Sandeep Kumar Mishra

Sandeep Kumar Mishra is an outsider artist, poet and lecturer in English Literature. He has edited a collection of poems by various poets - Pearls (2002) and written a professional guide book -How to be (2016) and a collection of poems and art - Feel My Heart (2016). Recently his work has published in New England Review, Society of Classical Poets, Permafrost Journal, Human Touch Journal, Blue Mountain Review, International Times, Literary Yard, Mud Season Review, Verbal art, Stone coast Review, Asian Signature, Chiron Review, Convergence, Harbinger Asylum, Helix, High Plains Register, Literary Orphans, Marathon Literary Review, Phenomenal Literature, Quail Bell, Really System, Red Fez, The Brasilia Review, The Criterion, Third Wednesday, Ygdrasil, ZOUCH Magazine & Miscellany etc.

• A Rainbow Memory

  • When my hollow present blows
    The dying embers in the heart grate
    A fond childish Cinders glows up;
    The frozen black memory melts past colours,
    A sparkle of rainbow recollections,
    As I walk up on our trodden pavement
    I saw a slash of sea between houses;
    Thy red dress like a bright red boat
    Sink in golden sand, blue fishing nets
    Brown fort walls, green lichen beach;
    My soul speaks, my lips moves
    A frequency of meetings, a wave of hugs;
    As I net to catch these moments
    Like A street urchin’s yellow fists
    Holding the rainbow in his tiny grasp

• We Are Third World

  • Although we are forefathers of self acclaimed
    first world nations but we are third world
    In their so called socioeconomic indexes
    and other “modernity is the real development” indices,
    We don’t do dinner parties but dream of a well fed day

    Our Children study on the floor of old public school
    know the other world by the greenery and
    figures hung on its pale walls,
    They wish to run on the velvet grass
    Instead of rag picking every morning
    They recognise the outline of a dark futuristic structure
    In a pattern of present dots of daily burdens,
    In the tragic repetitions of a homeland song
    He dreams of a young entrepreneurship but
    A termite death hollows out the roots of endeavour

    You say to our men”Keep It In Your Pants!”
    And to the women, “Lock Your Knees!”
    But here sex is the only amusement
    For a three minutes of relief we are ready to repent for life

    Although Some taxable souls fashion to run charity The poor wears tattered clothes
    But rich wear them to look different
    There is an agreement between the person sitting in the car
    And the poor begging for some help

    Devalued lives Full of shadows Of slaves
    Where poverty live with out evacuation
    We are caught here in the web of the foreign aid spiders
    We prop up this capitalising protuberance
    and force feed the bourgeois class

    Civil war is source of political life and death, We have failed to understand the kind of battlefield
    we are in and our weapons to deal with it,
    our educated mind demands freedom of expression
    but never tried to know the difference between our skin and our lips

    We are a nation that sighs and cries for debt relief,
    A divided country, Brainwashed by anti-propaganda
    It’s leaders becoming millionaires every second,
    And the people, poorer every minute,
    The land filled with milk and honey, still cries “no money”

    Here the self styled media with fake morality
    Aiming for PR and controversy
    interview a petty thought repeatedly to make it a philosophy,
    In the name of so called minority
    every news is labelled with religious stamp
    highlighting the immoral as a face of nation
    belittle the good-intentions

    Sex and violence is a new form of entertainment
    big lawyers and corporations openly
    influence in the demo-crazy capitals to gain huge profits
    Is this injustice with poverty and suffering
    not a clear indication of false thoughts
    that argue over a Third World at this juncture.

• If a Poem Becomes an Enigma

  • Why is it necessary?
    A row of lights when we supposed to sleep,
    Colorful neon fantasies when we dream,
    Intoxicated breath when we should be panting with labor,
    Why are there two personalities when we have our shadows?

    Yes, they call it progress or may be
    It is another name for self-destruction,
    We intentionally suspend ourselves
    between the seas and the skies
    when we have the earth beneath our feet

    We grow the fruits of antithesis on the trees of thesis
    while there is rich land of synthesis
    As we stand among the crowd to feel the ease of empty space,
    Perhaps we hear the whispers
    of stars and planets with dead ear to human voice

    All travelling this flaky pious life with the pack of lies,
    Each face is filled with Its own far away death wrinkles
    We count billion but to consecrate the hour alone
    Why our consciences strive to be true?
    Is it sensible emptiness?
    We long to drink the pure mirage

    Every heart is dipped in dark India ink,
    The sky nurses on black milk,
    The earth trembles with its own movement,
    The Chance, Beauty and Youth
    With its burden of fear and hope of labor and play

    A poet is also part of this dilemma,
    If a poem becomes an enigma
    If a poem does not offer a solution,
    Don’t read or look at it
    otherwise it will affect you like an after effect
    of a wrongly prescribed medicine