Gaurav Haloi
Those days are gone.
Am I troubled spirit, intoxicated like pope fingers on dead Galileo?
Those thoughts are tabloid words.
Am I burning trailer, biopsied by the tree and the noose?
Those free hands, they belong to the painter in the painting,
painting me and you, nobodies,
otherwise painters in some universe.
A polaroid on the wall, a sunny black sentence that never ended,
a self portrait of yesterday.
I can still recall that day.
Father drove through the gates with a trophy.
An Underwood for the writer in the family, with little apprehension.
It was a vortex into neo realism, my realism, unreal and story like.
It was a good friend for what seemed like a long time
until the tears stopped.
The telling wasn’t the same anymore.
Words were sober men boning whores.
It was beautiful but distant.
The Earth from the moon, a blue stonehenge
No sillage for a dopamine rush, no intimacy for a nightcap conversation.
All those grand plans for nobody were suddenly true.
The polaroid was the family minus dad because dad was the only one who knew how to bug the
shutter.
Time was a toddler falling asleep, everyone huddled around me and our trophy, time fell asleep.
There was the black and white photograph on the wall, and below it,
remnants of the trophy typewriter I bedded for a short while.
There were the shards, millions,
as if they fell out of every story I couldn’t tell.
Those unfinished character sketches coming back for vindication in a post apocalyptic, dystopian,
sans typewriter world.
What am I doing here?
What was I doing here?
Those days are gone.
Am I troubled spirit, intoxicated like pope fingers on dead Galileo?
Those thoughts are tabloid words.
Am I burning trailer, biopsied by the tree and the noose?
Life is elsewhere.
The orb in the noose was a portal.
Life is somewhere.
The orb in the ocean, blue green, was never mine.
And the typewriter,
the typewriter was baby shoes,
never worn, for sale.