By: Sandeep Kumar Mishra

Books are in restless wintry mood,
Their voices seem urgent,
What the books whisper
we prefer not to mention in social circles
Yet they know more,
Have been where we can’t go
in the clothes we wear

They are unsettled, we are motionless,
As their voices are foreign to our ears,
They disdain, will shake us off
Too many voices, too many lost conversations

When I open a page, fall into frosty profundities
to sink like a stone, I talk in cliches,
They hover in time like bad omens
and flap wings, frantic pages cloud the sky,
They are the darkness in our bones
that keeps on sparkling like dead flames,
What struggles they endure day-night!

Some books unopened stay to sight
Books of some pasts have been scorched
or may long live not a page turned,
To die unread of ripe old age
or by next generation earned,
Yellowed, book-worms devoured in rage!

There’s a thing common— books or men,
But a few significant can
Every book has its shining creed
which we fail to read and believe

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Sandeep Kumar Mishra is an outsider artist, poet and lecturer in English Literature. He runs Kishlaya Outsider Art Academy. He has edited a collection of poems by various poets – Pearls (2002) and written a professional guide book -How to be (2016) and a collection of poems and art – Feel My Heart (2016).