To touch that faint silhouette. Sublime shadow
undressing to a desertion of garments she wore –
kissed into ashes, bled into driest wine,
turned into tides at folds with flesh, with death –
the death in that revealing aftermath,
an aftershock. What’s left in this ruin of another heart?
Quakes are those years I follow
to a broken majesty’s throne, where I
seat myself, to govern a tearstained lie.
She left a glimmer at a familiar corner,
a space for me to curl up like a yearning child,
one who speaks in fragile syllables.
What had been there – to burn down, from Heaven
to stretch longevities of histories,
to repeat scars of a storied Hell? While she faded,
I began hearing everything falling
from skies that kept crying.
I starve myself on these lesser knowns,
falter in crawling towards greater daylight.
At her absence, I reach. I go there to feel
a sudden breath, at a radiant window.
A slightness to its openness, like when she
kept her light alive in inhaling me,
these unleashed kisses that surrendered
eye-drops with raindrops from glances and clouds,
within and hovering above a devoted soul.
Modern Romanticism 