Where would my story end?

by Yuyutsu Sharma

Where would my story end?
     for Amanda Bhabhi

In the crevices
of a cracked paradise

jolting from
an elastic energy

trapped in
the earth’s sanguine womb ?

A heaven tilted
sideways, the paralytic

face of a hillside
grandma left out in the cold

by dim-eyed demons
of a flailing polity ?

They predict a disaster here,
a future fractured

from the accumulation
of an ocean of a molten mass,

a divine frenzy,
a reversed vision

of the earth’s own unmaking,
retracting herself into an island again

a Jambudeep,
an island of eternal Vedic hymns.

Someday, they say,
the earth will change her side in sleep,
exasperated from
a turbulence in the reservoirs

of kinetic energy,
shaken from a vision of an impending doom,

an Ajeema / a Harati
our primordial mother goddess

of numerous off-springs
burying her own squealing new-born

beneath the weight
of her hefty torso in the whirling

black tunnels of her post natal sleep . . .

Geophysicists, panelists,
prophets of the whimsical West

pundits of the twisted East.
I see them squinting into the fogged holes,

imagining a cosmic crash
in the valley of the Lord himself . . .

But where’s there a way
for me to desert it, and end my grand story,

my Himalayas, my Nepal,
like my own destiny,

a life suspended in mid-sentence
a journey in smudged lanes of century’s crooked sleep,

the broad-chested canyons,
the glaciers melting like tantrik trophies

from the Master of Time,
Padmasambhava’s snow sanctuaries

full of the thawed bodies
of bleary-eyed wanderers reeking of hallucinating yantras,

hubris of consuming
fresher fragments of newer galaxies . . .

What if tomorrow,
what if this very moment

Kailash opens up,
tearing up the carpets of white rabbits

racing along
the green pastures of the turquoise lake,

what if Lord’s own
pinnacle of patience crumbles

and newly found republic
turns into a tiny morsel

in the jaws of a mighty
dragon of an apocalypse ?

Where, I wonder,
then would my story end ?