In Between Couch Cushions

In Between Couch Cushions

By Swadha Rawat

 

Photo taken by Lisa Fotios @ pexels.com

A short note on how this poem came to be 

I don’t think I've written on such a random topic before. The story behind this is that, quite simply put, I had writers block. I kept on sitting in front of my laptop for hours and hours but never made it past the first few lines of any project before deleting everything I'd written. Frustrated, I ended up googling "poem prompts" and looked for the silliest one I could find. The one that inspired this poem, as you may have guessed, was along the lines of 'you've lost something in the gap between your couch'.

This poem is all about discovering things in the most unexpected places and not really realising you've lost something until it's found again. I think as a teenager, I feel myself changing so much over the years but often when someone's changing, they're discarding something and as I've tried to draw comparison to in my poem, that something is either "not-necessarily-unneeded but merely forgotten" or "not-necessarily-forgotten but merely unneeded" which basically goes to illustrate that even if someone made mistakes in the past, they learn, grow and change because of it and they don't forget. On the other hand, there might be a positive trait or a fond memory that has faded over time but that doesn't make it redundant. 

There exists between couch cushions,

A kind of shadow existence

Of not necessarily unwanted

But merely forgotten things:

Clinking coins that no longer glimmer,

Or plastic pens that no longer write,

A stay hair tie or a couple of unwieldy erasers.

And for good measure,

Most often

In between the gaps of couch cushions,

Is a layer of dusty fluff and feathers.

Once in a while,

A remote or mobile phone comes to visit,

But is promptly discovered and rescued,

For a land of the forgotten but not-necessarily-unneeded,

Is not where it belongs.

In the gaps between couch cushions,

Living a kind of hollow existence,

Of not necessarily forgotten

But merely unwanted things:

A clump of tangled hair pulled out of a hair brush,

Broken pencil nibs and shaved off pencil tips,

Or morsels of dry bread and smidges of mysterious sauces.

And for good measure,

These too,

Are blanketed in the gaps between couch cushions,

With a layer of dusty fluff and feathers.

Once in a while,

An errant hair brush or moisturiser sneaks in,

But is punctually found and recovered

For a land of the unneeded but not necessarily forgotten

Is not where it belongs.

When the human hand comes to inspect,

As it quite infrequently does,

Out of the inherent human desire to stick one’s fingers where they don’t belong

And the curiosity that flows through human veins,

This vale of half existence,

Depending on what it finds,

Lets out a yelp or a yell.

For in the space that exists,

Between couch cushions,

Waits a kind of odyssey

Where the human hand encounters

What is not-necessarily-unneeded but merely forgotten

And that which is not-necessarily-forgotten but merely unneeded

Both in equal measure.