Space and time are categories – absolute, think of
science and philosophy. This morning I sat still
behind the steering wheel, forward ho! For backward
was barred, out of question. There’s no reverse
when you’re stuck five columns thick, in the middle one.
You are stuck. No retraction, no apologies; only hell:
that’s what they call an interminable wait for an unsure deliverance.
It’s hot, so hot, and sticky, so sticky within. The fan,
feeble, small, offers no respite. Poets, I’m sure, carry pen
everywhere, and I carry one around: poetic possibilities
of every moment, carpe diem etc. I saw that possibility
and I sat, sweated and wrote in that hell, not hell anymore.
Now I know a thing, or two, for sure: for poets, at least sometimes,
there’s no hell. When there’s no time – there’s no hell.
Worse than heat, housefly in the car, and all that humming
and buzzing and sweat, is the line just stuck, with no hope,
no deliverance, no respite. I was in hell, for a time,
till I took my pen and wrote.
Trust me, it’s true, I went in and out of my hell
– not my car – for I never went out.
Time is absolute, and space too, only in a laboratory,
they shrink and stretch in poet’s a car.
Rajnish Mishra is a poet, writer, translator and blogger born and brought up in Varanasi, India and now in exile from his city. His work originates at the point of intersection between his psyche and his city. He edits PPP Ezine.