this is us part2

You send me poems with flavoured laughter,
and i long for autumn shadows where poetry
is more than graffiti on social media walls,
where its ferocity colours me faster than i can
name the hues, more vibrant than my vocabulary.

I sit down to write you a letter, the envelope ready,
To contain the breathlessness that needs must be
(Like those long nights blanketing our winter reverie)
trapping it in salival good old days-ery. but i get lost
in the history of the stain on my notepad, and the
feeling of home that is my fountain pen. By the time
i decide to forego salutations, always so formal, always
so empty, another sunrise taps at my window. i watch
distilled rays fall on the sheet, hitherto blank. Ink leaks.

when you get the post, would you know that i sent you
the best of me - a drop of sunshine, a smudge of home.
Will you hold it against me that my new poem is an ode
to silence, whose words have dug six feet trenches in my
heart, and found something there. i know that. for after all
these years, there is a new pattern in the way it beats.

Would you notice the stamp of a nonexistent post office,
in a country farther away than you are in my dreams.
I haven’t given a return address this time, though we
are closer than this skin to flesh, and maybe i will smell
the decay of poems that languish in your notes and spill over
into unsent letters,lying in the corner drawer of the guestroom.
Perhaps the pattern will change again. The heart will beat,
beat down on words, whose ghosts will find succour in frail
memories of you, going frailer by the season, and the blot
on my notepad will grow bigger, darker, murkier.

Then again, perhaps none of this will be our fate. And
the exotic essences of your delicious verses will settle
At the base of my tongue, and keep bringing me back
From the obstinacy of my frosty solitude. Inkless.
May your will be stronger than my fear. Amen.