sheikha a. & suvojit banerjee · nyctophiliac confessions is the 17th installment of praxis’...

Sheikha A. & Suvojit Banerjee: Nyctophiliac Confessions

Copyright Suvojit Banerjee & © Sheikha A., 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, retained or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the

author. Published by Praxis Magazine

Website: www.praxismagonline.com

Address: Plot D49 Nsukka Street, Garki, Abuja 970001 Nigeria

Cover Painting and all images: © Robert Rhodes Book Design/Layout: Laura M Kaminski

http://www.praxismagonline.com/

Nyctophiliac

Confessions

Sheikha A. ● Suvojit Banerjee

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION - Tariro Ndoro .................................................................................................. 1

Sheikha A…of decaying nights:

Inoculation .......................................................................................................................... 4

Lichen ................................................................................................................................. 5

Olympus .............................................................................................................................. 6

Spindle ................................................................................................................................ 7

Adagio ................................................................................................................................. 8

Reading My Bones .............................................................................................................. 9

Webbed.............................................................................................................................. 10

Dispersal ............................................................................................................................11

Burnt ................................................................................................................................. 12

Sallow ............................................................................................................................... 13

The blood in the moon ...................................................................................................... 14

Earnest............................................................................................................................... 15

Protégé .............................................................................................................................. 16

Erode ................................................................................................................................. 17

Resuscitate ........................................................................................................................ 18

Suvojit Banjeree…of love and madness:

Day382: Another scamper through the city ...................................................................... 20

Painting depression in one afternoon ................................................................................ 21

Ignis Urit Semper .............................................................................................................. 22

Remnants of a poet............................................................................................................ 23

Words don't make sense anymore ..................................................................................... 24

Bone-signs......................................................................................................................... 25

Always wanting more ....................................................................................................... 26

There's a war everywhere.................................................................................................. 27

The happy life or lack thereof ........................................................................................... 28

Un-required ....................................................................................................................... 29

The Acceptable Madness .................................................................................................. 30

Fool Star ............................................................................................................................ 31

Choose wisely, Leonidas ................................................................................................... 32

Angkor-Wat, or the Gods are sleeping .............................................................................. 33

Invoke ............................................................................................................................... 34

ABOUT THE AUTHORS ............................................................................................................ 35

ABOUT THE ARTIST .................................................................................................................. 35


Page1

INTRODUCTION – Tariro Ndoro

“The night is cold enough to inspire poetry,” says Sheikha A. in her poem, “Reading My Bones.” This is the basis of Nyctophiliac Confessions – poems that are

introspective and luminal, poems that require a certain amount of silence and space to be fully formed and appreciated. Reading these poems, I imagined that they

were the kind of poems that assert themselves unbidden during a bout of insomnia. (A nyctophiliac being someone who loves the night or loves darkness).

Nyctophiliac Confessions is the 17th installment of Praxis’ chapbook series and contains twenty six poems written by two poets, Sheikha A. and Suvojit Banerjee,

interspersed with abstract paintings by Robert Rhodes. The poems of Sheikha A. are quiet, using imagery from the natural world to convey

a sense of pathos:

There will always be more than one way of keeping you alive. You did not think like rose petals plucked away from its bud

while talking aloud to the wind about a love as if the petals would carry like a smart human

In “Adagio,” Sheikha A. explains this preoccupation with night as being something

that can’t be ignored. Once a “dark place” exists it must be acknowledged:

I sit pondering the route this poem ought

to take: you can’t call a dark place anything else, but what it is: the typical black between

the typical grey The two poets meld and complement each other well. Sheikha A.’s poems speak of

the wind and the chrysalis and flowers; Suvojit Banerjee’s demonstrate a deep affinity for the night and the ethereal. His poems highlight the ache of sorrow

against the surreal backdrop of images such as stardust and nebulae, invoking history and mythology.

Thus he addresses Leonidas of Sparta in the poem, “Choose Wisely, Leonidas” and using the imagery of Vesuvius and Pompeii to illustrate the depth of his heartbreak

in the poem, “Ignis Urit Semper”:


Page2

Yet I’ve arisen, and now

Vesuvius inside me, I am to burn down our paradise with my

own hands, this fire burning always.

In this vein, it seems his duende is an aching, unreciprocated and failed love. Banerjee considers night in the city as both a trigger and conduit of loneliness in

the poem, “Day 382: Another scamper through the city”:

My eyes are stained red, my

vigour famished, my body aching for another

Although both poets speak of and to the dark, these poems are by no means lachrymose but instead, invite the reader to a silent space of introspection and

meditation.

