The Last Poem

By Mayank Gupta

My therapist has asked me to write.

All I want is to

Fire words on pages

Until they burn holes into them

Holes that resemble the voids in my heart

Did I talk about voids?

There are voids that exist

And voids that my head has created.

Then there is void of all my missing journals,

Taken away by a hard drive failure

The lost journals I wrote about

Love and loss

And more of love

For I still believe somewhere

That love triumphs in the end.

But who gets to decide

What’s the end

If there ever is.

I so wish there was.

That it’s just around the corner

Waiting to hold me to sleep.

My memory keeps failing me

But my heart and senses remember

How beautiful and peaceful it was with you.

All I had was those journals

To visit you

And I am robbed of that too.

I am told

I am not my thought

Neither am I my emotions

Nor what my brain thinks I am.

I could easily know I am

Far beyond what I look.

But how do I nullify the

Thoughts and images

My mind presents me with.

How do I erase

All that was written

Without my knowledge.

There comes a point

When it’s all blank

And it makes no difference

Where I am

Where I work

And what I do.

I stepped forward to hug you

Only to wake myself up

Realising I just shifted in my bed.

I would have a reason

If it was just about my love for you.

But fortunately, and unfortunately

It’s more than that.

I am asked not to look for reasons

But what do I do

With this irrational rational head of mine.

There are flowers blooming somewhere

And I don’t get to admire their beauty.

All I am now is a withered flower

Lifeless and dead

That needs care

Care to hold it, lest it may break

Nothing to offer

But all to take.

I am so scared

And fearless right now.

That I don’t even know which is which.

There are books waiting to read

And people who are poems

Waiting to be found.

So yeah, I am asked

Not to look for reasons

But I am also asked to sit till

Not to take any irrational decision.

If I had a flower

Every time I was this miserable

I would have a garden by now.

But that still won’t be enough

To give my life a beautiful fragrance,

But one thing I have acquired

Is the capacity to hold on

To wait

And that’s what I have always done.

That’s what I will do.

And if I am unable to

I hope the world will remember me

As a guy who loved.

As someone who had nothing

But love to offer.

And he left that love

Somewhere in the ghats of Udaipur.

In all the lakes he visited.

In all the poems he wrote.

In all the ’I love you’s he told.

And in the all-pervading air

He would have been breathing.

By Mayank Gupta