Strangers

 

Little instruments of intimacy

in the vast machine of love,

Enjoying the soft brush of lips,--

a solid stone fort’s support;

a steely assurance,

Melting into each other,

Skins seeping into each other,

Leaving no further distance to be covered,

Making a single entity

in thoughts, feelings and actions.

 

Then the walls crept between them,

Big stony walls,

Intimidating blocks

separating them,

Dividing them,

Cutting them apart,

The jarring fissures,

The glue-work of abandoned love

seeping and cementing the walls,

The walls crept high enough

to leave them complete strangers.

 

They carried each other’s torn skin flakes

on their changed identities,

The dead flakes of martyred love

sticking as sweet-bitter memories.

 

They walked along the stony walls,

There are no doors or windows,

Nostalgic entreaties fail,

Hope is lost,

They know that

both of them died in their own ways,

Losing a part of the self

in losing the other,

Thus they moved ahead wounded,

Then drifted away even from the wall.