Jayant Kashyap (18)
Insomnia
I
The sun came early today
cursing
woken up by a burglar alarm
not believing the people chanting
“good god! all is in place.”
II
I keep up.
Night had been late
with even the little christmas bulbs
blaring
the way a halogen does
coming out of nowhere.
Being sleep-deprived is history
that has passed on
unending
since centuries
between generations—two and
two more and more
until it could sum up to
unsummable magnitudes.
III
Eyes
burning
from all the light
every minute of a day.
The night doesn’t leave the light
the day doesn’t lose the light.
Even the walls are radium.
IV
Schizophrenia
paranormal insights
and everything inexistent
breathing
with vapours escaping the damp roof.
Sleep is a luxury I can't have.
A Loss of Choice
I put all the tracks on my phone to shuffle,
and that is more so a consequence of loss of
choice, than choice of variations or multitudes;
—it's a sad thing that is as usual in occurrence
as is breathing, or blinking, or anything that is usual
in occurrence—here too I’m at a loss of choice of
words, and even this is as usual as anything.
This happened with me earlier today while I
was interviewing another poet before his
next book comes out; I couldn’t rephrase well—
“tell me/tell them/tell us”—I had to think that each
was all the same anyway, that every question answered
is told to “me/them/us” once we read what is to be
read, but the problem lies not in reading, or being
told to, or listening, or rephrasing, or probably
interviewing; it lies in the loss of choice of anything
that is unusual as any thing.
Jayant Kashyap’s poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review and Barren and StepAway magazines, among others; one of his poems was featured in the Healing Words Awards Ceremony (September 2017), and he has a Pushcart Prize nomination. His collaborative poems with Lisa Stice now appear in zines, and his debut chapbook, Survival, is to come later this year from NY-based Clare Songbirds Publishing House. He is the co-founder and editor of Bold + Italic.
Insomnia
I
The sun came early today
cursing
woken up by a burglar alarm
not believing the people chanting
“good god! all is in place.”
II
I keep up.
Night had been late
with even the little christmas bulbs
blaring
the way a halogen does
coming out of nowhere.
Being sleep-deprived is history
that has passed on
unending
since centuries
between generations—two and
two more and more
until it could sum up to
unsummable magnitudes.
III
Eyes
burning
from all the light
every minute of a day.
The night doesn’t leave the light
the day doesn’t lose the light.
Even the walls are radium.
IV
Schizophrenia
paranormal insights
and everything inexistent
breathing
with vapours escaping the damp roof.
Sleep is a luxury I can't have.
A Loss of Choice
I put all the tracks on my phone to shuffle,
and that is more so a consequence of loss of
choice, than choice of variations or multitudes;
—it's a sad thing that is as usual in occurrence
as is breathing, or blinking, or anything that is usual
in occurrence—here too I’m at a loss of choice of
words, and even this is as usual as anything.
This happened with me earlier today while I
was interviewing another poet before his
next book comes out; I couldn’t rephrase well—
“tell me/tell them/tell us”—I had to think that each
was all the same anyway, that every question answered
is told to “me/them/us” once we read what is to be
read, but the problem lies not in reading, or being
told to, or listening, or rephrasing, or probably
interviewing; it lies in the loss of choice of anything
that is unusual as any thing.
Jayant Kashyap’s poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review and Barren and StepAway magazines, among others; one of his poems was featured in the Healing Words Awards Ceremony (September 2017), and he has a Pushcart Prize nomination. His collaborative poems with Lisa Stice now appear in zines, and his debut chapbook, Survival, is to come later this year from NY-based Clare Songbirds Publishing House. He is the co-founder and editor of Bold + Italic.