Slammed: Father

I never understood
Any of your endless calculations.
(You added my future and subtracted my past.)
Nor did I heed to
Your remarkably few words.
(Our little reserved sort of communication.)We've always been set apart—miles apart
Like shores running downstream;
Looking at each other,
Furious and dubious,
Of what life may turn out to be.
You wanted me to be a beetle
On the china plate of a leaf.
(A sod of vomit lay all around.)
I must feed on myself
I must suck my own blood—else,
I will die—you wanted me to be a stick insect
As small as an atom—
An impolitic dead beetle,
Only to be dismantled by the hands of Time,
Carried by a line of ant coolies,
Eaten and stored for winter.
But I was a disturbance
In your mirrors of Dreams.
My eyes were red and raw—spilling over.
You blinded me with
Your lights of ignorance
And I tasted the malignancy
Of the leaf
With my blind eyes—
Effacing the memories of time—to zeros
Shutting my life to nothing.
Father,
You weighed down
Like a Gestapo boot on my brain,
Killing my hope that lived on
Without sustenance.

Bibek is an undergraduate student of Engineering at the Institute of Engineering, Thapathali Campus, in Kathmandu.

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