Prabakar Thyagarajan
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Prabakar Thyagarajan, poet who has been writing poetry for the past three years. He reads regularly at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, and at the Brookline Booksmith, and at the public libraries at Brockton and East Bridgewater. He has featured at The Cantab, the Booksmith, and Borders Bookstore (downtown crossing). He feels most deeply influenced by Whitman, Hopkins and Hart Crane.
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He Never Quite Got the Pulitzer
They have all moved
on, my friend. The world¹s teeth
ratchet and cog. And the years
have sucked you
scrotal. Around each corner
you keep chasing the smell
of rain. Is it true
that you were once
airy footprints on a whitened river?
A radish of delight at coffee
tables, a hot scimitar in the tittering
bowels of matrons? A train
whistle knifing night¹s thick clot, vital
and muddy as a water hole?
Now, you are dark
rooms full of toothless men grasping
with venomous tongues. You wander naked
as air along the hushed pews
of movie houses, thirsty
for eyes glittering
at other gospel. Wrung,
you stare into places where harlots
sleep with parted lips and helpless
hands and flung, drifting torsos. The long
grimy steaks of evenings find you
jostled among deflated breasts
in the grind and sigh of buses.
Go back! Lets
go back, my friend, to that bright
attic tumbled with sleeping
bags and leftovers. When
yesterday¹s pizza in the fridge
was a bloody clawæour laughter
a hot river of poniesæour words a hail
of sneezes in somber rooms pudgy
with hesitations. When subway
rumble was the palm
under the chin of our reveries, and
our hunger, red pulsing gills
panting rooftops.
Solitude
If you ever find your arms aching
sticky with childæsing
to him clung
to you like peel, rock
him like you¹re still
primal seawateræsing
how we¹re all still immersed,
drenched in this ocean
of air we gently embellish
with fetid breaths
and farts and fumesæof its mouthless syllables
of falling leaf, its jet-scrawled
exhaustion.
Sing of the welling springs and spiked
citadels of mouths. Of angelic smiles
atop the worn waddle
of pendulous hips. Of how the eye is
dagger and blossom. Of consonants crisp
as hair singed in flame. Of ploughed furrows
of schoolchildren and sticky-eyed
puddles and sanguine-steepled evenings.
Then open your arms wide.
Let him go. Let him fly through
bladed air, past cauldrons
of salt marshes and fog
thick as fudge, to his own
nesting place. A winter
hill
gargling sea, where
tree lungs crepitate,
and fleeing gulls
are hung across the sun
Immortality
Will you remember
through all the intervening years
of other gusts
of eyes and moist nestling
scalps and warm shirts
of skin,
that shabby stranger,
flushed and trickling,
stammering greasy to please,
greedy glue-eyed, and shuffling
a suit badly in need of pressing
forth with something other
than silence?
Or perhaps that first walk
in the inky oyster shell
of duskæcharcoal scribble
of city against vast indigo and you
suddenly smiling "Babcock Street
lights its evenings with street lamps
and one torched maple." Something tenuous
between usæwafer-waisted
like the moon, or that last faint cry
of light in the west?
Or will you remember
that pilgrimage through storm
hushed streetsæslopes of snow
smoking in the windæthe world
a tent of splintered milk
and suddenly before us
a child¹s hot footprints loud
in the flesh of that silence?
My days glide
like silent barges
overladen with emptinessægutted,
adrift. But when I¹m old, rocking
rotted, drool-patched and breakfasted
upon my own phlegm, while the creaking pulleys
of breath drag a few further
hours across a porch, I know
I¹ll still feel alive
if I thought I¹d ghosted survival
in your memory, if only
as a shrug of some amusement.
