Better than Straight Lines to Life

(image for illustration purpose only. Image courtesy net)

How does my death come, I do not know

(All poems that are meant to go wrong

Perhaps start with invoking death.)

I would like to do die seeing snow

Falling into the wintry white nights

Where birds sing songs of redemption.

If not, eating dried meat and sipping vodka

Near a dim lantern light, like a Russian character.

Perhaps, I would like to die like Hamlet

Who keeps chanting ‘to be or not to be’

Or else like Ravi who was bitten by a snake;

But I am not sure about any of these deaths.

Death could come by anything else

So mundane like a stray bullet

Or by pellets that make designs of darkness

And blood in eyes and raw flesh.

Death could be by severing tongues

And fingers, one by one.

It could happen while four men

Hold you like a hammock and the rest

Beat you into pulp; broken bones and teeth

You could die rotten in dungeons

Carrying the burden of being an anti-nationalist.

You could invite death by writing

You just need to write.

It would come by motor bikes.

It would knock at your door

Instead of a good morning or a packet of milk

It would simply pump a couple of bullets into your chest

At times, it could come to you

When you are in a jogging track.

Death is a great tempter

It could help you prepare your own gallows

If not, it would help you to severe

Your own tongues and fingers.

It gives fire to torch your library

And lead you gloriously into that pyre.

Death could come at any time

That is a sort of surety

But today it is a deed signed and sealed

‘Shut the fuck up’, says death, ‘if you want to live’

I do not have any weapon to fight death

However, I wield the whip against the

Wholesalers of death, sometimes stones

And some other times words and tears.

It is better to have the curves of words to death

Than to live the life in a prescribed straight line.