What is there to write? by Debasis Mukhopadhyay

A zebra.

I want to write a zebra.

An array of upturned coffins keeling over an indigo road leads me to the border.
Maybe I should try to write a spine.

Quieted in that spine like melancholia, the sunrays still keep glinting. Cobwebs hover over the kingdoms of killings.

Sunshine yes.

But I would probably keep sunshine aside and thousands of its likelihoods, thinking of the ripples of weapons murmuring like a saline breeze around our best immediate interest.

Fingers, perhaps, growing sunflowers?

Fingers, not bloodied, smudging the pastel until a hallo appears lodged in the hollow songs freshly hatched out of the muskets.

Fingers wrap us in a musical of red poppies glimmering in the sun beneath the water with myriad skulls weighing down the long drowned boats.

The sea is known to be turbulent at times. Think of the firmament?

Yes, firmament! From under those naked skins it keeps gazing on the slalom of lives awaiting a starry Lych gate.

And with all the starlets dripping fireballs in mind, I open the lifespan of lullabies for the children of war.

Dreams only root out of dreams & their shambles roll across the rubbed pastel debris to shatter against your silhouette of folly, oh muse mine, what is there to write?

Sail on, doll head, sail on, the night is your wool of time, your doom, your womb of lilac, just go fetch a zebra.