I have gone too far inside a dream – Poems by Animikh Patra for Villa Romana

Animikh Patra for Villa Romana Project

A Real Calling

Send me a real calling
Which summons life to send you letters

No, not a symphony, one cacophonic sound will be adequate enough
So that my entire body gets shocked and urine is stuck
I have decorated home with the feeling of being shelterless
I have seen a piece of mind coming out of my palm
I thought it to be the sunshine
But a real tree doesn’t complain against darkness
I have placed myself like a decorative show-piece in all journeys
Still there is no vacation for the road, no return to home

I think you are my last milestone, keep me in your desire
So that my partner comes back from exiled land
So that a calendar’s leaf is turned after you see a peacock

Read out to me that letter which depicts such calling

Morning

Live announcement from a nearby railway station
As if I am peeping into sex life of someone else

It’s broad daylight now
Now, nothing is like a broad daylight

In the Sound of Pigeons’ Flight

A window opens inside the brain in the sound of pigeons flying. As if the brain is itself a grand
mansion with a square inside. Some birds enter. Then I pull the horizon into my head. Marvelous
sunset now, a feather swirls in an old school room. I roam with the horizon and birds then.

I look like a genius magician
I do vanish an identity in front of public eyes

Wild Beast

I am an abandoned beast
I have eaten up half the fruit of life
Roamed in many forms through the human woods
Stripes of my body have been eroded in each mating
The drudgery of jobs has bitten me here and there like an insect
Old, gummy and blunt a beast I am.
I search for my mane in older photographs
My wildness dies down, I mix with mundane people
Not dusk, but in between day and night
A crater is still seen, where you may lose your mind

I am an abandoned beast
I decide to drop the another half of fruit into that crater

Around My Body

Around my body
Close to the door
The baritone of a singer loiters
I sense a mild smell
Something is being rotten somewhere
I couldn’t sense the fear of it
Somewhere in someone’s heart
my past-present-future is boiling up
Fear’s conscience tells me to go to dim light
Tells me, you have been living so long

as a memory of someone else

So long like a human being on the earth

I see, my organs are fear
My colour slips off from the group photograph
I see, I’ve gone for a mild walk
In front of the mirror
I cannot look into my eyes

Hilly-1

I have come to mountain in winter
And resolved the warning of an easy riddle
I see the bloom of pomegranate-cloud
Arrogance of language, its tested wings
On every hair-pin turn
Query’s irregular arm
falls from the edge

Hilly-2

I have turned down harmony. Into some mountain fog, life’s pedestal has been lost. I’ve arranged
novice drivers for those who love mountains. And debris of cars in every ridge below.
Rhododendrons have shed all blossoms. Seeing myself always outside me, I’ve carved horrible veins
of speech all over my body. They may run after you

Tales of a Fair

There is held quite a fair inside me

In this baby daylight my job is to implant only metaphors
Boyishness spills out from the tube well
Girlishness owes my indebtedness

Now, if the connecting links between them are removed
Questions bloom everywhere since morning

Where does the author live when the tale grows up?

Quite a problem has taken seat inside me
And I set a fair by telling storie

People show up in the credit book and borrow tales
The homecoming railroads rob off vendor’s grief
Grief’s children buy words, buy verbs too
If the trifles of spelling mistakes are sorted out from their shopping cart
No grief remains
And the children are happily married off

As I see the tale is growing up, I do implant readers right here

Inside a Dream

I have gone too far inside a dream
and halted in front of the house of dream

I see it is not a multicolored compact prism like poetry
Rather a palace, where life is adorned on many floors
Memory like a cat roams there and invokes smell and touch
I myself have bloomed there as a book of epic

How can I read that book?
How can I live anymore in the mortal world?
If I have entered once into the house of dream
how can I get out from inside the dream to the surface again?

I was thinking these and I saw all the matters
were drooping towards a story

So I jumped and returned
To poetry again

These Lines

Evening befalls, yet the fire in my mind is dying out
It’s going to be evening soon, yet I don’t have to become anything,

Isn’t this a wonder itself?

Weight of exaggerations have become a mountain and the evening is a bird,
who cannot perch itself on the branch of life
You too are a hillock and your shape is like a slanting consciousness
There couldn’t be any concord between us
Only the sky became bloody with the battle we played by words

Whatever I have said, all are lies, only before I escape this net
I have to write these verses like a restless fish

Animikh Patra: poet, storyteller, prose writer and translator, born in 1983 in West Bengal. He holds a Masters in English Literature from the University of Kolkata. He is the author of six collections of poems JOTODUR BOIDHO BOLI (2009), KONO EKTA NAM (2013), PATONMONER KURSI (2016), SANDEHOPROSUTO KABITAGUCHCHHO (2017), ALO DEKHAR NESHA (2018), RASTAR KONO CHHUTI NEI (2020). His poems have appeared in many literary and commercial magazines, as well as in anthologies. He has translated several contemporary Indian, Italian and Chinese poets into Bangla. and has participated in numerous collective projects in India and abroad. Together with Sanghamitra Halder he is co-founder and co-editor in chief of the bilingual literary site duniyaadaari.com, a literary magazine with which over the years The Dream Machine has established a partnership with exchanges of translations and presentations of poets and poets. For more information on the poet and the magazine see here interview in English on The Dreaming Machine website.