The porcelain breaking under your feet

Like a winter death,

Sudden and cold.

Broken bangles,

The window between us

Melts into the vermilion.

This caged freedom struggles

To taste the numbness of the night

As these days get darker.

Love never tasted this bitter

And sanity —

Never was the monopoly

Of the guiltless till date.

This emptiness will devour the night

And no one would remember

Even a word of that letter

Which talked of death.

Death just could never find

The right door to be knocked

And slid letters of longing

Under the wrong doors every time

But you —

You somehow found just the right door

This time.

You curl around my ankles like anklets

And remind me of everything that is beautiful

And everything that is chaste.

You hand me a book of dandelions and daisies

So happy, chaste,

Yellow and white memories.

A few lines from Garcia's work on

Love in the time of Cholera blur into

One of your drunken nights

And mixes into the darkness

Leaving behind a few letters

On reminiscing about a death in the time of Corona.

The discomfort of hearing

Denim rip apart, —

Thunderstorm and deafening silence

Of art and age old bitterness.

Bangalore roads drenched in longing, —

A subtle lack of belongingness.

Emptiness like shards of glass

Held together through the kiss of a cyclone.

The novel cracks through walls

Bring in dead dampness into the dark room

But the cracked window

Lets a blade of light peep in

To slice through the emptiness

Of the sour morning.

Death —

The sweet release of the oppressed;

The sound of the knell

With a sweet after taste.

You are a wreck —

More of Bukowski

And less of Gibran;

More of Hughes

And perhaps a tinge of Plath.

Just drunken nights of rotten infidelity

Left with nothing but rust

And sand in your eyes

Burning salvation soaked castles.

The discomfort of holding pennies

Between your fists so tight,

You smell the stinking metal.

You never know which photograph of yours

Turns out to be your last one.

This is a whirlwind in the Arabian sea

Leaving us grenades in our hands

And an aftertaste of alcohol, gunpowder and grease in our mouths;

Blasphemy and a catastrophe with no

Escape.