To the non Wonder

In our days of learning the slum-alphabets

we craved of sugar-topped coconut balls

served in a silver dish.

That never came about.

With a pistol in my hand and a raging

youth in my loins, I had given in

to the picture of wonder, and

meekly submitted, like a damaged

Dorian Gray, plunging inside

the dark pollens of rhododendrons.

Love to me was stories

that rich people told their kids

at bedtime. The wagon-breakers,

the mongrels born out of

streetside fucks didn’t get

a Christmas present.

The gentle greenery was swaying with

moist, complaining river wind that evening.

When I saw my son thrusting himself

into a woman, teeth and nails bare,

burning his wonders into

a hot vicious brand, I was sitting with

my share of bullets, counting stars that

never shone on people who grew up

under homes made of plastic shades.

A piece of the forgotten

On the other side of the wall

that moons can see on earth, lies

a river with five faces. The suburban

myth led people to jump to their

death here, thinking that under

the gray abyss of water

was Atlantis.

On mornings laced with fumes

of roasted ducks and fried

catfish, blind hawkers made

their way to the bigger

spectacle of a city with

skyscrapers. Little bougainvilleas

coming out from the creaks

of the wall are fed by

bone-wishes of people buried there.

It is a strange curio-shop of old

people and even older wishes,

wrapped hastily by

banana-leaves, yellowing

every second.

The Temple

Blood has dried up black on the stone.

The temple is now a forgotten mess

and a crumbled relic.

Wishes were born here once, bathed

in crimson, roaring out

of sacrifices. How many vermillion

colored dreams have thrashed against

Nature here? We do not know.

Like dogeared pages of a biography

jungle has slowly eaten the last

signs of civilization, but every now and then,

a chainsaw squeals from somewhere.

The vines hardly care.

We barked like dogs one day, and then it was time

An old lady crept into our lives

and made fluffy pancakes,

We sabotaged every sanity, looking

at the comet that only came after seventy five years.

The only story our maid knew was of an old lighthouse

that glowed in the howling storms.

I thought she was dumb, then one day

saw her crying, showing her scarred breasts.

It was common knowledge that deers were to be shot,

same as mountain lions, and

rebels

And then the day martyrs became rulers, and

everybody was killing everybody.

My sister used to sing, but outsourcing taught her

to improvise. She now sings on a different note, on a different

code

On potholed roads, I dashed my car like there was no tomorrow,

running over sleeping beggars and their roadside dreams, knowing

nobody could touch me. For I was a

celebrity

We taught ourselves to pride on botox and plastic.

Billboards were the biggest drug, our lives on a platter.

Seventy five years is a long time to shoot an old yeller.

Maybe we oughta listen to our urges, and become

suicidal.

Radioactive

Bubbles spurting out of molten sulfur

look innocent green, even scarily alluring

to a stranger. The chromium salts

with their poisonous tentacles spread

shivering carmine love that gives birth

to a thousand children, their faces buried

in the ground, their eyes azure,

their breaths pulsating like

Kryptonite.

Little beeps emerge from Geiger-Muller

counters, and fade away into ether.

They are measuring souls.

In the bleak rays of the sun

scales of the fish caught dazzle meek,

like toothless smiles of deformed

people that eat them raw.

Humanity has become a concubine

of chemicals.

A dying man who lived in Hiroshima once told me

that he saw a falling star dazzle bright

in the middle of a morning. The

scars on his face reminded me of Bhopal.

Epitaphs of Magnesium and Aluminum

shone brightly in the factory lights.

There were factories making bombs and

babies, and lacing both with

Uranium.

Author Bio:

Suvojit Banerjee is from India and the United States. His poetry and stories often wander somewhere in between, questioning the accepted norms, and looking at the lives of the generation he is a part of. His works have been published in numerous Indian and International journals and magazines like Scarlet Leaf Review, Indiana Voice Journal, Visual Verse, Whispers, The Stray Branch, Tuck Magazine, UUT Poetry, Danse Macabre, Silver Birch Press, Voices de la Luna, eFiction India, Bactrian Room, The Camel Saloon, Red Fez and Hackwriters. His work has also been featured in the book ‘A Significant Anthology’, which covers 175 writers from all over the globe. When he’s not writing poems, he writes in his own blog and scribbles down words for his debut novel.