These verses move between solitude and society, memory and becoming; tracing the emotional landscapes of contemporary life by reflecting art, war, identity, language, and longing. These poems invite readers into a journey of self-discovery and vulnerability, and show what it means to search for life amidst uncertainty and change. And yet there is a poem on Puchka’s, we hope you like them as much as Srijani does.
1. Collaborator
All the artists seek inspiration
To create art
Instead, they get collaborators of various sorts
A half-life is in search of the other half
To crave for a union
Made in heaven
An eternal fulfillment
Of dreams and illusions
Through creation and recreation;
Collaborators co-parent the artworks
Even after the divorce and mortal separation;
Art is not fancy
Not a thing distanced from life,
It celebrates the rhythm of breath
That the collaborators inhale
In the form of lucid ideas.
03.11.2025
2.The birth of the artists
My vision is going away
So I capture the sight with my senses
Smell, aroma and fragrance
All are the same things
Those tell the tales of colours
Of the different scenes.
In the books, I read
How the artists fade away
Like stars
Like evaporating clouds
Like smoke coming out from
The butt-end of the decaying cigarettes
Not all
A few
Maybe-
This is the curse of the lot
The fame and the glamour surround them
Like death
Approaching
Towards their bodies and soul
Incorporating the idea of emptiness
The creepy thoughts
That their time of mortality has an expiry dates
Not all
A few
Maybe-
Some transgress the boundary of time and space
Make a dozen of eternal art
Among countless pieces
Leaving behind a lineage
A culture of works,
They become the history
History turns them into an artist
Raw, feeble, broken, spirited
Poetry in their mouth
And anguish in their soul
Not all
A few
Maybe-
This is how time collapses down
Eternity begins
This is how the divine destinies start
And the artists are born.
05.11.2025
3.The powerlessness of small talk
I hate small talk
The small talk is so small that
My tiny body
Fails to acknowledge its intensity
To capture its valour
And aroma,
The small talk hits me at different parts of my body
To make me realise its fragile bones,
Fragile ego, fragile senses,
The small talk is really small and naïve
Like a kindergarten kid
Often being mischievous
As it lures me to take
The lead of a boring conversation
On myth, cosmos, and life.
Stupid, it sounds
Unimportant, it appears
Disgusting, it turns out to be.
The small talk-
I hate you
My ideology crumbles down
Like a sand house;
Hour glass fails to measure the time
Of the duration of the small talk,
Being so tiny
It is overlooked by the crowd
Often go unnoticed
Remain careless
In the busy hustle of struggle and survival.
Small talk does not form anyone’s identity
As it lacks spirit and liveliness;
Alas!
Like a stagnant pond,
It emits out a foul smell.
06.11.2025
4. Silence & Noise
I chase silence
To bar the noise returning to my mind,
My body is stricken with sounds
Sound of cars,
The sound of cries of people
Sound of screams of the vendors
Sound of machines
Sound of a pressure cooker.
Throughout my existence,
I seek a calm state
Instead, I get a platitude of cacophony.
In place of Beethoven’s melody, I find harsh noise
Encircling my consciousness.
Rock & roll, rap music
Seem to be the raw evocation of sound,
The meaning of these sounds I cannot fathom.
I don’t chase noise
Noise comes to me
Like leaves appear to the trees
Spontaneously,
Like powerful overflow of emotions
I chase solitude
What I get is noisy crowd.
The world is a big bubble
That emits out an incoherent sound
Similar to the sound of the genesis of cosmos
Similar to the sound of the collision of the planets
In dreams,
The world at night falls asleep
And produces an unfamiliar sound
Of immortality,
Silence is eternal
While sound is transient
Ephemeral-
The life seems to be
Which longs for immortal silence.
Alas! I chase silence
What I get is cracking noise.
10.10.2025
5.Apocalypse of war
Any kind of war is a curse
Upon civilization
Coming down from above-
An apocalypse
Of spaces and mind.
The morning newspaper does not calm her down
Anymore,
The words turn into bloodshot
Of yesterday’s missile attack
At someone’s veranda,
Bombing on someone’s newly made café;
Dwellers,
Travelers,
Panic stricken
Are jumping like frogs,
Shrieking
Like chickens are going to be killed
For someone’s victorious glee.
From loitering death to possible shell-shocked memory
Hovering in the air
To pierce
To slit
To tranquilize for eternity.
Years have passed.
Moon has changed her seat.
Memory comes at forefront
To guide the souls,
Souls of Palestine
Collective trauma of Gaza
Geographical disruption
Fueled by
Israel- Palestine conflict;
People, sufferers, victims
Are navigating life
Through martyrdom and hopelessness,
A complete apocalyptic vision
Vision of death,
Vision of darkness
Vision of destruction
Of bodies and buildings,
Souls of broken homes,
Souls of grandparents
Narrating the other side of stories
To little hungry members;
Chaos has turned them into migrants
And refugees,
An apocalypse of dystopia
Ending of a culture
World collapses down
Orphans are begging for breakfast
In the queue of Hungerland
While the morning newspapers
Paralyses the readers’ psyche
For the time being.
