Withered Leaf

In the moonlight’s glow

A ‘daring’ light

Penetrated through the iron railings

And merged on her brows

Inside her,

Nothing was left of her

But, a small, shrunken shell

With kafka, Hopkins and Dostoyevsky

While the house of trade flourished

Unease slid along her innards

Knowledge within her perishable body

Proved worthier

In the ordinariness of

Marriage game

Every night

As the watchman’s shoes

Clattered on the cobbles outside

Keeping to the shadows

She watched the garish owners

Waggling their feet on the iron-safe

Eye-for-eye rapacity, ruthless cut-throats

Sickly white plastered figures seemed

Powerful, so embarrassingly powerful to her

Every life they took for granted

Even their wives were like puppets

Whose limbs moved, according to the tugs they gave

Her dreams fell apart

She was hurt and humiliated

With the clumsy rapid mating

Night after night like an animal,

Two rough hands tore up her brassiere

Those thick fingers bruised her body

She became a victim of a young man’s brutish hunger

Perhaps waiting for children to born out of union

She didn’t know whom to turn to for consolation

Wished, she could tell her father that she hoped for better

Far away from people who only thought of money,

whose brides were unimportant, their happiness unnecessary

For these men had very little time

For the niceties of any kind

For her, love was flowers in the hair

Bees humming in the sun, ponds full of lotuses

Conversation, companionship and warmth in a relation,

Finally, a morning nudged her to save her soul from rusting

Exhausted, she started walking the dark canvas of life

Firmly masked, engulfed in her silent shores

With deceit playing in her fluorescent lips

She learnt to feed Blake’s ‘beams of love’…

Outside, darkness darkened for all those men

Inside her, the spirit of madness pulled out her hinges.