Three poems by contributor Shivangi Goel.
Capitalism
We made the world we live in,
And we have to make it over.
Baldwin says to me, over
Tea on couch across generations
Of whispers of learnings snuffled
Across ink and what confluence
Would have it that only this voice reaches,
It doesn’t lie, doesn’t exaggerate
Taking me up the throat, gargling its
Way out
This venom
This venom
We’re accomodating unknowingly
I mean all of it is not venom, and
All of me is not shaken
To the shaky wiggly mud patches
Of what I know and am sure to change
I’m sure of nothing.
These men in Prada suits talk of
Business deals and deforestation
Mr Sir Yours Respectfully,
Why do you have to take every fucking
Poor woman
And man
And kiddo
Out of their house onto the street
And then call them poor
To build your goddamn dam
I’m a skeptic in front of the shopping mall
Glad I can buy creams and burgers
I don’t know of the degree of its wrong
Or if the world is becoming smaller
At all or
If I’ll ever know
If I should have to make everything about myself
Shaky wiggly mud patches watered with Starbucks
And confusion
I don’t know Roy, I don’t know.
Oswald’s day out
It’s the day my sadness refused to work
And I had no choice but to smile at the balloon man,
Although he charged me three
Pennies for balloon worth two.
It’s the day my sadness walked out,
And I too left work early to sit by the frozen banana outlet
And even treated little Mona to her last ever double dip chocolate
So I refused to be sad today
Although I couldn’t be sad anyway,
I could feel it surfacing deep within
It’s the day my frustration refused to work, although
It still laughed at me from the deep mysterious insides
It’s the day my emptiness gave up
And jolted into anxious action,
And I smiled because it only slightly mattered to me anymore what I was doing,
And then little Mona was run over by the fool who could feel.
Silence
When my mother told me to listen,
Instead of shouting resentment with every bit of me
When I started to learn
To see myself as a resentor
To see it as a good thing
To shout out doubts
When quite really,
I was better off noting them down
I was better off weighing my options
I am better off sitting in a room:
Small one, dusty curtains
Observing everything,
“To be a writer is to observe”
Sontag
But I’m not a writer
More than she is a writer
More than he tweets
More than they shout
More than my unhappiness.
When we discuss in class the true tragedy
That silences Ghosh’s narrator:
My narration
Crippling, numbing, staring out the window
I understand
that we are basking ourselves in ill formed opinions
Half baked in ovens of our illusionary profiles:
It’s lost on us
Like Neruda wholly exclaimed
To sit down
Stare at the curtain (mud sprinkled like specks of sunshine you miss the little boy more than I miss the little boy yes it still haunts me I make tea my memory dissolves slowly the sugar cube swirling it’s just as real just as necessary),
Say nothing.