Bleeding Solo

For the fading years
I promise not to repeat
my innocent faith in
what I saw and
what I heard and
not what I felt
or what I feared;

as time has changed
leaving me enveloped
in my ruins.

All senses, five or six,
are at sixes and sevens,
redundant at last.
I doubt my breathings
if these are clones,
and the heart that has
ceased to be sincere,
mind numb,
suspended in the air
of ignominious darkness.

Futility fuels not the hearth
nor long years of toil
nourish the earth.
What matters is a sweet
ignorance of pain.
What tastes is
the blurred vision
where bluntness
reigns supreme,
and blessed are those
who bleed in void.

Uday Shankar Ojha is a professor of English at Jai Prakash University, Chapra, Bihar, India. He has lectured widely across his country and has authored and edited a bunch of books on literature. He recently started submitting to literary magazines at his son's behest and has poems in Paddler Press, Roi Fainéant Press and The Bayou Review as of now. Uday is an avid ghazal singer and gym-goer (though he seldom says no to full Indian meals). He led his district cricket and table tennis teams in his late teens and early 20’s.