PROHIBITED

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Like wildlife reserves, even relations come with their own well demarcated, accessible and prohibited zones. There are these spaces where everyone is allowed. Every single soul, in their free, undisturbed roam can go wandering without any inhibition or even bothering to measure the consequences of their doings. Such spaces naturally come with an uncalled safety. There's really no one to probe you with the protectiveness of it all. Simply being ...there, letting yourself uncoil along the tide of your independent thoughts, you cannot help but feel immensely secured. And on the other hand there are these prohibited zones marked with red on your map, where we don't even desire to be present in person to feel the vulnerability. The very demarcation, the fact of being unguarded and above all, the fear in our heart, pursues our mind with an alacrity that manages to keep us away from such zones and their privacies forever intact.

I regret that I loved you from the accessible space in me. However, it really saddens me to absorb the idea of letting you into that region, coming right up close to my feelings. And just when I had my love plucked out of my heart, blossoming and fragrant and have kept it on your palm, hoping you would cherish it forever, the same way I did it for you, you closed your fingers and crushed those
breathing petals. Killing me altogether.

But then, I also loved you enough to keep aside a prohibited zone for myself, where no one dared to venture. Not you. Not anyone. Up there in my protected solitude, where the most dangerous animals are believed to reside, my feelings wander free - untouched and true at its heart. And sometimes, when the fact of being killed by you on the outer spaces of my world becomes a regret, it is those very feelings in my heart that becomes those wild, feared animals that keeps the world at bay and you, tightly held against my chest.

© Sobhan Pramanik

WILL

It was getting tougher for him with each passing day. Not being able to put his feelings into words was a crushing feeling that drove him crazy. With every breath, all he ever wanted was to let her know how much he loved her.  And so, finally, that day, he summoned all his courage and decided to call her up and confess his love.

Just when he was about to call her, his phone lit up on his palm and with her name across the screen, it felt like even the heavens was easing up the task for him. Or so he thought.

He always found himself lost before her. And even today, with all the summoned courage ready in his throat, he couldn't hold himself falling into the dreamy drift her voice lent to his life. As if he was a verse and she was the tune. They started talking and the conversation soon took a different lane altogether. And as always, his courage, the emotional audacity, betrayed him just at the right moment.

"You are an amazing friend dear." She had said, still laughing over a silly joke he had just cracked.

"Your laughter is the prettiest I have ever seen." He replied closing his breath around a cry that was already erupting in his heart.

"Haha. But how can you say so? You haven't even met me."

He had then picked up a shard of glass that lay at his feet on the grass. Having tapped the dust away, it at once caught the sparkling ring of the moon in the sky and its brilliant dazzle, almost had him blink. 'It must be just like this.' He wondered looking at her smile that he held on his palm.

"Where there is a will, there is a way." He replied instead, tightening his fingers, as the moon on his palm tore through his skin and cold blood dripped onto the grass.

© Sobhan Pramanik

ARCHAELOGIST

I love her like the blue lake, might love the migratory birds on its banks. Scattered in an array of colors; diving into the waves, swooping out of the trees and singing to the delight of the visitors. At once gathering, accolades from the world.

It is her moving away from me, her circumstantial absence, that feels like the winter. The grass, then, pales out on my banks. The mist rises over the horizon. The sky sheds its indigo jacket. The pines weep under the snow. My waters, whose once rippling waves enfolded the music of her voice, starts to freeze. And soon I am forgotten under the covering of snow. My presence as unknown to the world, as fossil, an artefact embedded in the heart of the earth.

It is my fate that holds me from succumbing. And so I wait.

I wait for her to return from across the mountains, and rediscover my love like a much awaited truth. Break the ice of suffering and breathe life back to my world. For it is only that, the touch of love, that can both freeze one into captivation and also set it free. And for that, for being able to continue swinging between the thrill of living and dying in love, I let myself be an uncovered fossil and she, my lovely archaeologist.

© Sobhan Pramanik

VAGABOND

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My verses were a population of vagabonds,
Moving along the painful distance ...
Separating my heart from yours.
The heartbreak that you sometimes tore me with,
Were the sudden raids in the middle of the night;
Driving them away to clear the land.
Those tongue splitting words
That you hurled in rage
Were vehicles leading the raids--
Smashing through their huts,
Sweeping clean their existence,
Grinding honesty to dust.
Still,
The vagabonds that they are,
Kept moving from one smashed
Land to another--
Dreaming of a new shelter,
Hoping of one permanent home
Where they could knit
Their dreams and tomorrows into one
Without being chased away.

And it was only when you
Held ajar the doors of your heart;
That my verses,
Those vagabonds,
Had their lonely wandering
Finally find a peaceful night's slumber.

© Sobhan Pramanik
January 2016