Your chalice was poisoned by a strange awareness And since I couldn’t drink that liquid I reached out to touch you wondering if things were lost.

But now I know it wasn’t loss that stood Between our previous departure and that arrival But him, he who had blown you into a different shape.

A concave mirror, with silver extracted from his body Slapped on the other side, you returned my signals of distress And converged love into an increasing heat at the focus.

There paper with my writing blazed, the sum of your memory, Saddened by these fictitious times, those flames unable to take the rich luster of the lamp that burned next to our bed all night!

If beauty can be exalted by athleticism in bed And desire can be mapped to the longevity of an erection How do I measure betrayal then?

Such questions asked on the April Fools Day Would find no answers. So I reconfigure associations: The turns of your speech, the blinking of your eyes.

They now don’t stand for playfulness as much as deceit. After that only excuses will remain, hedges Overgrown around another torched house.

The fire trucks left two weeks ago, I sniff At the burned timbers, somehow managing all the faithfulness of a family dog.

And who will tell the neighbors, When they are awakened tonight, What are the reasons of my howls?

Come let’s recite a poem. Let’s shake loose a sorrow from the weeping tree And place it in the twin bowls of our eyes.

Or let’s turn and go down a forgotten lane And call out, to ourselves, the name of the Beloved. Come let’s recite a poem again.

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.