MICHELANGELO WAS FORGOTTEN.

By Shruti Bhattacharya

When my wounds are fresh enough to

rise above the clouds of your empty vocal sounds,

I’ll know my chase for cowardice

and its shadow began with the fool’s halo.

I need to know how cotton was made with my hair

and alive was the forest inside your heart that it shrieked

by the sounds of thunders and drum rolls outside the window.

Hysterically, the cadavers are cropping into your bones

like stitches of woolen yarn, and you are smoking the snow

smelling earth as if you are ashen by your winter.

You don’t know your name and not your blooming monstrosity,

but its rising flames into the loins of your empty bosom

and as if you function as humane as nature you are puking bile.

I am not thinking about you but you are flashing in front of my eyes

like faeries and nymphs on feast

and inside the claustrophobic walls of my cosmopolitan house

I find you the ghosts of English past.

The fireplaces are so burnt with coal

and wood paining the red on bricks and yet,

you flash like the sorcerer of my life, and yet,

this is my monstrous cosmopolitan forests and the walls keep shrinking.

I fear that someday this hallucination of past

is all my today exists with truth.

And when tomorrow I open my eyes it’s a blank canvas

so bright that even my shadow

scares my soul to set a foot on earth.

Maybe I am thinking too much with

nothing concrete but my city around me.

But the cold shine of winter moon on the swimming pool

feels like slithering reptile scales,

and I am soaked in all vile liquid

and I am consuming it like a supple

and galloping meat with a mouth

and no air to fill vacuum space in me.

If someday you vanish from the throbbing cells

of my antelope brain, and truth is not poison

of my morning juice, and breakfast tastes

like bakery in all its bloom, will I know my name

and the sews I stitched on my gaping wounds,

would seem like papercuts of childhood games?

You have no mouth on your face now,

and I don’t remember you crook of nose

but your spiraling eyes like the storm of the seas,

resemble enough to the turbines of the laundry room,

and I am staring too deep into the glass cages of whirlpooling fabrics

as if you are looking at me, asking me tricks of your existence.

And never when my spring break comes,

once again, I set my eyes outside the door,

hoping a drop of rain would fall on me

and it would smell like the joy of soil,

sorrows of the sky and ending all hopes

of the sun to rise into the oblivion.

Just like it used to when days were juvenile

and trees were saplings.

They needed sun.

sun couldn’t face them

because of the skies wailing horribly.

I name you Michelangelo.

You created me this pretty when I was soil

and calcium of bones.

But you are no artist and flawed like him.

I call you so because in history

of my glory your existence will be a predominance.

I am me,

because you saw me then.

But you’ll be lost and barely

remembered except your creation,

the stapled scars of prude boyhood,

and so lost will be your face, like so mouthless it is.

Soon your eyes will be crawling with lichens

and you be consumed.

Rotting the rotten, you’ll be into the soil;

in the calcium I came from,

yet you’ll be acid,

and churning into the wheel of your eye;

and I’ll never look at the hullabaloo

of soft fabrics in the laundry room.

You’ll be Michelangelo;

forgotten and remembered;

and I’ll be the paintings of Rome,

talking tales of mythology

as if you built me in a day.

By Shruti Bhattacharya