Published Poetry: Scrap Collector's Diary by Snehith Kumbla

have sieved the

ruins of discarded

things,

sometimes finding

on an old magazine,

pictures of women,

looking through you

with ageless eyes

block square keys of

a typewriter,

cardboard covers

of fragile messages,

images of shattering

glass,

empty bottles of

RAT POISON,

‘Kamasutra for beginners'

‘The lonely wife’

other clandestine

books, sometimes,

extracted from some

secret wardrobe chamber,

wrapped in brown paper

school notebooks with

red tick-marks, blots, rights,

wrongs, devastating

stories of marks, homework,

a light bulb that still works,

the legs of a chair,

toy horses, toy cars,

scratched plastic

gaping holes in mugs, buckets,

fake notes from a crumpled game

of monopoly,

a dead dog's collar, a heavy rusted screw,

every night in my dreams,

they come hopping over a barn,

now you know,

that I do not count sheep

#

(This poem was first published in the Jan-Feb 2012 issue of Reading Hour Magazine.)