Arcadia

85

Moments slip, slip out of my finger gaps like sand like the white sand in the American indie movies that I have never touched, the sand in Digha is brown and wet and it always sticks on skin like cotton candy ends like a unhappy thoughts, early December begging for closures begging for answers begging for one last time for cocoa rich lips on mint cigarette for a little love just a little love, please? Unhappiness crawls under skin and pokes in the ribs and smells of early oranges, citrus smells, sharp smells, the sharp edges of artichokes wreck themselves in soft poetry, soft poetry on soft skin sugar in tea rum and coke in a plastic bottle, poetry in a plastic bottle, November night loneliness in a plastic bottle, hurt in a plastic bottle, Christmas in a plastic bottle with posh scented candles and the smell of his sweat and the smell of his poetry and the smell of his sadness, too, sometimes, let me be in love for a little while, in love like that giddy picture where we both look so ugly and drunk but he said we are beautiful people, we are beautiful people but we are messy people too and so I have heartbreak in a plastic bottle, heartbreak is blue, heartbreak in a blue room with a window and a patchwork quilt, heartbreak in November, heartbreak is cold, cold faces under cold fluorescent in uncaring metro stations.

Come, let us pray. Pray for happiness and sorrow and simple living and double decker buses for the trains to be late and for the trams to never go away, pray for warm yellow lights and friendly strangers, pray for a South Calcutta sun, pray for warm toes and lovers' limbs and people who have lost their souls. Pray for the unloved, pray for the loved. Pray for rain, and sunshine, and life and love and the courage to live another day under the sun.