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.