Let's talk about pain
Let's make a laundry list of the pain not acknowledged, healing denied,
moonless-dark bullying,
hiccupped, stammering hearts,
hollow burgundy wounds,
breathless, choking stitches.
Let's put them in a basket, one by one.
Wash them with nursing waves of ocean storms
Spotless clean and ironed.
Let's talk about pain
Like how pain is the flippant coin that turns rustic deep with every bargain.
Pain is the lighthouse warning against the silent growling of starving icebergs.
Pain is the friend that squeezes your hand, air-tight, because the anaesthesia faded away too soon.
Let's talk about pain
Let's rub off the hurt from the skin
Of our crippled memories.
Let's sit in circles and listen to the stars
Let them tell us if it's heaven or hell
To live with a constant burning ache
And we name it stardust and magic.
When it feels like a cold pyre's shadow of dead wishes.
But look at how the stars breathe out dragon fire and lets it all go.
Look at how they turn into black holes, light-years of nothingness, healed and free.
Let's talk about pain.
Uncombed memories, souvenir of untamed miseries, tucked away in the dusty cabinets
Like how you only hear the sound of waves inside the subconscious of conch shells.
And look at how it lets go through a forbidden roar
Puffed away with pursed lips.
Let a sky full of sadness ferment on the clouds and let the clouds hatch into rains.
Let us give it some space to cry.
While the planet breaks out in prescription of stone-edged pills
Before the earth hemorrhages into kohled blackness.
Let's sit in circles and light up the fireplace of silence
Let's jazz up the ice.
Let's make couplets out of our souls
Mimic the river songs
Crayon the islands in the skies
Let's make paper-boats out of our pain
and let it go.
Let it sail
Away
Far away.
Mandrita Bose is a spoken word poet and works as a senior copywriter in advertising. She celebrates people through an initiative called Pen Portrait (poetry on your picture). She is a Kommune Kolkata Ambassador and her debut book of poems December Waves was published last year. Her poems are also a part of different anthologies. She has explored the fields of journalism, events, short films, music videos prior to advertising and completed more than a decade of working in the media. She has a Master's degree in Audio Visual Communication from Commits, Bangalore, affiliated to Makhanlal Chaturvedi National University of Journalism and Communication, and Bachelor's degree in Journalism and Mass Communication (Hons) with English and Film Studies, from Calcutta University. Follow her on Instagram or Facebook.