Drifting Away

By Rabina Mitra

I hide in a dark room,

shying away from the laughters that open like gushing wounds, around my fragile days.

I hallucinate,

See your tender face, trembling in the candle lights, cupped in my bloody hands.

Your vacant eyes reflect a silent moon-washed graveyard!

So full of sounds from another world!

Then your toes twitch,

And you glide slowly in the air..

Start drifting away from the hard nights that chain me down.

I try to call you back.

Desperately.

But my voice chokes on cold rocks rising up in my mouth.

Meanwhile, you crush the sky and

From its wrinkled folds,

Stars break down!

The dust clouds fill up my burning nostrils.

After a while,

The yellow land seems calm.

You were gone by then,

You had drifted away, far from this obnoxious mess!

I sleep on the remnants of what was once us, together.

I can now feel this elaborate process of embalming the dead bodies inside chilled cold rooms.

I'm just this pale white skin, spread like a mourning sheet.

Out go the guts, the essential organs, fluids and blood.

Out goes life.

In goes these dark dark spaces, filled to the brim with hard wreckages!

Time, the shrewd embalmer

Paints a smile on my lips.

I smile through my end.

Underneath the membranes my failures swim,

And your face floats like a budding lotus in my dreams!

By Rabina Mitra