Tariro Ndoro

August 2018

Tariro Ndoro is a Zimbabwean storyteller. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Afreada, Fireside Fiction, Kotaz, The Kalahari Review, La Shamba, New Contrast and other journals. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Rhodes University and

participated in a Digital Arts Exchange programme for poets and photographers in 2017. Tariro was longlisted for the Writivism Short Story Prize in 2017 and

shortlisted for the 2018 Babishai Niwe Poetry Prize. She is Associate Editor (Fiction) at Praxis Magazine Online.


Page3


Page4

Inoculation

There will always be more than one way

of keeping you alive. You did not think like rose petals plucked away from its bud while talking aloud to the wind about a love

as if the petals would carry like a smart human brain to a pot of soil or a field to grow anew,

like a flower-chrysalis that would sprout from silk, that you would end painlessly and weightlessly; that knowing how to read

between the lines will keep you alive like a mystery in a book revealed at the end;

that you could adopt anyone’s shadow to amuse your soul, would play out faultlessly; that the less you connect the more enticing

you become. One of the many tricks I have learnt from your gift is the immaculate

techniques of breeding; stealthily, silently slinking into your blood where my body knows to abort without killing.


Page5

Lichen

My lines are buried under a state of amnesia; a thought landing on shifting plates,

worn out from repeated, oft mistaken devoted, utterings; it is hard existing within weathered words –

the collective salt – still managing to grow like opening the traps of an oyster shell only to walk into another one – a different spell –

the same coven. I can look at you like a face only just filled in with fresh paints – different house –

the same familiarity. You’ve been in my dreams like a cliché in a rhyme – different meter – same missive. You can come to be unaltered

like an unopened board game; I won’t recall; shapeshifting subversive fantasies, you live on

different peaks, the same moss.


Page6

Olympus

The souls have clamoured on like an epilogue to the ditties of the High Posts; a poet’s cure

in verses light – no descensions – no conditioning in a sense of constancy, for the revolutions

dug abysmal paths into denser tombs holding off fire in icy vestibules; a gothic entity has turned its eyes inwards to see truer

fugue in the fog where the grass grows under, the eyes of earth-feeders glow

like rhubarbs and the air stays withdrawn to mortal abdomens. There are bigger typhoons of beauty to shelter in the High House –

the place of gales winds through an alleyway of carnage.


Page7

Spindle

She walked like death opened its gates pouring out of her mouth, knowing many yarns

were extricated from the bleed-less – a yellow sun that didn’t know snow – flesh that hung like a hived

sheet of puckered berries. The cataclysmic notions of the grave-yard magic held the façade in stillness; the comparison of all things big; corroded cenotaph

of phosphorous remains; there were birds once jilted for their vocations, and the plethora of fauna jived

to the cadence of a blue ringed flute. The notes possessed a lire so enticing, the lips of a silver face witnessed queues of inquisitors, cardinal in motives,

practised of swords, but unskilled of wizardry; she had watched the moon rotate around a Saturn,

the way her rust-tinged tongue spun into her shaft endless lengths of hair – purple thread over skins of snakes.


Page8

Adagio

Words have demonstrated their bones and recited off dehydrated tongues

as I sit pondering the route this poem ought to take: you can’t call a dark place anything

else, but what it is: the typical black between the typical grey: this indefatigable cycle of a falling day into a sinking night;

my heirlooms have been expelled from my deoxyribonucleic acidic branches

and have bloomed into shapes of limbs that look as if underwent a decapitation on a sterile but discarded gurney; the ache

of acclimating to degradation now turned into an odd sense of agitate-pride to have

mastered meandering without belonging longer than should; the purgatory blankness on death-deprived faces: there can be no other

way to write out this congealed existentiality but with a thick ink of trite-full metaphors.


Page9

Reading My Bones

The night is cold enough to inspire poetry; the shadow of the leaves against my room’s

wall dance to the susurration of the wind’s whimpering, the lights have flickered off

to the commands of an unapologetic control centre, shoving the beings that exist between dark and light into an unprovoked ceding –

with the last blink of the fluorescent, it opens its eyes. All the wonder about science

and its proportions, the balance by which the world quavers, one part day, second part night, the earth rolls in the name of solstices,

sometimes aggressively, other times timorously, but shadows have been nailed to planks

the prying off of which tears away a piece that grows a new head; a year ends in a day by night, when the power goes out each time

the walls turn into screens, most times white other times sludge art of a dismantled past,

but none times for it to cease projecting.


