A Necklace of Skulls

Sprawled on the cool floor on a wild, blazing noon, with A Necklace of Skulls, I wasn’t sure what I was preparing myself for. Things began to unfold in an inert, unhurried, and sedate manner. There were occasional jolts of course, but I was safe. My eyes were getting heavier with every passing second and just when I thought I couldn’t further any longer, it began:

It was never a painful rain of blows, nor lethal enough to draw some blood. It hit me like a whiplash; its even more cruel because it leaves marks, right where they do not belong. But, as I reached the end, writhing and whimpering, I realized, what an ecstatic dance of irony it had been all this while.

Here’s a glimpse of those beatings:

Advice to Women:
Keep cats
If you want to learn to cope with
The otherness of lovers.
Otherness is not always neglect—
Cats return to their litter trays
When they need to.
Don’t cuss out of the window
At their enemies.
That stare of perpetual surprise
In those great green eyes
Will teach you to die alone.

Another Way to Die
Being eaten by maggots
Is fantasy

The real thing is
To touch the outlines
Of the hands, the hair
To find no body there

In a few hours
Or a few days
The bits reassemble
A breast flies back
A dull pain
Where the heart should be
An ache for a touch
Or a quarrel

For a while again
You are almost
Human.

I certainly don't have, even the slightest inclination to put the name of the poet out here, as she says in Don’t Look for My Life in These Poems

Poems can have order, sanity,
Aesthetic distance from debris.
All I’ve learnt from pain
I always knew,
But could not do.

Yet one is tempted to scribble the name of Eunice de Souza.

Now Playing:: Aaiye meherbaan...........................Asha