Burnt/Buried

By Moksh Sharma

I’ve guarded this shrine from heretical missionaries, carrying swords of history sharpened with grief gilded whetstones. I’ve preserved in this evening the crimson of my blood, the night in its shining armour shall succumb to no mercy. I’ve let out enough in taverns now disconsolate, pray my friends, the eyes might finally pour champagne. 

You smashed that glass, my arm longs to be shattered, I let you go, I’ve tried my best to lose me. Those imprudent eyes lined with eyelids of innocence, are committing premeditated murder, “What an artist dies in me”. 

This ‘death of an artist’ is tragic, death in general, not so much. You breathe in a utopia with every inhalation, that turns dystopian if you strive to stay alive for too long. Death happens within, happens as my shrine trembles with fear of the missionaries outside. The glimmer of their grief causes a glare, this impious weapon shall weep the crimson to life. 

The walls are being breached.

It was sundown. I was running down the street chasing ecstasy in exhaustion and somehow by chance I happened to pass by a cremation ground. On the pyre, a body being burnt of a man who achieved the ideal I attempted to achieve merely by running. The walls of the ground were decorated, more vibrant than anything alive around. The smoke from the pyre began to cover the polychromatic sky with a monochromatic truth, all attendants now sober from the clear champagne they were shedding. His body was now ash ; grey matter constituting the grey dust, but he was everywhere; in the truth, in the falsity; in the art. With this invariable freedom all prisoners could be with him, but envious of his independence they wished for him to be held captive in heaven. I too was jealous, not only of the free-man but also of the sober heretics. I too, contained in me the same truth and falsity as him, I too held captive an invariable freedom in me. But they could bleed clear and my veins were frozen, they had gone beyond autumn while I remained stuck in an ostensible spring. 

I longed to feel like dry leaves long for saturation, I longed to be, like God and Adam. The spring breeze now could only fan infuriation, I longed for freedom, a meditated murder. 

I’m certain I’m not the only owner of this crimson. I’m certain even the roses do not grieve different, but those blades now are daring to finally turn in me.

The idols are now exposed to imminent danger. 

I could pick steel up myself and wage a war, but what massacre will I conduct when all heretics are carrying my head. I am love and everything else is beloved, the dawn and the dusk, beloved’s revolution. So we’ll traverse these frontiers, destroy these distinctions for there is no greater consolation, than connection.

Bruised bodies are burnt or buried; I remain, I remain.

By Moksh Sharma