Letters to Kafka ⋆ Eve Poetry ⋆ Poetry Feature ⋆ Aishwarya Roy

Letters to Kafka by Aishwarya Roy

𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘵𝘦𝘳 3 —
//Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.

In our room resides a sky full of colours,
Making love to the drunk, setting sun
Who’s about to pass out.
Time is bipolar.
Czechs are at war.
The poor — dying.
But here we are,
Ashes of dead stars —
An extraordinary collection of atoms
That come together
For a brief period of time,
And then fall apart.

I write you a Slovak kiss
With my crossbow lips on the paper.
And you smile,
While reading it.

𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘵𝘦𝘳 2 —

//I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.

Tonight, the moon is a few hues too deep.
And I, like the waves of azure,
Carefully try to navigate
The rugged shores of longing and heartache,
Bruised under the weight of heavy nightmares
That lovers seek refuge from
In early prayers.

You carry a tired moon inside yourself.
It is round, white, dimly lit.
And when you are full?
People become ocean waves.

𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘵𝘦𝘳 1 —

//I can’t feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.

Gustav Mahler plays in the background,
As you write about erratic family circumstances,
Exile colonies, and Gregor-ian laws.
Your words are a pearl necklace
Falling to the floor.
Collapsing —
Alarming, messy.
Astounding, too.
And I collect all the pearls,
Slouched on the floor
Like a five-year-old
That has stumbled upon a collection of marbles.

You feel like your muse;
Weaving iambic poems in the air
That sails on the clouds,
And perhaps rain on somebody,
In another time.

𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘵𝘦𝘳 0 —

//Yours.
(now I’m even losing my name — it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)

Where we go from here will be a cliffhanger.
If we survive, we’ll have a story to tell.
If we fall, I’ll build a trampoline
With these crumpled letters on the way down.

They ploughed the soil to make trenches.
They emptied rivers,
And even prayed it to the rain.
But Franz, you and me,
We’ve started a wildfire —

The one that would either light up the world,
Or burn it all down.

—

[Kafka had written a series of letters to Milena Jesenská, from 1920 to 1923. This piece is an ode to that brilliant writer, who made me feel emotions I never knew existed.

If Milena could reply to those letters, maybe this is how she would?]

Aishwarya Roy

I’m Aishwarya, the ‘god’s perfect idiot’ from Kolkata, India.

The engineering student in me reduces the probability of sadness to near zero, by feeding itself salty newspapers of memes. The artslut in me reads classics and scribbles art on forbidden walls.

I’m still the same little girl, who would write stories of love and wars upon the palms of her hands, walking around, arms outstretched, asking people to read them.

Aishwarya on Instagram

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