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"I have known music to be her timeless reverberation in a forlorn corner of my soul; just when life was closing down upon me with its pangs of haunting silence."
"Hope is the point the 'world within' comes to an equilibrium with the 'world around'."
"The cold that my body feels can be comforted by pullovers of our choices. It is the winter that comes back each year, inevitably; is how we are connected on the face of time. A sweet suffering of forever..."
"My poverty, I know, was glamorous because trading you, my love, for a better life is outright heinous."
"Love was the day when she drank and I felt quenched."
"Life, ever since, had been one gripping tale. Your happening gave it a genre."
"Want is the soul's desire. Need, the mind's crave. Love, thus, I believe, is a bit of both."
"Art is how you lie to the world without ever feeling sinned."
"Sorrow is true and beyond the powers of healing, when you can taste the oceans on your lips."

Prisoners of Love

Prisoners of Love
~ Sobhan Pramanik | Wednesday, March 29, 2017 | |

I remember our first drink together.
I had brought you home to
rejoice my first salary, picking
on our way, a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
Driving the corkscrew spiral to
its very last thread, I had popped
the wine open, carefully pouring
into glasses that sat light-filled on the table.
How then you held one by its narrow stem,
your white thighs carelessly crossed
over my knees on the sofa and raised to your lips.
I watched stars flow into your mouth
from a yellow night - the sour rising to your eyes,
making clouds out of your thoughts.
And then when you lowered the glass,
the night was half drunk with distant stars
still swirling in it, and a matt red stain
of your lips printed to the rim.

I saw in that moist graze,
the fine lines on your lips vividly etched.
Thin cracks where the lipstick hadn't reached,
the pearl sized aperture where
your lips don't touch when you round them
and the drooping arc that completes your mouth.
Few more sips later,
with the night emptied inside,
there on the rim remained only
a smudge red stain of what
was once an intimate print.
With each slow raise, your lips
had met the crystal slightly moved
from where it last touched, even overlapped,
leading to a vapoury blotch of red lipstick,
spit and words unrolled.

What’s unnerving is that after all
these years of having gone our ways,
and my failing brain barely catching
any remembrance of the souls
I had drunk and got laid with;
it is your eternal existence
that glitters unsmudged from
the crystal edge of my redundant heart.
No one and nothing ever came
remotely close to reconstruct
my landscape, you left all dilapidated
with your promises.
Like fingerprints on the hilt of a dagger
that had claimed a life, I am but a
violated evidence of your love
with your lipprints on heartbeats
down my neck, sentenced to a
forever of yearning to be together;
this life or any other.

© Sobhan

Smoker's Phenomenon

Smoker's Phenomenon
~ Sobhan Pramanik | Sunday, March 26, 2017 |
It's a smoker's phenomenon perhaps,
to always hold the last puff a tad longer.
Letting the fumes spiral and widen inside
like ripples across a wind shaken lake,
inflating their chest to a maxima,
until it aches to sink back and then
grudgingly stubbing the fire out against
a tin ashtray; the toxic gas departing
through lips and purring from nostrils
quietly, in what seems to be a dreaded exhale.

Whether the last drag is the sweetest
or breaking from the high is sad,
it is all still an acceptable agony.
Unlike mine where I seem to be smoking
minced memories, rolled in a flammable leaf
of Time and burning recursively
between my lips.
My scarred heart that fervently
drags upon this lingering past,
fills my chest with massive clouds of tears
that never made way to weepings.
They stretch my lungs threatening to kill,
but I am far from quitting.
Smitten for life. And so I go on -
breathing in fire, blowing out voids.
For embers of love, after all,
can never be stubbed.

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