by Satya Dash

Waking up,
you realize some passions are long
gone, and it is at once arduous to count
the ones that didn’t fall
prey to time. You teach your sister a mental
trick to calculate percentages faster and she teaches
you back—it is not all about numbers. If you begin
to self-loathe, days start vanishing right at the stroke
of noon. Every squall of rain
grows icy in your glass
of whiskey. If you go on wanting
to please everybody, a good friend said, you will grow
into a demon. A second cup of tea warms
the cinders of your first
cup of coffee. Caught in traffic, someone sneers
at their doppelganger before the odd twitch
of self-recognition; someone reveals a secret
to a stranger during a casual conversation at the bus
stop; you scroll twitter and develop
an obsession with the seven-day
moving average of deaths
in the city. You switch off
your phone and sleep, slipping painless
into dreams where you meander door to door
selling books. Once by accident, you show up
at the house of someone you used
to be in love with
and give away all
your books. The way you separated from them
is the way you shall wake up tomorrow—startling
for water by the bed, moaning softly
into damp diagonal stripes
of the pillow cover.

Satya Dash is a recipient of the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Broken River Prize. His poems appear in Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, and Diagram, among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator. He has been nominated previously for Pushcart, Nina Riggs Poetry Award, Orison Anthology, and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack and now lives in Bangalore, India. He tweets at: @satya043.