Pratyan Chakraborty
Relapse | Ruminating

Pratyan Chakraborty says she is influenced by Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry when writing her poems. Read two of Pratyan’s poems here.

By 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.