Love Like a Bibliophile | Day 02 | #NaPoWriMo

Love Like a Bibliophile | Day 02 | #NaPoWriMo

Purest of loves often leave no trails.

Like a Bibliophile’s books,

of titles read over and over again,

starchy still,

between creaseless jackets

and not a speck of dirt at the corners,

gleaming like guns in an armoury.

Unlike someone who reads to kill time

where there will always be

a piece of paper stuck somewhere

containing address or phone number

serving as a frail bookmark,

a brown coffee ring from the

bottom of Styrofoam cup,

a peacock feather in chalk dust,

or uneven lines of blue or black

at the back, scratched hard,

to get a dried pen working.

Loves of the Bibliophiles kind

are hard to find and harder to get rid of.

They leave no signs at the surface.

Their feelings are submarines

wading quietly through deep waters of souls.

Transforming,

conquering,

setting hearts to ravishing ruins.

© Sobhan

Departed Trains | Day 01 | #NaPoWriMo

Departed Trains | Day 01 | #NaPoWriMo

A short, sun-burnt hawker

strides down the dozing platform.

A wicker basket over his head,

balanced on a cloth-bun.

The corrugated station roof,

old and season beaten,

drapes the concrete in a tattered shade.

Potholes of light shining at his feet,

as he glides through the hot daylight shadows.

In a raspy voice, he calls out

'Ice-cream Kulfi. Kulfi Ice-cream',

almost swallowing the word 'ice' in the process,

startling a child awake on a nearby bench.

He turns to his mother, lips drawn down.

She looks away, not acknowledging -

a strip of white light by her face

travelling into her blouse.

The hawker already slow in his tracks,

stops in positive anticipation.

He uncaps an aluminium cone from his basket,

pushes a wooden stem and pulls out Delight -

cold, white fumes curling from its buttermilk tip.

The mother loosening a knot in the veil of her saree,

picks out a five-rupee coin and places it on

the child's stretched palm.

He steps down beaming,

passes the coin to the hawker

and grabs his Kulfi.

A microphone then crackles overhead,

disturbing the pigeons in their high metal roosters.

Bardhaman-Howrah local draws hissing into the station.

The quiet dismantled for a moment,

replaced by the engine’s breathing;

and the sun eclipsed in a swirling cloud of dust.

The Kulfiwala boards it, as faces suddenly

come alive inside the compartment.

Slowly the train starts to chug out,

pulling away with it the cold metal shadows.

Silence falls back, almost as immediately,

like a sea joining, ripped by speedboat trail.

In the child’s happy eyes, there I catch my burning wait.

Abandoned amid the scorching summer,

for me to take a different train home.

The kulfi melts, like memories in my heart,

running down his thin arms to the hook of his elbow,

as we cherish in the back of our mouth,

the sweet aftertaste of a love long gone. 

  

© Sobhan

Night Soaked Bodies

No warm shower of preparation

or faint wisps of cologne at

my wrist where the blood throbs hard.

I shall walk through your doors straight

and unkempt; my shirt untucked,

my hair ruffled, burnt to brown

from long summers I endured

searching souls of your kind.

So that when you cling to me,

you inhale the impatient nights of

sleeplessness imbued in my skin,

like soot settled on city trees

gasping for rain; the moist aura of

desolate hours in my breath that

I have writhed in bed to be closer to you;

and those still dark hours of oblivious stars

dropping at horizon, whom I have

reached out with my arms,

seeking for my wishes they fell to earth with.

Twisted in desires, I, however,

for once will try and wrench free,

when you would be holding me tightest

and not letting me go.

When your fingers will be scraping

down the hooks of my spine,

your moaning mouth half-rounded

in a blazing ecstasy and

a tremor rising in your legs,

I shall stop suddenly.

Let my fingers relax on your

haunches and withdraw my lips from your pubis,

watching your desperate anger

crush the sweat stained

sheets between your fingers.

For you to realize

what it is to abandon a body,

having long floored its heart.

© Sobhan

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