The summer of 2019

The year my grandfather died

I started writing poetry cause
My grandfather’s Parkinson handwriting,
creases of that ball point ink
swarming into a hive of recognizable
conjunctions hanging
on the branch
of his tilted
musings,

Had assured me when I was eight
that I could swaddle the dead
within the lines of a peeling leather
calendar diary.

But mostly to press
within the pages the flapping
bushy fly of the adrift and house it in
mechanical pencil geometry. where once the parched inked
tippy toes of those supermarket
blueberries meddled
through
my molars,

was stored in the
naphthalene flash of a
Samsung I borrowed
when I was fourteen.

my grandfather
now in a vaulted
icebox in a disjointed corner of the
dining table, where the chairs leaned out
from its circular symmetry,

My pens and pencils
Strike out cynically pop poetry
against stanza markings
like fencing up a bushy orchard,
weeding out the stray bunnies hopping from
burrows of repent,
that nuzzle their sneezing noses
against their mossy fur,
against the turnip’s rooted mane
wrinkled and receding,
grown in the fertility of the
melting dead
and the unhysterical
mourner.

Those papery diaries laminated with
prints of indie America
Were half-chewed by those bleak
poems in runny limping Rhythm,
rotting with each new word scribbled
in my pencils.

Till the pages hung
by their threaded bindings
until I kept skinnier diaries

And the dinner plates grew bigger

as the mounds of rice
receded into the pooling dal and carried
the shreds of baked chicken,
till the clock’s little laboured ticks
into the hours up
to which I could remain Foodless
filled me instead,

the glitching black arrow’s
lament onto the next number
Which warmed a
winter’s anorexic night
as my grandfather’s creaking
against the plastic chair,
Did
Or as did a nauseous giggle,
or his moustache and pink glass with
occasional climbing slugs of saliva
and drool,

Or his shaky cold hands
Pressing mine in a
soft Firmness as if the veins
creeping underneath
his arm hair were
little ticking black arrows
around his fingers,
clocking,

The middle school anecdotes
Made to swim in an aquarium
of a warm, cheeky and
un-shaky Laugh.

His gushing guffawing accent
Pulling from the aged
needlework of his youth

To waft in the soggy aroma
of the lunch time
rush of samosas,
ketchup, pav,

While in his palm
Treading the folds
of his rings were
tucked, Powdery
and pale
ayurvedic tablets,

In the
corner of his bed
a bucket cleaned
of urine

in the morning
And through his sweater
and his shawl
the embroidered
sting of pain balm.

But as far
as his voice
could limp away
from the drowsiness

The little fishes and weeds
of his time
swam and gilded
with memory

Such that I could’ve been in
Bombay during the forties
With a rumbling
stomach amongst him
and the kids
who’d crossed the street
from the school
Into the fan creaking
canteen.

© fairypeachbunnyprincess 2024. All Rights Reserved.