Dream and nightmare
on the bed together
conceiving me while I
stay awake knowing-
all these shape the whole thing-
this tight house whose pane
opens to the violence in the street,
my father selling chill pills
somewhere to the nightfall minds.
Open the window,
see- my shadow leaps on the roof of a car
parked there to be vandalized by us,
bored kids, and our relief comes
in the shape of baseball bats.
Our relief is electric.
See- my shadow
instead of shattering the windscreen
lies there, on the sun-hot roof, supine,
and this is the dream part,
perhaps threaded in my DNA by my mother
while drunk, while blue, while caring
about nothing but to go through
my father’s stack of those pills.
Kushal Poddar
Illustration Rupert Loydell
Short bio-
Edited the online magazine ‘Words Surfacing’.
Authored ‘The Circus Came To My Island’ (Spare Change Press, Ohio), “A Place For Your Ghost Animals” (Ripple Effect Publishing, Colorado Springs), “Understanding The Neighborhood” (BRP, Australia), “Scratches Within” (Barbara Maat, Florida), “Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems” (BRP, Australia) and “Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems” (Hawakal Publishers, India)
Author Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/KushalTheWriter/
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe