Time

By Hiranya Mukherjee

Time has many faces

Often it brushes coarse against your skin

Like a crowded metro, stuffed with dry leaves

When it doesn’t lap around you—

In a soothing, swirling solitude

If not suffocating you

With its moist tremulousness….

Like the melting biscuit teetering on the edge— half submerged in your tea cup.

It sounds like the unwelcome bleary shouts

Of the hawkers down the street, rattling your sleep to slither away

As you lie there half asleep and half awake

Too alert to drift off to dreams, too drowsy to brush your teeth

It shows itself again as you reach out beside the bed

To water your dry cardboard throat

Only to trill your fingers to the crackling laugh of an empty plastic bottle

Hollowness…a rabbit-hole

That pulls and pulls and stretches you

Until everything is too fast

Too thin

Too sharp

Prick your thumbs

Blood oozes

Like a blooming thought smiling

A red garden where time stops

Just for a while

Breath out.

By Hiranya Mukherjee