On the right to plagiarise/subversion as an act of reading
/ a way of rejoicing in incoherence
Hold the pen,
turn the page
how does one write a poem,
where does it begin,
what shall the first word be,
the one gleaned out
of the subconscious
making itself amenable
to psychoanalysis.
Write it! the word I mean,
stain the white with ink
each letter a blot
on this vast expanse,
which reminds me
someone once said
poetry is a thirst
for more space
which further reminds me
I had once said
space is the absence of language,
which is of course
not very revealing
once it is subjected to examination,
but what is examination
if not of the wrong thing,
only a life unexamined
is worth living,
someone might have said
or not, I don’t quite know
which is not surprising
given that there is a lot
that I really don’t know,
what I do know however
is that knowing is not
the same as embodying.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and that has made all the difference.
BTW I have been meaning
to ask, Carlos your plums
where do they come from?
I’m not sure I know what
a plum is, but somehow
the question feels familiar
if only slightly so,
anyway poetry is a fruit too
I think, they call it
the inaudible whisper
of the terra incognita.
I like to think of it as a fruit
with a particularly hard shell,
perhaps there is light in there
and mystery and more,
I went there once
in the days of my youth
but now that I’m here
in an unfamiliar room
at an unfamiliar time,
it is almost as if
I never went.
Debarshi Mitra is a 25 year old poet from New Delhi, India. His debut book of poems ‘Eternal Migrant’ was published in May 2016 by Writers Workshop. His works have previously appeared in anthologies like ‘Kaafiyana’, ‘Wifi for Breakfast’ and ‘Best Indian Poetry 2018’ and to poetry journals like: The Scarlet Leaf Review, Thumbprint, The Punch Magazine, The Seattle Star, The Pangolin Review, Leaves of Ink, The Sunflower Collective, Coldnoon, Indiana Voice Journal, The Indian Cultural forum, among various others. He was the recipient of the The Wingword Poetry Prize 2017, The Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize 2017 and was long listed for the TFA Prize 2019.
