the slow art of breathing bitter

A Rainwashed Song

It rained like blue stars last night.

I was in my bed; my feet were too cold to move.

Night came too fast into my eyes,

and I didn't get time to figure anything out.

You were standing in the light blue rain.

The stars were burning in your eyes—I saw.

And suddenly, everything changed in a snap of fingers.

The rules, the fights, the kisses—everything usual

was now smothered in the stars and snow.

You didn't cry, honey; they made you to.

Rivers bled in molten guilt.

Disgust seeped into my rotten skin,

through my tearing veins, and finally,

into the thunder ache.

It was never about the rain—it was about its shade.

It was all about the acid that leaked into it.

Yet, somewhere, it changed into something impossible.

Faces have changed like your midnight colors—

another Christmas snow and five-ten hours.

Summer suns were never meant for us.

We were the rain seekers, deluding the sky blues and fairy tales.

Like memory tasting bitter salt on our lips,

squeezing sharp in the paper cuts of the August air.

Like another shade of cigarette ash, we'd vanish

forever in the midnight rumbles.

But the scars snaking around my wrists felt

too surreal for anything tonight—

a haphazard flow of poisons and tangled limbs.

You slept in their shade, bare and shivering, 

while I hummed in the bursting clouds, blistered in summer dreams.

The new rain cried bitterly in the worn-away town—at least

we were not alone.

The light in your eyes rushed into the second

we held hands and promised the world to each other.

The emerald-dipped promises, fading lighthouses, prisoned families—

now blurring in the haze of deserted portraits and stained stories.

Love's a burden for you—it's always been. 

But I found life in it—because that's what you make out of it.

Memories burned like summer heat,

spreading their tentacles around my limbs.

Frost nipped your nose; you shivered—we've got only this thing now

because nothing would be the same today or tomorrow.

I laid there, quiet, with memories gushing in and out like metallic blood.

I had learned everything but think of you when it rained.

People grumble all the time, darling—even when

the roads glisten in joy and blood seeps into our life.

I could see you whizzing past the evening train.

The feel of your lips on my knuckles has now slipped into the air,

out of the window, far away in its whistle.

I wished I knew if the train was coming or going away.

Sometimes we don't care about anything 

when we cry in the rain, except that I do.

Sometimes we want things we know we never want;

Sometimes, what-ifs haunt us more than fears do,

and at some rare fevered hours, the world slips

away from our damned minds.

But sometimes happen sometimes—they still do—everywhere you see,

sunflowers and sunsets, sky blues and bloodsheds.

I still wanted to tattoo your name on my lips

and erase the whitewashed past forever—could I?

We were burned in acid when we were seventeen, dear.

The molten lava and scars wouldn't ever stop, and never would time.

Yet I wish to meet you again one Tuesday morning

in the grey haze of blue acid raindrops

and risk my broken heart to save you from breaking.

–the flowers were dead and damp in the quiet melody/

but there's always been one song worth singing aloud.

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A/N: Let grief not destroy the yellow stars on your screen!

© May 1, 2023. Sreeja Naskar.