Page10

Webbed

Your spindly carcasses suspended by their last flesh,

their voices spooled

into their throats – the last gasps –

have been deftly cocooned. The corners of my room

hang by your dictates as the walls huddle in obeisance;

they keep your nests warm

while you lurk, your scent picking up on a defiance. I hide

in a new place this time,

your eyes phosphorescent against my paling tenacity.

You have me sequestered by the span of your web,

as it glints in the dim

like sequinned dystopia. I feel my mind paralyze

to your sting. Numbness takes over a now idled frenetic;

your medicine has worked. My eyes like constricting voids,

but my pulse keeps rhythm

with the walls as you ambush me into compromise.


Page11

Dispersal

You don’t sit on any mantles, I haven’t exalted you to heights,

I can read well into your black and white silence, the stillness

in the photos. Your Elysium denotes a voodoo –

living in a better place. The marks on your back well-guarded by

silks and corduroys – laced perfidies.

The shoes on your feet depict nobility; the soul in soles

would know of haggardness that tread over shards of miasmic deceptions.

I have inherited your marks,

maybe not the face in accuracy, but I possess your legacy –

giving away in oracular pieces to live inside many vessels.

You will find me as I will you; my ambulatory fate will succeed

over legions that you call posterity, our stagnancy unsealed – my destiny squandered.


Page12

Burnt

Hear into this echo, laying dead

silent like a spider’s

aging cobweb, hear into it nonetheless,

listen to it breathe

huskily, alternating high and low

notch; your hearing focused, fastened to

the emptiness shuffling its grime-picked boots,

the scent of oldness:

a decomposed incense;

decaying memories in a youth-like skull

ambitiously in denial of an evanescing

clarity; fading eye sight holding steadfast

to an ephemeral epiphany

like smoked out dreams tipped to expunge

the last of its embers,

the very echo of which you lay faithfully by.


Page13

Sallow

It was a C-section birth, the night hadn’t fallen naturally, like a pickle in a jar – sweet-fungal

quality; the perennial confounding, tendrils erupting from lacerations; the clouds a panoply

like a dare to survive, like a rusting frame on the walls of truth; the things in between elastic from contractions, allusive of pain, the fleeces

that staled; the pancreatic throbbing of stars rebirthing a future – minds – obliterated of its

past; the beings having had retained memory, night times in constant labour, the mid at the start, the clocks that crumbled, the eyes

that opened in the instant to close, waters of the womb like rancid dew on the morning

leaves – the sudden need to linger upon a phase hard to exit.


Page14

The blood in the moon

The roads outside lay lost in silence, a breeze probably touches by it

like a wafting river that teases and plays with the rocks by its bank, like in a game

of tag, and the river quickly flutters off glancing back in thrill and glee to monitor the distance of its pursuer,

keeping good arm’s distance, picking up speed upon close approach

while bobbling far off into the setting sun’s obscurity. I love being lost in such silence of these roads, and just the sound

of the wind, my thoughts gathered around me in like a bonfire circle,

their plain, innocuous faces sitting under curled hands, drawing into the fables I craft, word after word

by the passing moment, as it comes to my mind, I deliver to their fascinated

faces, hardly believing but accepting indubitably. I live in the silence of this

moment, many times to make it seem like years have gone by staring at the blankness from windows,

the blank roads under a black sky till the colour of the sun penetrates

the blank moon to blinding light.


Page15

Earnest

I can never write you enough, you hanging there by the trees

instead of with the rest of the sky, leaning into the leaves, resting

your broke-wearied body on newly sprung twigs – they bunching up to best huddle

your onerous deflating. Fronds fallen by the river, their destiny

entirely in the hands of the moody breezes, gaze up at their cousins holding your mass together

conjecturing the measure of hours until their fragile limbs fracture

and your sorrows descend upon another weightless vessel.

You are not unaware of my copious admiration,

I write you like religion; leave them trees and hang by me,

the white mists of the sky leave you despondent, the branches on trees will purge and leave unhealable

cicatrix reminders of their hospitality for tending you on this hapless night.

Rest you on me, fey away your porcelain truths

on my celibate panacea – I will incept without barter.


Page16

Protégé

There can be no abundance like a measure on a scale on the one speck of your silent

soul you consistently directed me towards, when the route was straight;

there can never be volumes laced on your breathing structurally, letting me

know the quality of the moment I should have felt with precise poignancy

and the redundancy I infused in perfection for suggesting to say more than do;

there can never be intelligence large like superfluous current in a broken wire

giving me the understanding of futility in wanting words more than sensory evolution.


Page17

Erode

into the essence of me that ebbs and recedes with a conviction weak,

yearning deep a thousand miles to gather in blight little pieces,

helping me germinate infertile tears of wet addictions to plant in your eager cravings for me.

