I am different now

A poem by Achuthan Panikath

Mon Aug 24 2026

I am different now.
Bundled in this same chair
Higher than any pigeons dare try,
I'm washed in the same lackluster rains
The sirens, not unlike the nymphs,
Intolerable tugs on this mortal heart.
With each gust that makes its way through the grid
All the way from the river to the west
I am reminded how I am different now.

A year ago was about all I couldn't be:
The moon was pulled towards a point in space
To blind the world in the beauty of its fiery union
Cratered and distant, yet glorious in its right;
But science of arcs rewrote destinies
And I orbited away from her and all I thought to be.

A year ago, these shoulders ached
With the Atlantean burden of hubris
That I must change the world.
I measured my worth against KPIs,
Bowed to the responsibility of servant leadership
Each wasted moment, another crime against humanity:
Knowing that to do anything is to give everything I have.

But I am different now.
I am to be a part of the whole
A speck of cosmic dust that will
Sparkle as I'm being forgotten.
I will be in history as the unwritten often are,
Of invisible effect born of a thousand flapping wings.
Where there was once legacy, there is today,
In all its amorphous beauty and shade,
Kept unshaped by a billion willing breaths.

I am different now.
I feel brave as a consequence of inconsequential randomness,
A being tethered to everything that was or ever will be,
Alone only in the darkness of my shut eyes.
There is something so simple about living
In its frailty and fervor
In its dance and reckoning
That feels alright to the chimp that
Now rocks on a swinging chair
High atop the dirt that is a part of him.
I was always as I am, as you were, as we will be
And in learning this truth, I am different now.