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.
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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 dayOur 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 endeavourYou 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 lifeAlthough 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 helpDevalued 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 classCivil 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 lipsWe 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-intentionsSex 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 feetWe 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 voiceAll 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 mirageEvery 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 playA 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
Pebbles
Time smooths rainbow hardness
Of tree basalt, vermilion jasper,
Silvery granite and pale feldspar
With the help of humdrum
But patient jeweler of tidesVolcano-born, earthquake-quarried,
Heat-cracked, wind-carved,
Death shapes compact among the rocks
It drifts light as a fractured boneWhen the tide uncovers
It blinks among the smashed shells,
Upset by gulls, bleached by salt and sun
The broken crockery of living thingsAn eagle surveys from the upland,
Unsympathetic to the burdens
I have carried here,
The sea would not hug me, so I sit,
Hollow as driftwood, jumbled as pebbles
I Painted An Ocean
I painted an ocean
But forgot the shore,
There were no ships,
When I took a close look,
It was my isolationSailing like the sea waves
I searched alone for centuries
To add the travelers
In my voyage,
Still singular I standOn this mortal deck
I need an island to anchor
When I call on a radio
It becomes silent monologue outward,
The reply comes from the resounding insideWith every tsunami from the bosom of the core
I feel like conulariid without pearls,
Although I have vastness of Dead Sea
But no light house of life fervor
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