"Dom!", I spat the word like a cough lozenge out of my window, but it bounced off the grill and plastered itself on my dust-crowded window-sill; the aww ricocheted off the walls of the next building and washed over me like a glass of water thrown into the wind: Dawwm, it said.
"Damn!", I tell you. Damn the consonance. Damn the way these vowels play a Parnassian in my brain, a sound cage I cannot break out of. Who is to blame?
"Dom!"
Yes, Dom is to blame. Can I take the liberty of calling you by your first name? I will do it, too. I cannot free myself of you like the Muse did, shutting you out for twenty years. Would I do it, if I could? No, I am the monkey on the back of your virtuosity. I am the conscientious thief of your artistry, a thief that takes in small portions, never in gluttonous wholes; I pluck the eye of your Christmas Turkey, the n from Altermann, the glister from your key. I will lick the blood off the unicorn you killed, the blood Shylock didn't dare spill. I will clip the nail of your typing finger while you sleep. Your poems will be held together by this variety of absences! Why should I be free of you? I choose to be fiercely dependent on your words.
And still I blame you, Dom. Tough love. You had many women, Dom, but this man would outwoman them all. Even faithful Sarayu shall pall before the fierceness of my devotion, the submission in my crawl before your disdainful, out-of-focus stare. Free of homes and homeliness, wanderer, dreamer, you shall never be free of me. I shall outwit the cancer you did not treat and become your prime disease.
I shall deride Sidharth Dhanvant Sanghvi in your voice as a weak dose of LSD.
My flashwords shall not let you sleep, I shall be a one-man-paparazzi army. Having wet my fingers-proboscises, I shall drink from your ink. I shall be the leech that will bleed you into health, that will rouse you out of death –
I warn you, Dom, you are not the only one doing the haunting; I haunt you as only the living can haunt the dead. Tie me close, Icarus, I am your waxen wings. I shall exalt you till your glory melts and till you fall to the sea. I shall prize you from your poetry.
At last you will borrow no voice, depend on no posthumous jamboree.
At last you will be free.
PS: The words are half mine, and half Dom Moraes's, lines or titles of poems, but that is expected; we are both Cancerians, and I feel this great affinity; and I will never forgive him for dying on me.
- Partho Chakrabartty
dropdeadman@gmail.com
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5 comments:
hmmmmm!!very different and interesting!!
This is an exuberantly stylistic write up.
Without knowing who Dom is, one can actually relate to the article. 'Flamboyant' would be the right word to describe it.
Had heard a lot about you, Partho! (through Sid)..Have finally got to read you!! You are a show stealer, dude! Amazing write up! And the connection with independence is so subtle yet so strong! Hats off!
Looking forward to reading more from you!
Partho, my friend you're an artist! You aren't a writer, you lick your words as though you are colouring your paragraphs with paint. I get an impression of a child licking his fingers till they are dry, after eating a great fish curry. Lol. Beautifully crafted, the idea of suffocation and liberation,are neatly played upon. I find a lack of structure to it though! Is it deliberate?
@ pallavi arur: Thank you so much, pleased to make your acquaintance. I presume the "hmm" was for the fact that you couldn't make much of it... I apologize for the nonsense elements of the work.
@ the critic: I presume this is the man himself. Thank you for your comment. Interestingly, flamboyance is what we also associate with rich kids leading empty lives :) This piece was somewhat empty; I shall attempt to be more true to future themes.
@ divya: Thank you for your comments. Sid is quite tight-fisted about his friends, but now that he has let me in I hope to get to know them all better. I hope we can all get to meet up sometime over the course of the next year.
@ Janvi: Hello! How do you do? Structure is not the only thing this piece lacks, I suspect... I was guilty of just letting myself loose and relying on the assonances to pull me through the whole piece, just trying to push through jagged rhythms in a prose piece, attempting to replicate the high school brashness and vacuous showmanship of a stalker. Thank you for your comments :)
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