Pratyan Chakraborty
Relapse | Ruminating

Pratyan Chakraborty sagt, sie sei beim Schreiben ihrer Gedichte von Sylvia Plath und von der Confessional Poetry beeinflusst. Lest hier zwei von Pratyans Gedichten in der englischen Originalfassung.

Von Pratyan Chakraborty

Relapse

I found myself or maybe
I have lost,
Is it legal to worry about the things,
That ain’t ours?
Do we need a justification to be worried about,
A stranger’s heart?
I wish I could feel something,
Know something to be real.
Standing under a high tension wire and waiting,
For someone to pick me home.
Perhaps that would make it easy
To be whoever I am.
Somedays a nectar and other days, merely a rose petal.
This week is going to be another week of July,
I will almost rust in the name of resting,
I will almost kill myself.

Ruminating

The last time I wrote a poem, it was about God,
This time it’s about you.
Sometimes poems are just unheard prayers –
And your absent lover is the only higher power.
So, I promised myself I would focus more on
Worshipping the language of starvation –
Because that’s the only way to salvation,
But the doctors gave me more ibuprofen & clonazepam,
They couldn’t diagnose anything from the blood samples –
I gave, after the night I spent with a man,
Who was looking for himself in my skin,
He didn’t know that it was more about kin.
So, I went to a priest asking for help,
But he announced that my forest was burnt,
All the birds were already dead, the butterflies turned into ashes,
And he screamed “beyond redemption”
I didn’t know we were coming closer and closer,
Only to be destroyed and drift after at the end.
These days I am giving up on things very easily,
Like you used to overwater the plants until their roots rot.
I decided to ask you not to talk to me
Until the hurt oozes out of your mouth like
An extreme act of self-criticism and love.
I decided to starve my body of touch and humidity
But I am scared.
So I came to tell you about my epiphanies.
I said I wouldn’t write about you,
But I fail to, you often appear in the middle of my sentences.
I needed you to know, that I replaced all my mirrors with your photos –
Because I only saw myself in your eyes.
I don’t recall what happened or came before you,
But after you, it was only pills, invisibility and nothingness.
There is something going on in my room
And I am yet to figure out what.
Something big,
It’s more than about my body
Because there was always music in the room,
But now silence eats my feet at night
I have stopped sleeping barefoot.
Father used to press pencils between my fingers
With all his might as a punishment for my bad handwriting,
Perhaps he was concerned about me writing my fate.
I didn’t understand back then what it meant to be a child,
But now I do and maybe
I also have an idea about what he was trying to do.
Recently in a nightclub,
I gave up on another man’s love
Shoved all the conspiracies about gender
Down my throat in the washroom
And told him I could never love him
So he named me Hermit
(I couldn’t help but hear – Her meat/ Her/ Meat/ HER)
I thought I did it for poetry,
I thought I did it for the tongue.
The priest doesn’t know,
I have learned to let things go
I have learned there is no tense in love
And no verb in grief.