The Illicit Life of Others


︎︎︎ Pitambar Naik
︎ NOV 1, 2021


Measuring the diameter of a drifting
iceberg is almost an art of sport;
feel the torso of    the illicit life
of those strange illusions if you can.

Now avoid being aloofly silent
avoid being a vacuum;   share a
message with Prometheus and all
gods of India not to split us.

How it looks swearing in the name
of heaven; see the costume of a
junk curve and learn the technique
how it flatters like a wild pain.

The ceramic art around your myth
is a sick apple that chases us like
a disguised hypothesis, you'd bitterly
be objected, if I named it soft bias.

While thinking of a fitting context,
I see a megalomaniac fabric as usual
under the valley of your tongue.



























Pitambar Naik
is an advertising professional. He’s a poetry editor for Minute Magazine and winner of the Spotlight Literary Festival Prize for Poetry, 2021. His work appears or is forthcoming in Packingtown Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Mason Street Review, Rigorous, New Contrast, Ghost City Review, Glass Poetry, Cha Journal, The Indian Quarterly, Vayavya, and The World Belongs To Us (HarperCollins India) among others. The Anatomy of Solitude (Hawakal) is his debut book of poetry. He grew up in Odisha, India.