P O E T R Y
Anindya Arif
Velouria, an amnesiac,
constantly on 18 mg of Percocet and LSD,
believes that the world
at its core is merely symbolic.
She dreams of a
new resurgent world,
born out of a casualty
of an era, where
everyone wakes up
with their regressive urges
wrapped around their sanctity.
The new age of the Holocene
privileges neo-romanticism
and using people as scratching posts
to fill your disconnected sybaritic urges.
And for moments
when the inhabitants feel bitter and apathetic,
the ruinous regime sanctions policies
inspired by consequentialist philosophy.
Enraged by the new reforms, inhabitants
form political rallies
on how the new sanctions would
basically mean everyone
waking up deranged and dead.
Entrapped within the ensuing violence,
in a raging revelry,
and high on Percocet and LSD,
Velouria in her head keeps hearing an old transient message saying,
“They are grappling on to
the last bit of futility
of all the good things that ever happened
to them and they
waited all April inside a vial
for someone to come and
replace their bones with glasses.”
Backwards, her world appears different;
it’s an age of decadence and abandoned sentiments,
of vice and violence.
They stain rusted door hinges and flumes
with the pain from old wounds.
In the pockets of their braided jeans
they carry neediness
measured in decibels.
Where they turn memories
of people into
absentee colognes –
and they eat austerity measures
for lunch –
and store ghosts
of last century maximalists
in ceramic cups and Kyūsu’s –
and use the
shoulder blades
of past lovers
to cut holes in
their manufactured
epidermis –
and fill them with pheromones –
and plant magnolias to cover the holes.
Velouria, not knowing whether she is angry
or lovesick,
or the difference between
truth and illusion,
or whether she is in her world
or having paranoid schizophrenia,
starts looking for a presage
from the glibness in her head
and finds her final reprieve
off of
the dissonance in drowning.
Anindya eats music, fiction, and reality — all for breakfast. Send him fresh recipes at [email protected]
