Start...Turn Off...Shutting Down....

How easy it must have been,
to keep a promise, to hide
under the veiled attempts of humor,
the tears inside.

I sleep-wake-work-sleep
in an endless loop, the insides of that blackened
hearth, in a damp swamp,
of disgust, of hope all misplaced, misattempts at
claiming that happiness I thought
I deserved.

It takes a second to say,
needlessly,
it wasn't so difficult to forget, or get over.
A dream that we three would be together,
and he will finally say to her,
how much he loved her, treasured her,
yet he ran away, and stayed away.

And she, uremic with happiness,
will draw her knobbed hands, knitting
sweaters for laborers, baskets for
orphans,
will draw that semi orphan,that rickety
chap into her parched bosom.

And things would be in a shape,
neither too happy, nor too sad,
but just okay, when she would herself return,
limping from Work, she would find him sitting
and thinking,
And he would look up and smile,
and a thousand fireflies would light
the room, filled with dark secrets of the night.

Till the rains of that overdunged,
underdrained city will drown,
every tear, every fear, into a heap of
rotten river marsh,
which she buried her head into,
when he had asked her,
if she felt like killing herself
because of him,
like his mother.

And she could not explain, why this
why that. She would wait, she thought
For time to come.
It never did.
There was always a Dad.

A lifetime, of not fitting into,
anything else, because, for her,
there was a situation, she
couldn't explain, couldn't fight
until the night when she bent her head,
at the altar of The Over.

Bent her shadow, that she had left
to hover over that luckless widow,
and her lonely son,
and she took it and put it into
her wretched soul,
to be slammed down to 'tiresome'
in the name of propriety.

Because, now
the swallows had flown, taken a new look
of Sky Blue skins rubbing across,
a grey western shore...claiming
dreams to be shined, on the altar of
The Forever.