The Etymology of Precisely Nothing
Kintun, my nickname.
What does it mean?
Nothing.
Often a miracle precedes nothing.
Fog precedes a miracle. Boisterous
and silent,
all at once. Oxy
–moronic is the sweetness of a pudding
called miracle. My name is your
thought. We’re thick longitudes that insisted
on elongation—
pinstripes of milk blooding
the first syllable then aching into silk.
Radius, yours and mine, of giant sequins
on verdant bedsheets touching
at the point an ecstatic tangent runs
through, illuminated in the X-ray-like 4 am
light permeating
the room’s dark musk.
The second syllable like a long lull,
a melodic stretching of the senses: Raga.
Your chords are perhaps mine too.
Feeling encloses the senses
like warm air inside an igloo
against the backdrop of seas
and seasons. Inside we mirror intricately,
often naively both brilliance
and shock, approaching
that certainty of contradiction,
the brimming flood in the last syllable—
circle.
Arson
The day would come when there would be no sun, they said.
Flowers would grow tiny flapping mouths for expressing
pleasure, they said— outlets of gusto without which pleasure
alloys into mere productivity. Faces would italicize, they said,
with watercolours edging borders into vulnerability like in a
Dali painting. In the sunless world, you could communicate if
you spoke the tongue of vulnerability. Could people really
walk on charred pavements with hearts dangling like pulsing
red leaves as if they had abandoned a heart surgery midway, I
had wondered. I guess the anesthesia did wear off when the
hills wailed and the ocean got sucked into an underworld
tornado leaving a bowl of sore desert behind. At the time, I
was at the dentist relinquishing a ravenous tooth and how it
seared having to give up the bloody cave it was born into,
while the city outside became the colour of shadow. Without
natural light, how we will recognize the hours of sleep— we
realized, they never told us. Only an outline of the unknown
was provided. The outline was ours— our bodies lying on
sooty sand like beads of a seashell necklace. We mirrored the
sky, making constellations for dinner. Breakfasts disappeared,
so did high tea. We licked crumbs off edible ferns and laughed
till our stomachs hurt. Joy seemed like a conscious transfusion
as though we were beheld to the wonder of our own laughter.
If things were beginning again while we bared our rotten teeth,
I couldn’t tell but I was sure I was on drugs until I was
vehemently told I wasn’t by the ones who first noticed the
absence of green and started planting seeds on patches of
tender loam left untouched on this burning map.
Illustration : Prapti Roy