The Unread

By Tanish Gupta

Must I write

To let these steams flow?

Will you not 

See through my eye’s vapours rising.

Is it only outward disdain

Which shakes another sense?

Is not myself written

All over me airs?

That dreadful way I watch

Watching my every step.

As does the night sky watch the sun

Vary of its own demise.

Thirty burdens on my shoulders

Must thrift hereon.

To be delivered quick 

And yet forever to stay.

Is not my witness enough so to shame

Any look within?

Or perhaps my shoulders show not

How they pump and so?

Yet wait we must

For bones will break,

Now however much

They stay.

By Tanish Gupta