Sylvia Pastiche
Blood comes anyway to my fingernails
For writing can sometimes be worse than killing.
Father, you however wrote,
Wrote to me
Only to be cross with me.
Never wrote to me except to tell me
How I never dotted my i’s and crossed my t’s.
By you, I never did anything write
Never could perhaps become the turning tide.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
No these aren’t footsteps just kind alphabets thumping through
My soiled wooden desk
Afraid to a fault to settle down upon the wrinkled paper
To blot out the truth hammering hard (hard, hard!)
Like engorged bullets not done with the same meal.
The irreproachable night does not send me twinkling stars
Sending upward prayers is no effective barter for sound sleep
Daddy however sleeps like a graveyard
No fear of approaching nightmares or knickknacks of sullen ghouls.
In winters I kept blinking at him, watching him die for hours
It wouldn’t be so easy to call him my father
Though he did bring me up sane and sorted
Like an alert journalist who knew how much of attention was necessary for the columns he had to write in.
In sickness and in health he never failed presuming I had been sick all along
It is the heart that cares too much that steals the little life we live
He would run to me and brew me the storm himself and play rescuer
No joke no table manners but crude cavemen like caring.
My flighty mother was his Sunday snack
Only when he wasn’t preoccupied with work he ate her
And I grew tired of closing my ears over the years
Flung my senses all about the house of tombs
Quietly jumping and dragging stuff in my locked room.
©2023 Kaustabh Kashyap.
