THE FOLLOWING POEM WAS SELECTED IN WINGWORD POETRY PRIZE 2023 LONGLIST.

Your wall clock suggests that the time of the day is not what you want. It's 4 minutes to 8.30 in the morning.

Boring. Blasphemous. Brittle.

You can get up, and slide the Bhujodi shawl off your shoulders, stretch your knees and undo the act of becoming a cucoon. You can breathe, unwrap yourself out of your loneliness, and take a step towards mirror.

Instead, you stay. There's a sour taste in your mouth - acidic, more like an aftertaste of seeing yourself. The mauve-colored nails are chipped into sediments, near your pillow. There are threads lurking out of your shadow.

It's 8.30 now.

It would be 8.31,

Then 8.32,

Then 8.33,

Then 8.34,

And then 8.35.

Time lapses in seconds,

And in number of words you can utter.

Your silence has reached its zenith -

A friend is calling,

The cat is purring.

Your lips are quivering,

Your feet is shivering.

The project manager is yelling,

The toaster is pinging.

But the distance between your eyelashes and eyelids is decreasing.

The ceiling above you is reducing

into an incomputable mass.

Here, in this room,

Einstein fails, and Newton gives up.

Your nerves are throbbing,

And you're thinking. Again?

Yes, again.

You remember you had once told:

If a person goes out to pluck a flower,

No matter what color it is,

And no matter how it smells,

And no matter when it blooms,

And no matter where its vastness lies.

The person awaits -

The season of wilting.

Now, do you realise how enigmatically you're becoming the person you'd warned everyone about?

You're plucking the pores of your skin.

//And how - like this - in a scratching, scribbling, struggling way.

//And how - like this - in a denuding, deserting, deafening way.

//And how - like this - in a lonely, lamenting, lurching way.