My traumas are the ripened berries staining the stark white dress with shades of war.

Where is my home?

I wander on streets with a jabbed heart falling unhinged from the hole of a brown paper packet I carry it in.

Why is it that grief screams louder from my eyes than what my soul could have ever held?

I am the bruised remains of a limping old hope,

Moribund and fragile to your touch

I’m lost in the pastures of guilt grazing on lush green pain

Is this why I bleed of milk and cry of stealth?

Death whispers to me a note that ends with “with love”

But am I deserving of any bit that begins to sing from the L swiftly trailing its way across the O-V and E?

There is a broken lamp in my room that flickers through the night

But when I live in the darkest pit, a flicker is not as broken as you might see with corneas that are not even scratched.

The world from my eyes is just as colored

But the only stroke that paints my breaths is dark

And to you, dark is death.

So, I sing my heart to a cold knife, red with dripping stories staining my stark white dress.

There is something cold about the furnace today

I wonder if I would blind myself to oblivion when the fire would embrace my face

I amble my way to the graveyards at night, exhuming every strewn remnant of tired aspirations.

My face is an assimilation of every gory recollection curated carefully by enchanters of detest

From eyes that gauge the brooding to an ugly, charred tongue that throes in excruciation.

Cheeks blistered with saline dripping to the lament that broils my soul.

I am soaked in trance from sleep to the runs.

They ask me if I could write a dream

But what is dream to an insomniac who sells bricks of her home through the night,

Only to wander homeless through the day.

What are we if not a galaxy of lies?

An entanglement of sins- being born, existing, killing, slaughtering, smiling, hoping, heaving, and then finally... DYING

By Preet Arya

From: India

Website: https://deadpoetswrite.wordpress.com/