Lunacy Chamber
By Tamoghna Mukherjee
See how the skeins of utterance and silence get intertwined here;
remember how these foreboding walls once witnessed
the insidious act of a primordial maxim being etched
across the ridges of my sombre arrhythmic heart—
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.
This is the space where my body turns into a sacrificial altar,
yet the cumbersome paucity of dreams stops me every night
from becoming the executioner a poet is destined to be.
This chamber is a living being: one who waits with bated breath
for the metamorphosis of its prey into dilemmas coagulated.
And I have no other place to move to and cremate my
variegated past, circuitous present, and flagitious future.
If this is what inferno looks like, so be it. If this resembles
the interior of paradise even for a moment, so be it.
Here unfurls the epiphany of silence, here I sculpt the
sinews of sublimity in lieu of the seeds of dreams unknown.
See how the slanted moonbeams invade this room
at the dead of night and plunder the panacea: lunacy.
The dawn growls—Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.
Yet I speak. Yet I inscribe life upon the walls of awakening.
Tamoghna Mukherjee is a poet, translator, essayist, and PhD researcher who writes in both Bengali and English. His work has appeared in journals and magazines including Muse India, Poetry India, Verseville, Literary Cognizance, The Wise Owl, Anandabazar, and Desh. He regularly participates in poetry readings and literary events across India and tries to engage with memory, history, landscape, and the complexities of contemporary experiences through literary and academic writings. He is the author of three poetry collections and has translated the works of several Bengali poets into English.