POLITICAL Poem: Hell is empty-Applications Open, by Aarush Raj

6:27 – Mercius Attys is dead, which marks it as the 27th city to be heavily bombarded and reduced to a single word which speaks volues, FREEDOM not with a period with a question mark.

6:30 – You sit in your lime blue sofa on other days it would feel soft but today that word is absent. ‘Don’t come out, don’t open the door’ you remind yourself. You go to the window but stop, the same sentence crosses your mind, last words Mom said before she promised to come back.

6:45 – Hell is closer to our knees so you pray while standing, repeating the same word again and again in fear until it loses meaning, in belief until it loses meaning, in hope until it loses meaning.

God,God,God.

7:00 – God is asleep, its been weeks now Dad hasn’t come back. You stopped asking but it will take you years to stop questioning.

7:22 – ”The state is urged to play host to any citizen and stay indoors. Mass shootings and futile killings continue upstate.” the TV says. Someone knocks on your heart it’s terror.

7:40 – Ali calls”Hello-Yeah I am fine. My mom and dad left too. No”. You put the receiver down. 1..2..3, you cry why? You wonder. That’s the first time you have spoken in 46 hours so every word weighed, brought back the life before. ‘Hello’, ‘fine’, ‘My Mom and Dad’. Ali is alive-as alive as someone can be right now. You wonder about other students of class.

7:44 – You try to breathe because you have to, alarmingly, irregularly or unusually but you have to breathe.

7:50 – You pick up school diary and a pilot pen. It is this or insanity. You don’t choose so you write. Grief? Pain? Loss? What am I feeling? What can one feel when every face you have seen in your life is potentially dead? So would you.

7:56 – You break the pen and throw the diary at the lamp. Your hands in a foreign colour. Blue blood.

7:58 – ’I have to find Mom’ you say to the faint smell of smoke and plastor.

8:02 – ’I have to find Mom’ you decide.

8:04 – You are searching for it but you can’t find that one thing. True nature of coincidence. TV still talking to smiling pictures in the living room.

8:10 – Behind the cupboard, under the bed, nothing,’Oh wait! What is that? Ah just a broken cracker’, you continue searching.

8:12 – You are tired. Didn’t thought that you could be anything other than scared but you are.

8:14 – So you realise the hierarchy Love, Loss, Grief, Hope, Hunger. So you eat that goddamn cracker.

8:15 – No one told you what to do when you can’t stay inside because you can’t risk dying alone but you can’t go outside.

8:17 – Checkmate, fried beans, necklace, emporiums, southern mall, dimsums random words in your mind, scenes playing in your head of your Mom talking.

8:19 – Dracy?Yes, yes he was the one who flew to study dragons or was it Charles or Charlie?, you can’t stop your mind from going on.

8:25 – A four letter word for smelly, you pretend to think.

8:26 – What exactly will they achieve by all this?

8:26 – If I run to Claire’s place. It’s like 2 minutes.

8:26 – Going to grandparent’s doesn’t seem so bad now does it?

8:26 – ”Mayor’s both wives and 3 out of 4 children abducted, one presumably dead. Unidentified bodies count increases to two thousand.” T.V. tries interrupting.

8:27 – ”Is anyone home heh!” he laughed as he sang in cruel mockery, broke the door and got excited to see you.

8:28 – You are still, scared to move or breathe or run or cry. So you hang in front of him, unsure unlike his gun metal, cold and sure.

8:29 – He aims for your heart from the back.’COWAR-‘ you lie silently, ’I am back mom’ last breath freed as your eyes said.