Cerebral-Cemeteries | Ritiksha Sharma

for when there’s a blank space writing itself,
names and people you used to call; have become like

pages torn from a book, words ripped away wordlessly,
chewed away letter by letter; scattered

in dumbfounded stupor, on profiles of an elusive olden archive;
jolted out of daze by esoteric codecs of conversion.

Roads swallowed under weathered wheels of a car,
speeding to wherever they say there is help; another page

ingested by hungry worms giving it a go, going places
governed by memory lately, tangibility is lost.

It’s been hard to find a good time to break down
as we lay besides ourselves, heart-wrecked.

If there ever was such a time it hides away, sick of casuistry;
it didn’t test positive, but we did.

Cerebral cemeteries,

Incessant pounding in the head, someone knocking from
the inside. It is the sound of a city, it’s a guise, it belies

names and people refusing to be conspicuous, to be gone,
to be dead. Cerebral Cemeteries in your head, alternate cities

built on principles of intangibility, textured stretch marks
on brain tissue, the choir of names and people you used to

call; it is the sound of a mind vandalizing itself; when there
is a sudden unreasonableness. A pace assumed by death:

all spaces overwhelmed. It is a time
for no walls, no plots and no fires.

Cerebral cemeteries,

For when conspicuosity drives you mad. Say why don’t you
rest your eyes awhile? Names and faces unfading in folios of

a sepia washed memory. Paralyzing-unparalyzing warmth.
As it turns out:

No peace for you.
And no rest.

Until one day you cease to exist: flesh and bone;
find your own way to a city inside someone else’s head

Cerebral cemeteries.

Ritiksha Sharma is a graduate in history currently based in New Delhi, India. Her interests include intangibility, history of intersections of the real and imagined, and the idea of simultaneity of the literal with the metaphorical.