Shibaji Ray \ Monsoon 2015

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questions

on birthdays I over-think,
about your enthusiasm

and

touching upon the furthest end
of being formless          
                     I ponder, mother what
it felt to think before self-knowing,          
                     in that mediated dreamscape.

was it a borrowed parasitic memory          
                    inviting comfort and deceit from                        
                                       your conscience
or was it a new rule of servitude, to balm 
my loss of ownership, to a name you had called me?

and sometimes I do not ask questions.
that we overcame identity together
through pain in a timeless struggle, seems good enough.
perhaps we have always existed in this shared realm
and ‘birth’ was a simple augmentation of your instinct for endurance;                      

                     – and a fragment of our memories to become                         
                     an inheritance.

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Shibaji Ray lives in New Delhi, India.