DEATH-WISH LIGHTED IN THE
DARK
BRAJAKISHORE DAS
Death-wish lighted in the dark
drifts into your
intestines; you know
the bizarre experience
is too deceptive
to be silenced or severed
to rythmic numbness.
You are reasonably frozen inward, while
an acute pain gnaws at
your flesh, your exterior.
However much you try
to ignore the wound, you can’t;
you can only bury it beneath
the fossilized debris of
your soul, as you undress
before the broken mirror
in your bedroom. Sheets
of hunger envelop the privations
you swallowed, your
futility still vomiting itself out!
Death-wish shakes
the corridors of living bones,
empties the expanse of
hope’s surrealist fount,
and there jumps within you
the hunter thirsting for blood
that oozes from the archetypal intensity
of a strangled horror!
Nobody's really interested
in the irony
of your hyphenated introspection–but
you can see the numbed night
sweeping into
the embrace of an incestuous morn,
and the death-wish dying
slowly, imperceptibly.
–Translated from Oriya by the poet