No Hideouts Found
Avishek Parui Dialogues “Say something” you throat across our table where three plates of grapes and the leftovers furl a forest between us in which something had been lost or maybe cleverly hidden like a leak… And as the butterflies in our tablecloth begin to soak all that we had spilled sauce, juice, wine lies, grease, guilt; You stretch your strategic smile as I see the silhouettes sink… and think of the words that drop Waves. Dredge. Pills. Bridge. Edge. Brink… The rituals would stay the patterns will remain but this time when our eyes meet I hope to cut across to you with another strip of silence that the glass I broke after they had left wasn’t really slippery and the blood that curled my fingers thereafter was not very red… But guess you’d stop me midway slit across the stillness I would have built and say “I knew.” ******** Guy Fawkes’ Night As the boys outside were trying to set fire on the Guy they’d built you were thinking of a way to say sorry to mum for telling papa when he had asked over the phone that she had been out all afternoon… You know lying is a bad thing Mrs. Teresa says that in class that God is very angry when you lie but you think now maybe it would have been OK to say sorry to God later than to see papa scream “rotten bitch” and throw his big bad bottle at mum so hard that you could hear the glass hitting her eye and then the cringe and the cry when the blood that began to spread started to chase you…as you ran into your room so that mum could just feel the pain and not be ashamed… “The guy won’t catch fire”, you hear Tommy shout “It’s the freaking wind that blows it out” You stare at your colours and the page where you’d been trying to draw a house that’s become a birdcage… across the room papa is watching TV now where someone’s speaking on how the world could be turned to a better place by fighting terrorism together with love, care, faith while there’s still time you think it would be a good idea now to go to your mum’s room and show the big cage you’ve drawn with all the red crayons you have maybe you should write “SORRY” beneath it as well just in case mum doesn’t understand… ******** Quo Vadis After the torchlights had frisked through my wet insides and whistled away into the greasy night you came in to stay having walked through the heaviness of grey chimneysmoke in nightair and shrieks in radio plays despite the moons and purring cars you must have met… I had doubled down my stakes by then with the knowledge that I would crash again all signposts would be strewn across my tart taste… guess most of us cave in sometimes when the cold grows frills across the tiles and the rosebud shows the sled… But you showed up with your hair tied back too neatly into something like a bun… You smelled like someone who had stared at the whole of last night till the rhododendrons screamed a sunrise between them… I’m here to stay, you voiced till the claptrap is over and all the axioms flake off or die I looked out and saw the frisbees flying the stars that had dripped across were drying of course I knew you lied… ******** Spectres The twilight shrinks as each day dies from the cold rooftops the blood-red tiles that purple fast under changing moons. The hours slide beneath the lies the walls cave in against the tides the lovers fall way too soon. The hotdogs sell and the salad’s free see how Afghans die in flat TV-s no hideouts found in the end the hunters coughed… Apologies? Our eyes meet in guilty streets white stripes align strangers’ feet as the swishing cars race across the green-eyed gods who count clock-beats. Between love-songs the RJ says “Very soon the nation-heads would meet to plan a perfect world where every man is free.” You stare out at the lonely stars that drink your guilt and hide your scars from all that should not see. ******** Avishek Parui is completing doctoral studies at the Department of English, The University of Durham. He is the winner of The Short Fiction Competition 2010 by Platform Magazine, India, the winner of the Poetry Competition titled Journeys by Sampad, Birmingham, UK. He features in the anthologies of best poetry for the years 2009 and 2010 by Forward Press, UK. adminhumanitiesunderground.org