a literary magazine.
Five poems...
Kali in the Living Room
Assaulted by an array of sounds. Blender grinding away in the kitchen. Somewhere in this concrete jungle a drill breaking the last remaining trace of humanity. In my living room, the Tamil mega serial that has had a run of over a thousand episodes has reached its peak. The aggression within the television, between the actors, has reached boiling point and the ensuing violent result would be telecast on the news tonight and in the papers tomorrow: Housewives have assumed the form of Kali, husbands across the world are brutally thrashed, dismembered and others nowhere to be found.
mega serial climax
armed with a spatula:
my mom- the destroyer
fathom
waves tumble and roll imploding within
foaming and rolling ripping and stretching
churning the blue inside out tossing spraying
invisible forces at work round the clock
makes you wonder if you thought about it
the complexity of nature and the natural world
the design and scheme of the living
makes you wonder if you ever thought about it
our purpose and the need for our existence
in essence we seem to be an anomaly
an accidental occurrence
and yet here we are
at this epoch
unable to coexist
unable to accept the terms of nature
unable to fathom
unable to evolve
unable to compromise
so fuck the stand-up comedians
the politicians and scientists
i say we go
it’s time we left
build us starships and set sail
into space and the endless void
until the world has healed
and maybe then
we could return
some us perhaps
Cancer
The path walked. The path walked again. Dawns relished. Dusks loved. The path walked day after day after day after day… Until a squirrel crashed through leaves, branches, breaking the silence of the silent walk. The squirrel lands gracefully in a horrendous spot. A place filled with a trash, ripped clothes, bins scattered, littered things. A mess. Smells of death. Nothing grew there. The soil soggy and impotent. The path walked. The path walked day after day and I had failed to see, to turn my head, to shift my gaze. All along the forest, the path I dearly walked has been suffering from cancer. Rotting from the inside. Dying slowly. All because, we failed to see. I have failed my forest. We have failed our world. They say it’s not too late and yet this feeling deep in my core tells me otherwise.
winter revelation
green turns to black
rot reigns
stay
imagine being on land all your life
and then one day the walking
becomes running for your life
running from home
from bombs and death
running from war
running from land to land
from place to place
because some politicians
decided that they would take
the world into their own hands
and mold it the way they would
and you were not part of their plan
not part of their ideals
you find yourself on a muddy shore
at low tide in the dark before dawn
shivering teeth chattering being thrown
into a boat by men who stank of fish and salt
you find yourself crammed below deck
in a room that sounds mechanical and smells of grease
and pray to god that the people here would not eat you
at the slightest hint of some maniacal fetish
night or day you cannot tell
the waves and the sound of the ocean
calms your soul the sights of the sea
and its strange inhabitants invokes some peace
you finally breathe in this dark hell
comfort finds you water seeps through the hull
dripping on your hands and feet
puddles pool and you rest easy
you can tell you belong
that night everyone is woken to the sound of sirens
and floodlight beams tracing the dark
there are shouts and screams
people struggle and some are thrown overboard
you remain quiet very still
you can see the shore
paradise they say
uniformed men usher people into crafts
but you remain onboard
you’d like to stay
with the men who stank of fish and sea
they understood your silence
Still Here
I’ve seen the moon more times during the day in the last two months (ever since the year started) than in the years before. A pearl in the day blue sky. The cosmic eye silently observing the follies of the mortal realm. More than ever, I’ve started to look up at the sky, not to look at the clouds, birds or for signs of the mad gods. I look up, squinting, undeterred by sunrays in my face, looking for the moon. The full, the half the crescent, whatever it may be, I want to see. Whatever she shows, I will take it all in, without judgment, without hesitation, I look up. The moon is here. Gallivanting nude after dawn. Full of herself. She is here. And so am I, her ardent devotee gazing at her celestial beauty. Inside my head, it is night, sky full of stars, planets and cosmic entities engaged in sexual frenzies in ivory craters, madness some might say. I would rather describe it: Lunar obsession.
naked by day
full moon
shameless spring
Bio:
Elancharan Gunasekaran is a multidisciplinary artist and poet. He has a strange love for all things poetical and Sci-Fi. A winner of the Montblanc X Esquire Six-word Story prize 2017. His latest publications are Superatomicluminal (Hesterglock Press), Gods of the Gonzo (Analog Submission Press) and The Cosmosnaut Manifesto (UndergroundBooks).