2025
6. Identity and becoming
Part 1 : Still, we are alive
Listen, we are all drowned in deep sound
but these are heartless noises,
We no longer find the melody in a bird’s song,
We no longer listen to the rustling sound of the leaves
And sighs of a flowing stream,
We fail to feel the flute,
We forget to embrace our soul’s symphony.
But we are plunged into deep cacophony.
Listen, we walk, we play with people
But do not play
Childhood hide and seek,
We see with lustful eyes, we aspire a lot
But we do not relish anything fully.
We are humans with blood and flesh,
But, we do not mean it,
When violence kills peace,
justice cries in silence.
When a girl is raped,
the culprit laughs merrily.
When greed, hypocrisy are ruling,
Honestly,love are panting for little breath.
Listen,
We are lost, we are dying,
Still,we do not have sense.
How-
Why are we alive?
Maybe, this is hope,a little hope
A hope can be a dangerous thing.
Part 2: Still there is colour
Days are gone,
When I was dipped in multiple hues,
Colours and crayons drove away
My worries and woes.
A bright dawn, a rainbow, a reverie-
All were my constant joy,
My blissful soul danced with a thrush’s song.
Those days are gone now,
Today, I am in nothingness,
Silent as a grave, deaf as a corpse,
Black and white is everywhere
But that paradise is not lost.
If a mummy has its afterlife,
If a phoenix can rise
From its own debris,
If a candle can hold a flicker of decaying flame,
So does my consciousness, my entity.
’cause twenties, eighties are nothing
But different shades of colour and age
Of becoming and being.
7. Becoming
Part 1
You deny the possibility of becoming
If you keep yourself captive in this room
This space acts as a panopticon
That hinders the growth of your body
And soul,
Your entity lacks the fresh air
That you get from outside
From the vast spectrum of uncertainty
Oblivion, abyss of the future
Where the present time collapses down
Forming a falcon of supreme spirit
And divine hope;
Its celestial body soars upwards to
Immerse into
Nothingness –
A pure state of possibility.
Part 2
You are watched over
Since the beginning of the civilization,
You are watched over
To be on the right path,
You get direction from the lighthouse
Like the sailors of the giant ship.
Storm arises,
Hurray! You master the art of controlling impulses
Under the captaincy of eternal force.
Fate does not betray the momentum
The moment
The transience of life
Fate embraces your whole structure,
Like a seeker
You discover purpose
In this cosmos.
Diminishing the line between periphery and centre,
You reach a certain space
Where you find a sense of home and a balance.
Part 3
Ever flowing-
Ever becoming-
Like a youthful stream
Flows through the hills
You journey towards the sea
The last stage of becoming
Closer to maturity
To encounter
To assimilate
To submerge
Into divinity
Into light
Into calmness
Into prosperity
Of life
Of existence and being.
08.10.2025
8. Dreamy Confession
I spread my wings among my people,
I scattered some colours on those barren lands,
I painted a street of gloomy countenances,
I smoked a pipe, and
The vapour rose like a giant laugh
Of a swollen cat rubbing its hands on the window pane.
Once, I took a few sleeping Pills to get mingled with Numbness.
Neon lights stood in a queue,
The man and the woman kissed but parted.
I found a silence in deep cacophony,
But, I did not find the eyes that could soothe my Wounds,
I did not take a morsel of my food.
Everywhere I saw ‘marks of weakness’, ‘marks of woe’,
I crumbled and allowed my unconscious to flow,
To flow like an irresistible wind,
Trying to carry a message
And to expose the dry bones,
Marooned ribs of everyplace,
It was a wasteland, a cactus land
Occupied with hollow men with evil smiles,
With hallucinations;
Here, Shelley’s dreamland was lost
Saturn allured all, and made it a Dover beach.
I woke up, fell asleep, and saw a web of illusions
In my dream.
Macbeth’s dagger was hanging before my eyes,
War poets were almost dead but held their poetic pen beside two drops of blood,
I strangled my throat in madness, like the way Porphyria’s lover did it to his love.
I cycled
With the spirit of a rebel
Passion like Byron,
I sang ‘ No woman, no cry’
I whispered, “London bridge is falling, falling,
Falling down,
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady.”
This is why I have made a wall around my body,
Around my peace,
This is how I want to sleep
“Oh, starry starry night
This was how I want to die.”
2019
9.Life’s told in stanzas
Part 1: The next life
In my next life, I want to be human
Again and again
So that I can do the things
that remain unfulfilled in this life,
I want to be human again
So I can taste the sorrow of untasted misery,
I want to be human again
So I can celebrate the anguish of death
beforehand in my nightmares.
