Prisoners of Love

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

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.

© Sobhan Pramanik