the slow art of breathing bitter

A Sunset of Heartaches

I wish I could stain my shirt more

with raw blood and my bare limbs

with mist pink razor cuts.

Old, dust-painted sorrows cluster at my door.

It's too hard to blink away from them than the sunlight.

I wonder when these will stop hurting

splintered souls, surviving another black night —

Cold cashmere and dead, naked lies.

Shivering daisies spill blood in my garden;

Stolen poetry from scoured metaphors

rush into the bleeding blues of the sky.

Pitiful limbs in rusted handcuffs and souls bursting 

like wilted flowers in your dead garden.

I want to die in a new song of our perished love;

A numbed feeling of your crimson chaos

in the dynamited daylight of broken summers.

Poetry slips beneath my hands, 

promising you won't come back again.

Our world will end soon with the bloodstream underneath the wild skies.

Dreams of epiphany and grief-clouded orchestra.

(I don't feel fading into your bleeding laments.)

The dry wind whispers star-secrets

through the yellow scarfs of flower girls.

Turbulence, like lustful lovers, deludes nude minds

in its emerald spells and false sunrises.

A congregation of beautiful sinners; our bodies burn in the molten lava.

Swayed in the ashes of lilac bloom,

You come back into my thoughts; it's hurt so damn much.

And like another summer stain, we drift apart.

Blurred by red tears, trodden under rain boots,

the sun falls into my thick, burnt skin.

I drown and drown until I touch your last poetry.

The skins of dead men lie beneath our grave—it's too late, darling.

A sunset of thousand heartaches, 

memories void after the war.

If nothing else, I'm certain cold death will metamorphose

into the earthly flow of syntactic nimbus.

I wish I could forget you and me and the world for once.

————————————

A/N: Well, how can anyone forget such lovely people like you guys out there and those yellow stars at the corner of your screen?

© April 13, 2023. Sreeja Naskar.