Sunday Poem By Jhilam Adhikary

Sunday Poem By Jhilam Adhikary

Randomly I Bleed

Randomly I bleed No fixed hours And my sheets stain red, Shameful and permanent, And something to be hidden. Randomly I scrub my pants, In the random cold water Of the icy winter That isn’t as cold as it once was When my mother too did it; Dark brown is the wetness And my fingers shiver. I don’t randomly cry anymore Even when it hurts the same I randomly got used to this random pain. Though I cried back then, When against my wishes I randomly bled one day, Though still a child, “Puberty” they declared Randomly. And I called it “periods” For that’s what I saw on TV. You don’t dance or climb mountains When you bleed Not for of the pain, But for the random shameful stains That are visible So they must exist. While the random pain is a random myth; Those who rule the world Took years to “scientifically” prove it. Yet now, it’s still the mountains and dances And the stain-free designs that remain, Of the blue blood of ideal women, Who don’t randomly sit in a corner all day, Groaning and depressed with ice cream and chocolates Not smiling, not serving, not cleaning, not bathing, Not productive, not working, Such humans are real, so they are all lying. Excuses to randomly call in sick To waste precious sick leaves, So I change and dress And ignore my mind’s random mess To go to school or work or whatever charming; Just like every random person did Hoping their blood too, would randomly turn blue If they suppress their mood swings. And shrink painfully on my cold seat The red on my bed isn’t more red Than the red marks on the attendance sheet. And I get up and look back twice every minute, Despite the cramps, despite the pain; Any random stain Is the object of laughter And a room full of Constant, random, programmed whispers; Just like anything else shameful Is a laughing matter, A whispering matter, An unspoken rule. Random rules of random worlds And random worlds are idiots, So every word spoken against it Is just baseless feminist hate. Blood is private Just like pain Those who don’t bleed have said it So it must be true. Any mention of it, randomly in public, Is blasphemous and hedonistic. So I too will keep quiet, And once again be constructive; I randomly owe them all Sophistication and grace.