I am emptying myself Of all content. All the poetry Done, undone. All the prose Barefaced Chalk boned. Clearing up Head space. Spring cleaning Desecrating Deepest refuge, No less. I need my mind. To no longer be Blind. Shame stage. Sham, staged. Tried damming the deluge Damning guilt, Nursed, curst, sluiced. No more band aids Scars show and tell. To Heal. My land is famished. Watered down blood Tears. Can't wet my thirst. Can’t quench my parch. No more scary drive To connect Pale dots of isolation Pricking pin points of Obsolete absolution Fairy lights, strung up Needy sentiments. Now, Disparate. Separate. Gathering context. The journey not Between points. But in mapping, The orientation of design. The tale told. Not in the telling. But in the before and after. In the in between hellholes Where words fail To barter meaning, or Transact closure. To be alive Drunken on myself Knowing, sustaining innocence, Acknowledging hunger. The hangover Slurry words Afterwards Cherished. Only To write like this Like I care For nothing more Than the world These words bore This moment. And you take Them the distance They need to go Words live free, travel Beyond my mind cage. This autonomy ensures my truth.
Amrita Valan is an Indian writer, who writes on life, love, loss and her reflections on it, and dabbles in diverse forms of poetry, prose and in between spaces. Her Debut collection of 50 poems on loss and hope of reunion, Arrivederci, was published in May 202. In Between Pauses, her collection of short stories was published in November 2021. She received a jury award from the Friends Wood Library Ekphrastic Poetry contest in 2021.
Book link for “Arrivederci” on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09484PMQF
Link to “In Between Pauses” :
The Pine Cone Review 