LOVE IN THE TIME OF ANGIOPLASTY
if the god of non-existent desires asks me
what i desire to be, without hesitation, i
will say i want to be a stent in her body in
one of the arteries leading to her heart.
firmly positioning myself there, i will
watch the passage of corpuscles and
molecules, thoughts and events, kisses
and chemical compounds of love, a few
stars, certain violet moons, some sparks
of exploding light and galaxies in demise.
she will never know I am there inside her,
smoothening the creases, dilating the
blocks, swimming in her protoplasm,
merging with her genes, navigating spirals.
when she dies, i will watch her heart
decay, her body dissolve. I will float
in some fluid moored to her bones.
Her soul, translucent, will sway
above me, her hair pouring down
on me. She will pick me up gingerly
and stick me in her hair bun like a pin.
that will be the moment I choose to die.
Ravi Shanker (Ra Sh): He translates from Malayalam and Tamil to English and vice versa. Published English translations of stories by Bama (Tamil), Mother Forest (from Malayalam) and Waking is Another Dream (Sri Lankan Tamil Poetry) and for Anthologies of Dalit literature published by OUP and Penguin India. Published poems in magazines, journals and anthologies. He is one of the five contributing poets to the anthology, “A Strange Place Other Than Earlobes” (five voices seventy poems). A collection of his poetry, "Architecture of Flesh" was published by Paperwala in 2015. E-mail: shankeran@gmail.com