Komerobi

He said after a moment of comfortable silence
"I got a question.
It's a bit too forward but I need to know :
Would you

Would you ever be with someone younger in age?"

I took my time
Reading between the lines

I said, "How young are we talking?"

He said, "Does it matter ?"
"In a decade, it won't"
He said, sometimes people think they are born
Into the wrong generation
So they age so fast to catch up with the years they have missed
And it's so unfair
That their love never waits on
Sometimes, never remembers
The promise they made in another time
To find each other again

"That sounds familiar.", I said

"It's because we read the same books."

"We did."

"So, what do you think ?"

What do I think ?

I think I did remember, a while ago
When I thought I was going to die
I remembered how his lips stuck out when he murmured
To himself
His rhythmic way of breathing out his words
His lean limbs, awkwardly long
And his inordinate perms
His eloquent gaze behind his thick frames

But I
I failed to remember the details of his face

I look for him
Among strangers when I walk down the street
And I tragically
Tragically

Can't remember if I loved him

Truth is, I never loved before

In this time

To remember how it would feel

And I never wrote a love poem that was true to my heart
At the time
Made it a point to cross them all when I'm done bleeding
Toss away the crumbled pages
When I, in a moment of frenzy, have jetted all down
Lines he spoke to me on long evenings
Lines he probably thought to himself at the borders of slumber
Never believed they would cross through time and space
To reach me

Your whispers live inside my head

They drive me insane
Out to the streets without an aim
Out screaming at the face of the darkness
Atop the highest dunes ,facing the planes of nought
Driving past my destination on deserted roads
Engraving into my iris the colors of the tiles
In foreign allies
Breathing in some foreign sighs, holding them longer
So I could taste the smoke exhaled from a foreign pair
Of lungs, twisting in a foreign kind of despair
Over a foreign breed of cares, in some foreign land

It was all to find you and, alas! it was all

In vain

These verses you shot into my veins
Spell out as I cut myself ,when it rains
In November
These morsels of words and acrid metaphors
That you passed on to my throat, while bidding my lips farewell
I disgorge while twisting in pain
Trying to find a clue or two in the mess I mean to wipe
They were timeless letters from you to I
And I try to write back, heaps and heaps of pages that I scribbled in reply
In gratitude for the chance
In regret for the wasted years
In fear of forgetting
In agony of loss
In delight of short lived infatuations
Brimming with the idea of you
Perfumed by the unfounded memory of you

And I never loved you
Despite all, that part was true 


They say an afflicted heart never lets one
Fall asleep at night
The butterflies flutter wild in their guts
And a few might escape with the sighs they let 
In the presence of their beau
They say it makes one wander off too far
On crisp afternoons
Their cup of coffee gets cold, the wind flips some pages
Past the one with the word that brought a lover's apparition
Into their thoughts

Where was I going with this ...


These morsel of words and acrid metaphors

Are tender apologies that would never reach

Through
Because in my wanderings, I've found myself
At last
Became whole and full of love
My time started moving
Forward in age, backward in spirits
And I could never make sense of why

Would one seek the source of all maladies
To heal a trifling sore

I never loved before

And I said "No", for all the wrong reasons
That was my longest letter to you, I thought

He said, "Good,
That's good, because love is an invention"
I said "how so?", a bit disheartened
He said, "Loneliness
Is so incomprehensible to us
That we look for an exegesis
Inscribed on someone else's palms
We stumble upon a stranger with matching inscriptions
We link our hands to unlock the script

And we think we have found what we lost at birth."

I paused at length
My cup of tea grew cold
Wind blew hard through some open window
And the pages flipped too fast
I couldn't recall the word
That brought your apparition into my thoughts
But I think I broke a precious vase
While I spaced out, trying to recognize your face

In another stranger.