Poetry: The Night And Views Spread Inside And Out
'We were a winter that became factories and movies and cults and several mysteries in the world,' writes poet Mihir Chitre.
After all those nights,
there are no new ones.
You've seen it all, you think:
Words slipping over a drink,
or six. Time being timeless
when you laughed with
all your heart. In the balcony,
love constructing itself
like a conversation. Two or three
people have always regretted
being in your life. And regretted
everything about some of those nights.
Memory is a dance you fail at
as it creates the old from the new.
Glasses, tears, the cans of beer look
all too familiar like a missing sock
as you walk into the unknown,
away from yourself.
Bay View
A woman kept howling at the hotel staff
when we entered, she and I, and, between us, laughed
as if we didn’t at all understand the disappointment
or dissatisfaction or anything dis- or un-
That evening, the world wasn’t bickering.
She shut the door and jumped into my arms as if nothing
about life was ever wrong as if the past
were a well-rounded object or a dead neighbor
that cannot bother us any longer. And then we were a whole
fucking megacity spreading over the bed’s geography
and sparkling like moissanite in the stories we made up
of faraway lands and imaginary people
that would agree with us as instantly and unquestioningly
as most of our countrymen agree with television news.
We were a winter that became factories and movies and cults
and several mysteries in the world as we thought-traveled
to perfect places, we were happy to ruin
with the brilliant mistake of existence.
(Mihir Chitre is the author of two books of poems, Hyphenated and School of Age. His work has appeared in over 25 literary magazines including Nether, Indian Literature, Cerebration, The Bombay Literary Magazine and in several anthologies including 40 Under 40, Modern Indian Poetry by Younger Indians, Helter Skelter Anthology of New Writing, Converse. Poetry is his first love and first vice.)
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