Rituja Patil

Ars poetica: problems

If only all my problems started as tawdry
brawls inside my head and ended in a poem.

How convenient it would be, how thrilling.
But they don’t. They start as words spoken

too harshly or days spent without moving
even a single bit. Sometimes, as forgetting to

swallow a pill, or as being swallowed whole
by pain. My heart does not know how

to keep pace with all this beginning.
My mind cannot grasp the sheer range of it.

It is exhausting, being amidst so many beginnings
while you are amidst so many middles.

If I’m lucky, they end in a poem. But mostly, they
never end. The spill is uncontainable.

Oil on water, fire on farmland. I cannot hold
anything within the fragile boundaries of my body.

And every day, I burst open anew.