The porcelain breaking under your feet Like a winter death, Sudden and cold. Broken bangles, The window between us Melts into the vermilion. This caged freedom struggles To taste the numbness of the night As these days get darker. Love never tasted this bitter And sanity — Never was the monopoly Of the guiltless till date. This emptiness will devour the night And no one would remember Even a word of that letter Which talked of death. Death just could never find The right door to be knocked And slid letters of longing Under the wrong doors every time

But you —

You somehow found just the right door

This time.

You curl around my ankles like anklets And remind me of everything that is beautiful And everything that is chaste. You hand me a book of dandelions and daisies

So happy, chaste, Yellow and white memories. A few lines from Garcia's work on Love in the time of Cholera blur into One of your drunken nights And mixes into the darkness Leaving behind a few letters

On reminiscing about a death in the time of Corona.

The discomfort of hearing Denim rip apart, — Thunderstorm and deafening silence Of art and age old bitterness. Bangalore roads drenched in longing, — A subtle lack of belongingness. Emptiness like shards of glass Held together through the kiss of a cyclone. The novel cracks through walls Bring in dead dampness into the dark room But the cracked window Lets a blade of light peep in To slice through the emptiness Of the sour morning. Death —

The sweet release of the oppressed; The sound of the knell With a sweet after taste. You are a wreck — More of Bukowski And less of Gibran; More of Hughes And perhaps a tinge of Plath. Just drunken nights of rotten infidelity Left with nothing but rust And sand in your eyes Burning salvation soaked castles. The discomfort of holding pennies Between your fists so tight, You smell the stinking metal. You never know which photograph of yours Turns out to be your last one.

This is a whirlwind in the Arabian sea Leaving us grenades in our hands

And an aftertaste of alcohol, gunpowder and grease in our mouths;

Blasphemy and a catastrophe with no

Escape.