THE CONFESSIONS OF A MASK
Disemboweled devotion offers steaming viscera, turning the body’s art into blood-ink.
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From ULR
Issue 9 – Violence
PRAYER
Amidst burning bones and a splitting earth, a faint breath is the only dawn.
June 15, 2023
Tonight the fever burns bright
The symmetry of bones visible
Like loops of tiger-light.
A black swallow collects the dead
Down the smoke-tower of sleep.
The houses are silent,
Angels on pins
Crowd the attic
In confusion.
In the eye of a tear
A crystal cathedral
Travels to its pier.
Spring depleted breasts,
Helmets of their heads.
The summer carried
The dead by train
To the king.
He wills broken hearts
And shakes the hands
Of orphans.
The earth narrows and splits
Like his forked tongue.
The wind flees on metal wings,
The still night and altar,
Onwards to cities come down
In dust.
In my prayer, no one’s child,
There is no faith
But your breath,
Faint, uncertain as dawn.
📖
PART OF A COLLECTIONSENTENCE and 2 other poems
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CP Surendran
CP Surendran is the author of five poetry collections: Available Light, Portraits The Space We Occupy, Canaries On The Moon, Posthumous Poems, and Gemini II. He has written four novels: One Love And The Many Lives of Osip B, Hadal, Lost and Found, and An Iron Harvest. He is a screenplay writer and a columnist as well. He divides his time between Delhi and Kerala.