Poems by Mesbah Alam Arghya

Fugue
 
And then a sentence was erased
 
It wasn’t written on the scene that
There was a breeze
And a curtain,
All the numbers lying between them
                                aging along with them
 
Instead, a line was erased.
 
The way “Tuesday” has a meaning,
The way fingerprints on every storm door look familiar
Knocks around an ashtray
The letter’s demography was erased
 
That they had bought new cushions for the old chair
Was rumor confirmed
 
A blackboard could never be fully wiped black
 
And more new plans
A mundane pencil     with the square shapes it entails
         spoke in effaced words

Preparation
 
Still disc of a horror film
 
Someone stares at me from the third floor window
 
The wrapper is torn photo missing
             If everything else is set aside from midnight
                              This water hides
 
From every scratch
 
A cotton-stuffed crow
 
Covered with real feathers — a handful of sliced melon
            stares at me with their stone eyes
 
Two easy ropes make an effortless knot

I didn’t go anywhere last night
 
I didn’t go anywhere last night
 
Medication; I am sick in the head
 
I slept last night doctor
my doctor slept last night in my head
I didn’t drink a drop
 
The artwork on the wall
 
Naked women and this Montreal blur sways to and fro nocturnal
in bright flames and purple, violet lights
 
The primitive artists
Up to my distaste their high heels
miniskirts and their fading away into shady motels
 
Insouciant white lines twelve-thirteen
scroll on waste paper
in the parking lot
 
Don’t do cocaine, I tell them —
Stare at the walls — the lewd curves of her waist
A bra is parking her car
A bra next to her
 
I dislike, saw my doctor yesterday
 
Sleep trouble!
 
I sleep for two hours
the night after, I sleep for two hours again
a night later, the stairs go down the fire exit
 
stairwell
 
the staircase in the back of my neck
 
trouble … doctor …
 
What brand of fag do you smoke anyway?
 
Anyway
 
I don’t see at all
 
I didn’t go anywhere last night

Magic Mushroom
 
He said “shrooms”
 
Shrooms collected on our guilt from last night
 
A couch
Flees with our legs
A dawn-shaped Honda Accord leaves with our stomach
He gobbles sitting on the couch
 
A fountain under his neck
He keeps licking the chewing gum on its nipples —
Chewing, O how perfectly he shakes his jaws
while radio plays the street
 
Spiraling down to the edge of the belly button
and giggling, the radio
softly giggling from inside the couch
 
The night chuckles in our legs, stomach the fountain
 
We are without knottiness

Grid
 
Lunatics give me suspicious looks
 
I shave my face, wear perfume
              and lunatics stare at me funny
 
A lonely cotton flakes about in the middle of the night
 
From this block to that —
Just a tiny piece, as though a ladder made of air
              in a ludo board
The psychopath who stepped on a snake and went south
 
Let’s talk about chemistry here! About that eerie sound he’d made —
 
Did the wind not pull my hair apart?
 
Here, we mean the motor that’s pumping mineral
Here, we thought about the Earth’s plates,
                                                      May be a seashore.
 
Did my shaved chick bring in this clean bathroom?
Did this shaved sink create the water tap?
 
When I put on perfume,
the lunatics can hear —
It’s raining,
All basin holes have spiraled to a halt

Tunnel
 
The ball thrown from one hand has returned in the palms of many
 
A common plan in their faces
 
A vanished ion
 
Who is staring? There is no observer inside you
 
Rattled threads — one lip edge shoots inside the other —
 
The net flies after a flock of words
 
Leaves fall
 
More or else something leaves the cloud

Don’t mark
 
Green light on the handle
Yellow and red
 
Don’t mark
 
Let it sing
Let people gather uninvited
in your peptides,
And the hundred pigeons that engulf you —
 
A face has slowly rolled over to your next you,
And the face has not
 
The greasy pistons underneath sleep, the electron route
The comfy seat on top — the easy remark — “How come I want? I can only make a mess”
 
And my acids make me smile at it
Make love         put no name       use no word

 
All poems translated by the poet.