distinguish
a brown chord, to illuminate everyday
monochromes of tragic flaws, the flaw
being no flaw whatsoever in flat palettes.

psychoanalyzing

a string of clouds
tightly held
compressed
into white atoms
within a bottle
now dreams
are strange things,
especially when
you’ve been watching
cartoon shows
for eleven year olds.
you assume
a different identity
from the school days
you remember
you outshine
the rugged seventh graders
that always figured
mathematics in a way
you couldn’t quite.
problem child —
dreaming away
a possibility of life.
you laugh as you hear
your teacher’s words echo
you feel transcendence
like passages of time
are some sort of a joke
on what seemed to stretch
like eternity.

Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a GREAT scholarship awardee, pursuing her second postgraduate degree in literature in England. Her poem ‘At Dusk With the Gods’ won the Alfaaz (Kalaage) prize. She is co-founder of Parentheses Journal, a collaborative venture that straddles hybrid genres across coasts and climes.