The Post human Soliloquy or The Metaphor of Essence

Tanmoy Gharami

How long has it been since I have been estranged from my core Self?

How long has it been since I celebrated being the ‘I’ that I am?

How long since I left the tensions of ‘civilization’

And rendered to reclaim my completeness?

How long has it been,

Since I dressed in my own choosing?

How long has it been since, in my refreshing sense,

I expressed the pulse of my thought?

For how long now

Have I not, with a heart-driven lament,

Spoken the words, “I love you,” to my beloved?

How long since I ceased to behold upon, creation’s sweetest, untainted beauty

And truly rejoiced it?

Yet, even today, I remain radiant, latent, and unfettered.

Hence, even now, I sow the seed of hope again,

Cultivating my true natural essence,

Unseal the molten chambers of my mind,

Where the long-suppressed lava boiled for ages,

How long have I not become the ‘I’?

How long since I beheld my own reflection,

Unfiltered by oriental gaze?

Is this self truly my authentic self?

Or merely a structured mechanism tuned to civilization’s rhythm?

How long has it been since I posed the existential query to my own being: Am I well at all?

Does my time evanesce in an instant?

Or am a bewildered construct of modern technology-

In a perpetual state of ‘what-to-do’ disorientation?

Henceforth, I subsist as a literary trope – the metaphor of literature itself,

My everyday self-wanders the streets

Yet is dispirited, melancholic, and utterly enervated,

For how long have I failed to genuinely engage with others in my unmodified manner?

How often do I, wishing to dissent, I paused —

Stifled in hesitation halting like a Prufrockian figure?

How long since, I’ve been killing my own self, every day,

Just to sustain a social and psychological conformity?

Whose hegemony is responsible for this? I know not!

Yet, I am gravely anxious concerning my Self;

I have perhaps lost myself in the contemporary struggle of modernity.

Or perhaps, this world systematically massacres every individual ‘I’,

And forges a mechanism under the guise of constructing machines

Designated as ‘human’.