Mirage.

sometimes my eyes linger.

Don't write poetry,

My father warned.

It will take your heart,

Where it finds the source of

Your melancholy, your despair.

Pain is not art,

Do not romanticise your heartbreak,

To win accolades from others.

But, you are mistaken.

I write for myself, and myself only.

I am selfish with my words,

I only offer them to someone

Who had either given me

Nightmares or conversations over coffee.

Not that I solely concentrate on

How the coffee tastes,

Sometimes my eyes linger on

The lips of a stranger sitting opposite to me,

Asserting how pleasure demands to be needed.

And, I please myself as I control my

Thirst to suck the blood from his

Chapped lips.

I lick my own,

Cigarettes have long replaced,

The taste of someone who

I thought I loved,

Love isn't that easy,

Or that impermeable.

And he couldn't even get under my skin,

Just help me sleep at night

When I couldn't.

Without a stranger, a cigarette, a doubt

I can survive.

But not without my words,

Not without the metres where

I can come undone.