You become my undertow; my drift

high dwindling off ecstasy, slipping unfeeling sadness in cranky hours conceived and aborted by me.

I play you like a rehabilitation toy to carousel my boredom, gestating

incurably…I lead you into erosion.


Page18

Resuscitate

I’ve been perfecting the art of obscuring with the impeccability of a tumble down a rabbit hole,

the lines of a love poem have converted

to a different faith, abandoning the divinity of mountains for tunnels

where the sand is black from glowing a blue flame for far too long,

the sun filters the green as the moon does gold, and the woods are known by an unnatural name

like the love in the heart of a shadow

that resurrects on nights of a Lepus feast, and the mouths of boulders don’t open

and the sky dresses a feral cloud

with its own impatience;

the howls of wolves have become white as the sheet of fear,

and love is written as moon runes with a piece of coal on wisdom-aged papyrus.


Page19


Page20

Day382: Another scamper through the city

Street lights move and reflect on the glass

to lash out on the empty backseat, searching for human flesh; My car drags into the night

screeching, scaring dogs and demons alike. My eyes are stained red, my

vigour famished, my body aching for another.

I search for the deepest breasts to throw my embarrassments into. Hide in the crevices like an animal holding

on to the last patch of its turf, I tug

my casual-dressed middle-class hypochondriac self every night to find that salvation, following

the mirages of the city and its notions of lust-love-eternity.


Page21

Painting depression in one afternoon

Watercolours flow on one another like mating serpents; bare skin

a canvas, he paints his depression onto her, and she

lets herself become a vessel. Outside, harbour seagulls squeal happily as if they had found the biggest shoal

of their lives. The lonely steamer sighs a moist horn

and ventures out into the grey sea. They spend that afternoon making pictures and blurring pictures,

and in the end disappear amidst colours like two lost

grassheads in a valley of green.


Page22

Ignis Urit Semper

I bleed fire from my chest wound that looks like a crater spewing out

hot lava from inside. The Oracle warned me before of my

Babylon with you being turned into the ruins of Pompeii, but like the drunk gods

I drove away that mortal fear and poisoned myself with your

entangles. Wheels turned, you chose the titan over me, and left me to

die, like a condor leaving a helpless prey on the mountaintops of

Andes. Yet I’ve arisen, and now Vesuvius inside me, I am to burn down our paradise with my

own hands, this fire burning always.


Page23

Remnants of a poet

Stardust accumulated in little jars that you kept by the window which looks towards the city. The city

which brews hatred and love in the same kettle and then serves in little earthen cups to

hungry minds. The sea sighs and ends in rocky shores and pitch roads around it take it far away to nothingness, but hey

look at them pretty lights, like runways to morning stars.

Your little wind chime sings tinkling lullabies to plastic dolls and strapless nights, so you can preserve

your tears alone inside the diary; The little balcony keeps your sanity

from the inviting sky. You have no pictures of me, love, but I fly by you on dreamy dawns

and tiring dusks. You’ve built this city to keep me out from your town of

memories. Yet your body, every tiny ounce of it

breathes my poetry like the bright green leaves smelling of morning dew. You killed the man,

but couldn’t hang the poet by the bed.


Page24

Words don't make sense anymore

Ten years back you and I were meaningless words on a yellowed out notebook.

Then fate drew a line and joined us together; we made poetry in

monsoon afternoons under gaslights. How daft was I to not realize - that not all poems

make sense, and not all words are meant to be

used with one another. Now look at me; searching for meaningful ways to stitch together stray letters from the alphabet

and failing horribly.The incandescent

ten-year-stack of channeled words poetry, prose, novels – they’ve all left me, like you.

Leaving a carcass of jumbled emotions, burnt unrecognizable.


Page25

Bone-signs

What does it take to read the insignia in your bones? The child of moonlight slowly

draws near, and your present casts a heavy shadow on the wall.

I can’t reach through that veil. Your naked breasts smell like past regrets; I, like a lost explorer

try to find my way out of every crevice, only to fall into another maze.

Are you laughing at my despair? I hope not. Because deep down you’re the same as me.

Dejected, depraved, soul-searcher, lone star in a galaxy.

With empty promises kept in nicely ribbon-taped shoeboxes, named and dated, and nailed to your heart.

Oh, I was reading your bone-signs again bare yourself for me,

please?


Page26

Always wanting more

I offered you thirty types of love, yet you

always wanted number

thirty-one.


Page27

There's a war everywhere

All the dark alleys joined hands and screamed their inner brightness

as Champs-Élysées, and from the top of the Eiffel Tower

angels cheered for them. She was sitting away from everyone, slowly undulating her copper feet

in the black waters of Seine, wishing for the falling stars

to bring him back from the shores of Normandy.


