Poems | Saurav Roy

Banaras

Grand images
Cows and carts
And dug up roads

Dried up kunds
Locked in land
Coffers and coffins
And ghats

Burning and raging
Spitting pyres
Gold diggers avenged
Cracked skulls and embers
Worth million years

Seats of skins
And luggage
Of dead stinking rotting
Bleak remains of the once bleating
Thrown down at the thrown downs
Two dead men
Once knew themselves as living and now through the bent and crooked alleys
Looking for strength and sorrow at light poles and south of the spitting pyres along castles of burning wood and abandoned castles of time

Cows and dogs and drunk men pissing in silence
Into the salvation spot go streams of jizz



Cheese and Peanut Butter Toasties

Six pieces and six bodies
On red and gold and four
shoulders chanting and bidding
goodbyes

Through the houses and tea stalls
dead men through the stalls, caged, selling spurious concoctions
okayed by the residents and the dogs and crows

Dead men meeting other dead men
in a human traffic jam
narrow alleys, sweating men
and cold dead bodies on red and gold and four
while i gulp hot tea underground
watching wide eyed at
the clergy of Death



Going to Kashi!

Careful on the way
Grace be with you
There are thugs and thieves and pairs
Of golden swords and wretched sands

Three weeks of hustling
On corridors devoid of dust and flourishing away
From the vortex of a city we live in

Dreams and surreal wishes at tea stalls
Our only gifts – a bike a bag a bottle
And two dead men


Three Years

Against the Shining Sun
love notes and photos
folded legs and letters
with red ink of desire

Deferring dreams
daily lives

sticks and stones
silly little quips

Against the shining sun
While it lasts, laugh, Let go..