Living with the “Language”

I suddenly find myself living in a world

Haunted by word-monsters

They are bursting with intelligence and opinions

Philosophies and ideas

Empathy and outrage

Eclectic tastes in music and movies

Poems and critiques;

Words pour out from every crevice of their bodies

Like millipedes and centipedes crawling with thousands of tiny feet

And their pockets are filled with eight-legged Neitzsche spiders

And large eyed Kafka roaches

They shout and they scream without pause – poems on song-birds

Lists of dirty corporates and corrupt politicians They abuse everyone; flaunt their nude bodies or their hijaabs

They shout statistics, post-modern gibberish

They are out to bruise and hashtag every tiny bit of the world

I tremble at the constant spectacle of such noise –

Whose decibels imitate silica rubbing on quartz

A relentless grating of metallic words

And I wish I could escape into a world of

Cobwebs

Darkness

Stagnant waters

Mosquito eggs

Layers of dust

Profusion of weeds…

An idyllic landscape of complete inactivity

Where no-one would ever hear this poem

And it could live forever in its silence…

 
 


*The cover image is a part of a new series of drawings called
‘Logos’, which Sarnath Banerjee is currently working on, looking
at contemporary Indian society through symbolic representation
and diagrammatic visual depiction.