Contemporary Literary Review India | Print ISSN 2250-3366 | Online ISSN 2394-6075 | Impact Factor 8.1458 | Vol. 7, No. 3: CLRI August 2020

Sarthak Chauhan

To Bukowski

In the cheapest of rooms

Sits a dirty young man

Reeking of cheap perfume

And menthol cigarettes.

He stares at the empty bottles

Next to the dried red roses

And crushed cigarette butts,

He glares at a stare staring back-

He sees a child,

Clenching to death’s cold hand.

And his heart begins to giggle

As his eyes begin to weep-

Not for the world so brittle

Not for the women who left

Not for the men who weren’t

Not for the books or the poems

Not for the bottles of vodka

Not for the dried red roses

But the child who died

And the smile that went with him.

He sits there, staring

Till the shards of this peculiarity

Pierce deeply within.

He peeks out of the window

And turns down the blinds

For the world is too cruel for him.

So he grabs a pen and a paper

And buries his agony beneath words

The dirty young man writes

To the dirty old man,

That, once, was in a cheap room too

Just like him.

Sarthak Chauhan is a 21 year old artist and poet from Shimla who is currently based in Delhi.

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