UTPAL CHAKRABORTY - POEMS

I'm a teacher of English language and literature, a fiction writer, an author of academic interest and a poet. I was born on 10th August, 1968 in a village of Howrah district. I stay at Barasat near Kolkata.  Graduating from Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission Residential College with English as honours I did my masters from Calcutta University in English literature and thereupon started teaching in different schools. I write both in  Bengali and English. I have authored 12 books on English Grammar and Composition meant for school students. My book CONCEPT deals with Rhetoric and the art of substance writing with critical appreciation for unknown poems and prose excerpts. It is meant for the English honours students. Several of my Bengali poems and articles have been published in different magazines including Bengali dailies. I have been learning Indian classical music (sitar) for several years. At present I am working as a permanent assistant teacher of English at PBMT institution,Calcutta.

---

                                         ME AND A PENGUIN 




You are sitting just before me. 
At the distance of 
a sky. 
Your eyes are wide 
In a speck. 
Like that of an 
atomic emptiness. 
Where the vigor is falling apart. 
I have the dream. 
It is hit by the hood of a reptile. 
I'm full of the venom.. 

The sun rolls by.......... 
I do feel.. 
I'm down.. 
At the feet 
Of a penguin. 



                                              GROWING



Everyday I wake up from bed 
To see the bottom where I'm led. 
As the chlorophyll piles up around. 
I feel I'm tied to a muddy 
ground. 
The more I know the space 
The more I find me set in 
a mess. 

The more I near my goal, a bait. 
The less I know for what 
I wait. 
Everyday I wake up from bed 
To see the bottom where I'm led. 

The more I feel I'm on the rise 
The more I expose my guise. 



                                        CHAMELEON



Chameleon, chameleon I want to be 
I like much to live out of the gravity. 
Would you let me know how you feel 
When you run across a ceiling? 
How do you change your colour? 
To hide you inside a bower? 
You hide and you seek 
It is not that you play a trick 
So strange is the nature of man 
He brings you down 
at every turn. 



                                          SELFIE 



I was in the bath. 
When the orangutan hardly felt that he was speaking below the belt. 
Slowly I rubbed my hands and feet. I heard the splashes of bath in the adjacent room. I was slowly losing in the darkness. The light was full and clear and I could not find me. Only some mites that crawled on the wall to reach the web helped me discover. I was flabbergasted that every fiber of my being was scrolling out.  The screen does never betray. Slowly the mites ate out the camera. And I remained unframed ever after. 


 
 
                         I'M NOT READY TO PULL  OUT 



When I lost my morning 
I craved to get  it  back. 
When I lost my noon 
I felt sad and yearned to fly back and then, I resigned to all sweet reminiscences. 
When I lost my afternoon 
the wizened time came. The sterility that ambushed so long set me on a keel. I willed to move  forward. But it did injustice to me. It  made me feel I was not prepared. I was weak and frail. Became dumb and paralyzed. Then  one messenger came and said. ‘you are not  yet ready to leave the scene.' I have been living for years crippled, cribbed, and bound in to saucy doubts and fears. I'm tied to a stake. Yet I'm not ready to pull out.