Page28

The happy life or lack thereof

The happy life is a wonderful metaphor, like the blessings from a hangman who’s about to

pull the lever. Our lives are blended illusions and puzzles of mixed chemicals that we

try to segregate throughout our lives, unknowingly that the litmus we use slowly

becomes our own downfall.


Page29

Un-required

I am not needed anymore, you said, as the world was dancing and celebrating

first monsoons; I let myself get drenched in the rain

to wash the blood you left when you forced my heart into my ribs again.


Page30

The Acceptable Madness

Looking at the serrated edges of steel; my freedom a few inches away from the throbbing vein, I

frame the utopia that rests on the fabled other side.

Like a rusty machine that chugs, does its work, albeit with loud grumble, monochrome

monotonous mo-no,

I’ve been slowly diluting the poison in the air inside my blood. Letting the afraid, the intellectual,

the dumb, the lewd, the diplomatic, the ones with white masks and no

face at all, hug me and tell me I’m their sibling. Because I’m Bukowski’s third monkey;

losing all of my mind and melting away my soul,

to become accepted.


Page31

Fool Star

Like a naive crow who rears a cuckoo by thinking it as her own,

you let the demon in believing you could tame it

down. Love is a poison which resurrects even the oldest of wounds, and you fall prey to the mazes of

bodyparts wrapped around lust-laden directions; when it is over,

the demon has been formed, and given a mortal name. Me.

http://wedreaminneon.tumblr.com/post/113273060991/fool-star


Page32

Choose wisely, Leonidas

You wished your heart be as wide as the universe, and the galaxies be your clusters of

good hope, and the nebulae be memories of us.

Then, love, what are those dying stars and black holes?


Page33

Angkor-Wat, or the Gods are sleeping

The fluffy clouds crowded in one corner of the orange sky, I looked at

the fading shadow of myself slowly get eaten by that of

the Angkor-Wat. The silence screaming into my ears through the empty hallways,

the elder God was whispering his story; the trident, the chakra,

the lotus, the destruction - the rebirth.


Page34

Invoke

The moon carries scars like the ochre stains of blood

on your wedding gown. The incense stick burned out; the candles

on the pentagram melted, spitting out burnt smells, telling us the summoned beasts are around us, ravenous and canine -

only our entangled bodies understand the feasting of flesh is only skin-deep, the passion

flowing soul to soul like first shocks of electricity through poles of a mad experiment. The little slits on the destinies are

howling like lone wolves tonight; You’re drained of lust, I am

anaemic of every sanity, yet we continue carnaging. Lines blurred, hearts pumping beyond mortal limit, we travel through

Dante's inferno, but the fire that incinerates us is

different from the ones amongst the spiralling

torture-halls. The night is dying. Trees rasping, whispers warning us of excommunication.


Page35

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Sheikha A.’s work is largely depiction of life and the experiences brought in any form. She believes in the spoken or written word expressed after having being deeply felt, and that writing is one of the better mediums that can help express

what cannot be effectually spoken. Her work appears in a variety of literary venues, both print and online, including several anthologies by different presses.

The writer has a business degree in marketing and has for about six collective years worked behind a desk in administrative and coordinative functions that has given

her valuable and profound insight into human behaviour.

Her writing began to take shape in her early twenties, but braved to put her writing out to larger audiences, only now, after a decade of keeping it to herself. She has a bordering intolerance towards tardiness which is ironic because her self-conflicting

tardiness keeps her ideas oscillating and wavering, failing her words to find the light of ink many times. She hopes to overcome that, gradually or precipitously, so her

words are given due justice.

Suvojit Banerjee is from India and the United States. His works have been published in many Indian and International journals and magazines and featured in

several anthologies. He currently works in a software company, and has worked as a lead writer/reviewer for a technology website. He observes, sometimes giving up

consciousness in return. It is a dangerous thing, this silent stalking of nostalgia, but he has a maddening urge. He follows the trail, from decaying jetties to swanky corporate buildings, picking up little breadcrumbs of memories and then giving

them their due place in white and yellowed out papers. He continues to juggle between poetry and prose, not deciding on where his heart lies. May be it lies in

both of them, may be in none.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Robert Rhodes is a poet and artist. We are grateful to him for allowing us to use his artwork as an accompaniment for this series. Many of the images included herein are from his “Night Etudes” series. More of his artwork can be found on his

Facebook page.

sheikha a. & suvojit banerjee · nyctophiliac confessions is the 17th installment of praxis’...

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