Poetry

Empirical Inquiry On Pain In Glass Houses 

By Anindya Arif

So I have decided to leave you,
With a bell jar filled with poorly represented feelings.
And an inquiry into the nature of our kind of pain
Will reveal
You have built your world with such perfect pieces that
I have now made peace with the fact
There is no place for me there
I have been so many people over the years
That thinking back on all of them
Makes me feel disconcerted
in between the commotion
of rusted railway stations,
Living alone.

Watching the
Plants you brought home to
Die on windowsills.
And breaking down over
Getting the wrong bottle of shampoo.
You went searching for an August.
That melted away way too soon in
All the inessential moments.
And any and every
Interpretation anyone has ever had of me
it has now been drowned in some revelry
or underneath a bottle of absinthe.

in my remedial search for the tiniest bit of affection

Everything I had built
So far has fallen apart.
In my relentless need to establish an
Identity as a writer
I have fumbled my way into
Glass houses and hazy sun-soaked
Autumn afternoons in late October.
I have made holding on to everything
A habit, just in case.
I have made an enemy
of the pain that resides in the glass houses
I have craved all the possible things.
That could go wrong between the start and end
of a sentence
With a Scalpel
on the walls of the glass houses.
Then, I painted them with all the thoughts
I had in between waking up and falling asleep
Which just made the walls look gauche
And reek of vernacular.
When your meandering search for such
An August like that eventually fails
A bitter taste scuffs the wind around
You and I will ponder
What might have been?
As the new rain
Creates discordant noises
And I start to feel detached
From my skin
I conclude my inquiry as inconclusive.
People living in glasshouses are
Glad to have killed whatever
The rest of us are trying to save.
They have embraced a life devoid
of opiates and longing.
So, before the eternal winter takes over
And you find yourself
Becoming a glass house tenant
In a cleansing moment of clarity
I will gently let you know that
I am here; how I have always been
How I have avoided falling
Into the gaps of a desolated August
And will remind you how
Everyone has always
Overestimated life
How it might not be
All that it was made out to be.