I’m dead inside now:
Murdered by your exit.
Your play goes on now,
New actors come to stage,
One face remains lost to it all.
Do you, O lover, ever miss him?
The cigars burn and the blood flows,
Into the tapestries of stain and smokes,
A life shattered into grief, sorrow and pain:
A triumph that would be, now in misery laid.
The books on the shelves are in flames,
Their ink has forgotten all their languages.
A blind reader, a deaf listener, a mute poet:
Behold, a slave set out to master the world!
Youth withers away. Resolve grows stubborn.
Hope bleeds as a haemorrhage draining the soul.
You have left me like the life that leaves the body,
And I lie here now, cold and ruining, forsaken forever.
In search of your departed ship,
I have bottled and sealed my soul.
I have set myself adrift at sea now.
Plunged into the ocean of memories,
I have remained but so dry of you still.
Lover! Does your kind heart not melt?
Have I spoken in tongues so unknown?
Have my words flowed as the watery ocean
Upon the ancient stones, barren and harsh?
What are love stories, but the tales of our deaths?
To love is to be with you, and death is to be without.
Tell me, lover, what it takes now?
Tell me what paths take me to you?
What words, what deeds, what intent?
This homeless man bares his skin
To the unkind tempers of the fates–
He has come for your refuge.
I am lost.
I know not where I go.
Nor where I come from.
I am lost, lover.
For my home has forsaken me.
And my destination deceives me.
I was born in you.
I am to die in you.
One thing has remained
Forever, O lover, the same.
Where else would I go? Why, lover, ever?
You belong to me, you belong to me!
And I, to you–one soul, in bodies twain.
For a lost muse—
Bardhaman, Āśvina Kṛṣṇā Caturthī,
The 18th of September in 2019 CE.