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.
