Grave Writing by Amrita Valan

Once upon a time I wrote

Ink blushed, splashing

Rushed through vital veins,

Blood flowers blossomed

Viral from wondrous pain.

Eroding silted rich clay of experience

The bones of inspiration fleshed,

Filling interstitial absent spaces.

Less a quest, mere existential crisis

A floppy quill, comatose,

After the act of

Writing.

Wispy down feather

Limp, limbic exhaustion,

Wanting to, yet never

To let go…

The howling winds pine,

How I nearly lost my spine

Scratching out scary lines

Blunt ghost tines that kept

Together forks of my destiny.

I walk straight, pain sublimates,

Pain keeps indifference at bay

Makes us hunger for love.

An ethereal wind reaches

Across a vast vicarious universe

Viciously inflicting self-flagellating

Suffering. Blind and oblivious to

The wounds that leak trauma,

Tearing apart matrices

Maya and Reality torment

Each other

Fabric of time and space

Dip and bob

Gravity gives way.

Something beyond nothing

The wounded neurons keen.

Has to be and yet,

Balm for braving the gap

Seep in stills of your sorrow.

Steeped in ruthless courage.

Daunting taunts of predestination

Nihilism of futile causation.

When effects are irrelevant 

What is constant?

Causality flirts with

Casual chance.

The existential dilemma

Of life’s dance.

Once upon a write,

Hallowed Shabbat

All Poets mass,

A witchy holy rite.

Retell your fairy tales

The favourite heroic epics

Mine was Jeanne D’Arc

Read in her burning gaze

The questioning

Heretic at stake.

Alas thinkers

Galileo Copernicus

Brave writer, write

For those who fight.

From prophetic wilderness

From Job’s virulence

From second death.

Resurrect the page,

The poignant pause

Of journey

Towards our tombstones,

Readers, your significatory sigh

Bids headless sad ghosts goodbye

The rattling skeletal cage of the

Gallant dead men walking

Challenge our age.

Questioners

Among us,

Scribe adieu to erasure.

Even banal epitaphs

Hold such holy grails.

The ink is grave. Surreal.

Grave writing is poet’s prophetic art,

Solitary grace of the wanton maddened heart.