PULLING HEART STRINGS
-
Nandini Sahu (India)
Making you the resolution of life, I am
clueless now
about my own sense of the word ‘purpose’.
If I think anything at all, the thoughts are
just on matters of the heart.
Isn’t it fascinating to paradigm the
character of a woman
who has no life beyond? The theory of this
poem is—
I have presented my life to you. Presenting
the elemental woman
to the man who is he-knows-what-he-is! Though
this must be ‘normal’ in some world
elsewhere. ‘Me’ in this story
is a missing female character on days of your
choice—given subjectivity.
I disappear without a trace, you see!
Of late I am too interested in missing
characters.
I find myself as in a soliloquy, talking
aloud!
“Look! Look at yourself looking at Whatsapp,
social media and
at that house-dress he left in your wardrobe,
and his half-finished Beer
in your portico, and look at the right side
of your bed!
Look at the plates he likes to eat in or the
glasses he likes to drink in.
Look at your slightly swollen under eyes and
the nose-pin or
the dot on your forehead. Look how some lives
are a prolongedsinch!
On missing-days, look how you experiment with
left-over food
from the refrigerator and with ill-fitting
fabrics.
Look how he prefers one disagreeable over
another disagreeable.
Look at your enviable profession, the fine
books that you yield,
and your manicured neat hands, remembering
some other obnoxious.
Look how freakily free he is, living multiple
lives!
Look how he is having two strong legs and yet
a Merman’s tail too—
he is actually having it all!” Except that I
pretend unhappy, but am content
and you are not, yet you envisage to be
gratified.
You have given me a critique of seclusion,
this is melancholy
rather than depression. Sadness rather than
despair.
I no more weep alone in the kitchen on
missing-days
and no longer put up a social face.
I make-believe to be baffled by the many
lovers
who come and go through this revolving door.
I tell myself--- I have to be likeable;
well, I am exceptionally accomplished at it!
I, thus, am incredibly liked by one and all.
I apologize
my unrequited lovers for my want of wanting
them convenient.
But this is another life, like exactly what I
want.
Carrying the old playhouse inside me
all my life, very heavy though, I am willing
now to let it go.
Nay, let me stop here. What is the point of
writing a poem that makes one chuckle and
shed a tear or two!
What is the need to make heartstrings on
hand! “Look, change the mood!”
I have been very taken with this Jasmine
Itar, its erotic fragrance,
a bit of warm and harsh. I look at the
narcissism of love
pulling my heartstrings way too hard; now I
want to extinct.
****