Love

By Sudhansu Thongam

Our hearts are misplaced—

Yours beats inside me, mine bleeds in the pages.

So much is born in the wrong hands,

Like lips caging words that only silence dares to voice,

Like love mistaken for a noun when it was always a wound.

Tell me, how deep is your love?

I hope you wear an armor deeper still—

I don’t trust my heart to hold its own blade.

How dead would you be

If love was both the knife and the breath that followed?

Are words war against silence

If intentions surrender before battle?

Is love an ocean of rivers,

Or a river that drowns oceans,

If my heart is a sinking ship?

Perhaps we are too close—

Perhaps distance is the only true intimacy.

So I say, in every misplaced word,

I find our love fighting for meaning.

By Sudhansu Thongam