On the telephone, I saw a number, I once frequently called, for laughter and sometimes for faith. Such exclusive demands are hard to meet, so I got the works, with tears thrown in free. And faith? It broke like the glass bangles they sell in musty markets, of that country where both of us came from: Indies.

Now for days, the phone is silent, I am silent. No more of it's pealing in the middle of the night a voice at the other end, entreaty in the tone, most of the times it was mine, some times yours too. No more crowbars, no more wrecking balls swinging at our rifts and no poetry breaks in between, no more breaking open the sutures

I had managed to apply around the places where I broke, where I was broken, mainly in the head and the limbs. Now I hope to come out intact and survive, when my stitched skin closes and the threads that tie the two flaps are expelled. Only the width of the scar would provide any clue, if someone looks, of those amputations, I tendered in full measure, when those calls came in, over the plains of Mid West, like Shylock, demanding their owed pound of heart’s flesh!

I had to let it alone, I couldn’t warm the lines, by giving them my voice, by saying any words, that might metamorphose, in your reckoning, into mines . What strange battlefields into which we had slid, through the mud, neither of us knowing who the enemy was, where the guns were and into whose fences we were running into, to be cut down by fire, even if sometimes it was just target practice! Butterflies flopped on the wires when faces contorted in the dark both of ours at times, too often towards the implausible end. So I used the delete button. I kept peace.