Part 2: Prostitutes
How does suffering look?
What does compulsion taste like?
Look at the prostitutes.
Like the sellers, they sell their bodies
Their souls
Their navels
From where the giant cosmos has been born,
Their fragile vaginas
The exit or entrance to the Hades
The bed of blood
A road to purgatory
A journey towards catharsis;
Their silent cries
Unheard words
Meaningless moaning
All they sell
Only to overcome starvation
To quench thirst and hunger
Just for bread
Mild butter
Sandwiches and fries.
Regular visitors search for eternal mirth
While their eyes initiate the commands
like holy rituals.
Part 3: Flashlight
Here and there
Glimpses of memory
Appear like clouds, air, and smog
Light removes darkness
Obscurity
Uncertainty
Chaos
Palpitation
Of mortal existence
Still, I open my phone’s flashlight to search for meaning
Like a nihilist.
Part 4: Storytelling of life
Life’s told in short stanzas.
It has no end.
It is going nowhere.
Even after death, it exists.
Life exists through memory
And imagination
With its wistfulness,
It has no end.
It carries itself
like an unending contract between God and the devil.
Life-
So much depth
That some lack courage
To dive in it
So shallow
That some act like the stoic.
09.10.2025
10.The eternal war
I feel so absurd that sometimes I forget
My own existence
So alienated, so estranged
I feel
Between dawn and dusk
That the entire world revolves around my tiny structure.
Everywhere I see the rampage of war
Destruction, conflict, and calamity
Changing the scenario to inclement weather.
Children of Gaza are hungry,
Looking for water in the dustbins, food centres
Israel must be tired
To send missiles regularly
Both sides are facing the tragedy of war
Displacement, hatred, and the flames of anger
Burning Passion to destroy the opponent nation
Thousands of people are homeless
Becoming refugees
In a young state
Victims of politics, policies, corruption, and diplomacy.
News channels cover the areas of ruined states
Calm agony of lost souls
Silent suffering of the civilization and cultures,
In the meantime, I remember the poem of Octavio Paz’s ” Brotherhood ”
Celebrating the unity among all
Comparing human existence with the stars
How tiny! How fragile!
Humans can be!
So do I
And my problems
My recurring thoughts, profound ideas, and existential feelings.
I start to realize the meaning of the present
Slogans of free Palestine sound better
Than the slogans of self-centered narcissism,
I realise
Self-imposed sadness is not the cure
Just like disgust and greed for power;
I feel the sensation of mirth
I feel life’s blessings
That I am still safe
And they are not.
03.10.2025
11. Phuchka
Part I: Tamarind
Another day passed
Ennui wrapped around my body
Like a warm winter jacket;
Unable to move like a mischievous fly
Unable to breathe the fresh air
Unable to gasp a sigh of relief
From the clutches of boredom
I was looking for escapades
In a tiny spicy ball of flour
Tamarind acted like a mood changer
Added some colours
To the grey, deserted lanes of my livelihood.
Its taste metamorphosed me into a spirited girl
Who was going through the process of becoming
Becoming a woman
Who compared her meditative eyeballs with the giant phuchka
To see how one needed water to baptize the soul ;
Tamarind, I nurtured a love-hate bond with you
The more I turned my head away from you, the more you lured my taste buds
The more I wanted to taste you, the more you made my life sour.
Oscillating between two contradictions of love and disgust,
I gave in to ennui
I embraced life with its utmost paradoxes
That made me a ‘woman’
Named Srijani.
Part II: Water
Miles after miles,
I was walking
In search of water,
I hoped for a drinking tap
My eyes met across every particle of earthly life
Except for
A few drops of water.
Dejected,
I sat
On a chair
kept in front of a phuchka stall
A few drops of water
Coming out of nowhere
Or from the mouth
Like a flow of luck
Or heavenly boon
Saliva, it seemed to be
To relish the essence of
A transformation
That might only be caused by
The materiality of phuchka.
It’s not an abstraction of some
Mythical figures
Not a fragmented dream
Phuchka served the purpose of water
And accelerated the process of becoming.
Part III: Salt
Like a geologist collecting salt
From seawater
The phuchka sellers sprinkled salt
With a hope of making it
A masterpiece.
Like the diseased mind of Van Gogh
Enticing himself to cut off his ears
I looked at the shaalpata
To remember its origin;
Like the magical wands, the seller used his hands
To add salt
Only to excel phuchka’s mortality.
Alas! This is how
Phuchka altered the state of mind
State of existence
Enabling the process of becoming.
29.09.2025
Srijani Dutta is a writer, independent researcher, lecturer, and an admin executive at Techno India University, India. She has published widely in academic and creative writing journals, including Cut to Cinema, Yearly Shakespeare, Setu, Parcham, and Contemporary Literary Review India, to name a few.