Poetry: “Stone” by Mumukshu
Is a stone-cold love still love, or does it mean far less? Could it mean nothing? These are the questions Mumukshu explores in this poem, moving through vacuums searching for the “atoms and magnets” which are associated with warmth and love. The exchange of words alone make it difficult to express love fully—”words against words make for cold sentences.” As the speaker in this poem seeks to follow their “logic to grammar,” the writing grows increasingly repetitive and torn. Language falls apart the more the one seeking love attempts to explain how it works, and without its adequate expression, love fails to expand and fill the empty space.
Read Mumukshu’s poem below.
Stone
It’s true, that a vacuum can still be yearning,
And all empty space
Can be charged in anticipation of a presence.
Follow this logic to grammar:
Parentheses enclose a love for speaking
Where words become warm,
Proof that heat can exist without fire.
Elemental counterpoint
Words against words make for cold sentences.
Directionally speaking
Inward is warm, outward is cold
So humans search for the atom.
But cutting a stone gets you another stone, and
Suddenly, everything becomes cold.
The climate of a vacuum remains indeterminate.
Now make this into an argument for love
That the body seeks another as proof.
Take a cross-sectional view:
Love looks like atoms and magnets
Attracting and repulsing.
Consider distance a romantic imperative
and bisect space
To two halves of a heart, beating and whining.
Examine the stammering valves
And the splithair veins there
rais’d on the bloodplain. Say
Ugliness is the only argument for love.
Divide again
And again
And again
Remains the same argument.
It’s the mathematics of warmth
That molecular agitation
Makes heat.
Move if you want to be loved
Say anything –
Will say anything to be loved.
So say something –
The return of a lover is
The expansion of vacuum.
Then change life for a semantic view
Statistically,
You meant nothing to me.
Mumukshu
'Mumukshu is a writer from India'
