Bond

by Bhargab Chatterjee

Aum!
                     Where
                     ‘you’
                     Breaks
                     Into
Solid,  liquid
Air and void.
              Enormous
Data                             bank
Of  neuronic    sensations.
                          Dogmas
                          Intellect
                          Language
Form an incomplete sentence.
                            #Time & Space Co

Good Night

by Bhargab Chatterjee

When forms and colours make an impenetrable fog in the east, night is the only reality. My name is transfixed with good nights of my friends. Their fading footsteps unfold me in the abyss of midnight. My friend Sanhita strummed her guitar in the dinner. All the people cried "White Horse!" But the horseman evaporated in her satiated smile. When she departs her music turns into a glass-house in my garden; there the roots of cactus clutch all the familiar names. 

At last when I brush all the names off and come out in the street for a leisurely walk, I find a barefoot silence stalking me and whistling like a street urchin.

Stupa

by Bhargab Chatterjee

Shadows remain behind every wall  
A Brahmi inscription
Erodes through the ages.

Those picnickers
Around the railing of the stupa
Step like silhouettes
Their foot-beats echoing everywhere.
Moving down.
Smashing the hard shell      
Wanting to smell the pearl
Putting it on their palms.
Morning sun offering a cold light.

Two Roses

by Bhargab Chatterjee

I hope to know you again.
I do hope
because every flower starts glowing
being withered.
Who walked
between the rose of yesterday
and the rose of this morning?
Spines are the stony steps
to the caves of Altamira.
The bones could have been beemed
with the mellow light
of the yesterday's rose.
Or the bones could have been burnt
with the fire
of the rose of this morning.
Between the two roses
the dome of my pain
is now the only room
wherein I am cooped up
having fled from all suns.

                             

There We're Atheists

by Bhargab Chatterjee

Catching the fire of a withered flower
you drink from Neptune's tumbler;
your thirst makes a mirror before me.
There colours meet and change all possible shapes
of an usual morning.

Knowing,
death has all colours and shapes
in obvious finitude,
you,
my "Belladonna, the Lady of Rocks"
smile.
Out of the yellow paddy field
the shadows of our hunger grow
and perpetuate yesterdays.

"I rebel therefore we exist,"  
you say stepping on the floor
of my room;
there we're atheists.

Sipping Coffee With Lova

by Bhargab Chatterjee

I

When you brew coffee
on the gas-oven
I sense a neo-realism  
breathing on my canvas.
Eating sun-toast in the morning
is fabulous.
Crunching like the evening raga Purabi
on my friend's sitar
or slicing a newspaper
with a sharp knife
I linger
until you turn with two mugs.

The sipping coffee
takes us to the Star of David
sketched on the flat, barren space
between you and me.
Morning translates your emotions
in a different way than the night.
The bright sun makes me feel
the shadow of The Potato Eaters,
that still hangs before me.

Am I wrong
when I say "we are the hollow men",  
only walk drooping our heads
towards Mars?
Being completely famished for the sun
how much you can do for me?
Can you create a new planet
in another galaxy?
Though I love the sound
of your every sip,
because it opens the whole gamut
of mystery of the universe.

 II

In your work-place
there's a knocking
on the ever silent door.
You think,
some of your unfamiliar shadows
have come
to make you more famished
in a circumstantial moment.
But every thing doesn't happen
the way it is expected.

Somewhere there is another door
waits for a similar knock.                

The Floor

by Bhargab Chatterjee

When the evening
crosses the twilight zone,
when the murmur of a river
hits me back
at the centre of my torso,
thoughts come.

In the vase on my table
the morning flower
grows redder
on its green calyx.

Perfume makes the floor.          

Glass Wall

by Bhargab Chatterjee

The clarity of darkness
is more than your lips.

We open our hearts in the cafe,
every day, before the glass wall.

At night silence drops into height
like a strong appetite.

The cold smell of stored up rice
teases my senses.

Before the glass wall
all known faces explode in the air.                      

Room

by Bhargab Chatterjee

I watch the night rain
sitting beside my anorexic window.

Pink rain makes the other buildings
shadowy,

they gyrate,              

glasses rattle
in vain silence.    

I step out      

in rain,

in pink.      

The clarity of night
makes another room around me.