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Two Poems by Rajnesh Chakrapani

“Good morning. Happy Birthday of your favorite Ganesh. Love. Good Day.” and “Please don’t forget about your flu shot.”

Poetry | Poetry Tuesday, poetry
August 9, 2022

Good morning. Happy Birthday of your favorite Ganesh. Love. Good Day.

You wear the garden, the stretch marks of the city, you wear billowy clothes. You make a place, a backdrop, a torn up background, chewed up photography, you travel some crease. A piece of thread falls out, an experience of opening and something unexpected falls out. As the years went on the feelings pushed up through the lie, new information changes the need to have the same past, history should go through intimacies. Feelings that impregnate the mind, even unwillingly, a place is the teaching of language from the mother but who does the writing? You look for the writing, the documents, try to fill in the spaces but first you have to keep deleting the credit card numbers the computer memorized. To make a new history not oppress the old history, you ask someone to tell you about a place, even about a place you already know.

Please don’t forget about your flu shot.

In order to translate I want to live happily ever after I have to ask if I lived happily ever before. What is most important is the story you are telling yourself about me. Lots of arguments about putting your stories into my stories, like that Japanese writer said you use reality to write fiction and the fiction becomes reality. The disappointment of how you see me, to not want to speak but the words spill out. Even if I invent a fiction you would find a way into the descriptions. I recently heard the phrase from another language, fear of a block of salt falling on your head. I imagined pink salt crystals, a Himalayan lava lamp, words, a threat at the edge of the table. I break off a piece of something you said and flavor food, before language sat comfortably at the table next to me. At any moment the fear of what is untranslatable falls on my head. Reading is translating the word, an uncomfortable habit.