Harmonic Oscillations | Shome Dasgupta

There’s a songbird in my head — I can’t imagine it but I can hear it, and the melody, a million songs in one, variations and striations creating stairs in my mind, and it never stops and there are a million songs in one — a million songs in one which bursts into a sky, my cranium full of chorus and choir and every now and then I’ll open my eyes just in case I’m not a ghost who hasn’t flown away, and there’s a bird beyond the sun — I sing to it and wonder if it’s the one I can’t imagine.

Shome Dasgupta is the author of i am here And You Are Gone (Winner Of The 2010 OW Press Contest), The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), Anklet And Other Stories (Golden Antelope Press), Pretend I Am Someone You Like (Livingston Press), Mute (Tolsun Books), Spectacles (Word West), and Iron Oxide (Assure Press) which is a poetry collection. His fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Hobart, New Orleans Review, Puerto del Sol, New Delta Review, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing, Parentheses Journal, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.