Persephone

I

Autumn.

I am a naked leaf

Lying in the wake of autumn.

In all my defenseless glory, I lie

With remains of painful memories

painted over my undraped flesh.

Memories of 

Feet that have tread past;

over me.

I wonder at how the stars come 

home to the solitary sky

every night,

every single night.

I feel my body tremble in the wind,

Propositioning the onset of a storm.

I feel the restlessness 

brewing in the air,

and within me.

My selvage quivers at the 

mere thought of 

parting with this ground.

I am now a paring of the earth,

having long forgotten the sky 

I dappled proudly in.

Change is formidable,

however it may propitiate the ache.

Misery has made a home

Within my veins.

It runs with my blood,

A deep, dark crimson framework.

I may have found 

a travesty of humanity,

a house in the musty gloom,

a secret glee in pain.

II

Winter.

The overcast stitched sky lies forgotten.

Beneath the canopy of wilderness

We surmise our the journey,

That has lead to this piercing moment.

A strident keen cast, commands my attention

I desperately swivel round 

In search of the origin 

Of this ominous augury.

Of a being so profoundly soused 

in inescapable agony,

To have wailed a misfortune so, 

That it shattered my heart 

The moment it lay it’s feet at 

the doors of my ears.

I searched about in vain, until

I looked down at my own figure 

And saw it whittled into snippets

Of pain, longing and misery.

And peering through the clefts in my flesh,

I saw the source of all this suffering.

I saw my heart.

Alive, beating, writhing

in all it’s glory.

I felt it’s anger and it’s devastation.

And oh! How it howled desperately in search

For a hand of love and tenderness.

It raged and raged against 

The dying love that now escaped it

tardily, as every moment slipped forth

From the hands of my clock.

I had found the source 

of all agony and suffering

And it lay, thundering apace,

inside my own body.

III

Spring.

The sky shatters into a thousand clouds.

It thunders and roars.

Perhaps it feels the hurt I hold inside.

Perhaps it heard my plains

And it wants to say that it’s crippled too.

Perhaps it’s in woe.

A sulphur smile; it pours it’s heart out.

I step out and watch it hold me, 

Running streams down my body. 

Touching me fearlessly.

The way no one ever has.

I hold my hand up

and I stare soundlessly, waiting.

Waiting to dissolve into a million molecules,

the way my mind is in thousand pieces,

and my heart in a hundred places.

I want to become one;

one with the water that just flows. 

Drifts to no one knows where;

escape these thoughts that

Weigh down like a stone in water.  

I will them to slip into the rivulets of water

running obliques hurriedly down 

the uncharacteristic mountains and valleys of

mute fascination.

I step in through the door

feeling less drowned than I was before.

The Moonless Midnight

I

The night lies still,

Hanging above like a sword,

Waiting to cut through

the strained silent screech of

the quaint trees and the unmoving shadows of the sleeping wilderness.

I sit in the balcony staring up

At the black sky stitched seamlessly

With delicate threads of

a few elusive stars, that sit loftily,

Mocking the ones gazing with awe.

I’m afraid to breathe,

The air is stagnant, unmoving.

It sits in my throat, heavy

Like a letter hidden

in a secret compartment

of my weary, mahogany desk.

The houses are barges

Casting shadows of an enticing quiet

that has laid it’s concrete feet

in this town.

II

My heart is like the fresh carpet,

Lying in the door.

It holds the unearsed prints of your feet,

As you left in the middle of the night.

The moon beckoned you to return,

the lonely barn owl cried in dismay, the night wind howled in misery

and my door shivered

in the agony of loss.

I lay there counting;

counting as seconds turned into minutes,

and minutes into hours.

The sun rose and fell

but I stayed pivoted to the bed,

as though by an invisible force

that prohibited any more change.

As though perhaps a single movement, may testify to the time as it passed by,

that my pain was deepening,

with each round of the clock.

Perhaps if I stayed still

I might fall into numbness.

Any second now.

Any second.

III

I now sit on the bedspread

As the winter lightly kisses my feet.

I take its shivering hand in mine

And rouse it up;

Gently caress it with my fingers

And I feel the warmth within 

its heart so shrouded with pain.

The pain of longing, of desertation,

Of absence and of the estrangement;

Like a wounded lover whose:

Scars remember the wound,

And skin remembers the blade.

I sit beside its defeated figure

And lay my sorrow and longing

Out on the red velvet carpet,

Beneath our blue feet.

And I embrace it in my arms,

Close to the warm blood

deluging through my veins; 

Closer.

Until it curls up inside my soul,

And subsumes my warmth.

A dark smoke engulfs all that was before, crystal clear; 

whose smell is a faint reminder 

of unfinished evenings and 

quiet nights at end.

And lastly but not the least,

I set my head, numb, 

down on the carpet,

And close my eyes to the solitary ray of light, left unattended to by the contiguous dark ;

Prying furtively through 

scarcely scattered fissures in my window.

The bedspread frozen indelibly,

within memory.