Poems - Shahzeb Akhter

Trouble in Mind 

                        —after Ellen Bryant Voigt's Kyrie,

How we survived: the doors couldn’t be locked, & supposedly that’s how the ruins arrived (Anne Carson) & ruins didn’t leave. I had my lungs heavy, more so after some doing. This frail body since forever. But don’t pertainfragility with beauty in your mind— not the tenderness of some miniature glass swan. Just the bones brittle, the intestines wimpish. I kept a Book of Losing in my phone, to be read after-ward, and while waiting for the after, tried to read other poems, but the mind too diverted, couldn’t even recall what the just-last line was. Mind all over the place, mind whisked, grey and white, scattered. The end times, injustice everywhere, the mind struggled to keep hold of itself— there were lots of flies that day, in the house, that day and night, & the moon was waning in Taurus. Internet went about in the same Godspeed as ever. I wrote this and left, never return to it again!

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