A purple umbrella blossoms
deep inside my cranium.
Vascular inventories of surreal time:
haloed by rainbows and lightning,
my head is an anvil of agony.

Throbbing hammers shatter
the mirrors of my eyes.
Candles inside these irises,
with recipes of wax, smoke, and fire.

The body twists and turns
on its spool of nerves,
the threads which gather
their synaptic marginalia
in my insomniac bed.

Sleep descends on parachute-
dark wings of alprazolam,
flunarizine, or sumatriptan.
The night drips iron shadows
through the sieve of 3 a.m.
into the wet tar of dreams
black with nausea and terror.

This is the hour when pain
stamps its postmark on my envelopes —

their destinations: nowhere,
their freight: my tomorrows.

Srinjay Chakravarti is a 35-year-old journalist, economist, writer and translator based in Salt Lake City, Calcutta, India. He was educated at St. Xavier's College, Calcutta and at universities based in Calcutta and New Delhi. His poetry and prose have appeared in numerous publications worldwide. In North America, these include The Cafe Irreal, Gowanus, Euphony, The Melic Review, Eclectica Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature, The Foliate Oak, Bare Root Review, Astropoetica, The Bathyspheric Review, The Avatar Review and Ygdrasil. He has won one of the top prizes in the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Poetry Competition 2007.