There are moments when a line you’ve just read pierces you clean through. The words linger, not as ink on paper, but as a pulse under your skin. It strikes some unlit chamber beneath the ribs, and leaves you in a sudden storm of instinct, an ungoverned music, the kind of thing you can only write when you’re still trembling from the strike.

And before you can name it, the hand begins to move—ink spilling in a language you have never formally learned, yet somehow have always known. The words arrive as if you are not writing, but uncovering. As if every curve of the letters is the brushing away of dust from a relic you once held in another life.

It is only then you notice the ink is not black, but red—warm, wet, and still dripping...

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I don’t crave your hands
if they carry
leftover heat —
touch me only
if your fingerprints
have forgotten
everybody else.

-

My mouth full of her river,
lungs craving breath,
soul somewhere
beneath her thighs.

-

A leaking bus stop,
one broken light,
and her head resting on my soaked shoulder —
I have lived richer nights in cheaper places.

We kissed beneath the plastic roof
of a roadside tea stall.
Steam, rain, and her breath —
that’s all I remember.

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Afternoon sins

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We used to make
clay dolls in summer;
She, with skilled fingers,
I, with clumsy hope;
She always moulded the woman strong,
and weak the man.

heR grief had form, even then !

-

Her diary pages
filled with recipes,
and scribbled lines like—
"Don’t forget: he loved sugar in tea."
"Fold his shirts with care, he liked them crisp."

She always wrote love in past tense.
Maybe that was the only way she could keep it.

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The Smell of Rain on Her Pillow

That evening, the rain had arrived earlier than the forecast. It wasn't a drizzle—it was the kind that knows your wounds and washes them without permission. I sat by the window, not watching the downpour, but the spot where her head once rested on the pillow. It still bore the shape of her absence.

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In her attic,
there was this old iron chest;
tied tight with jute rope,
it held letters,
bus tickets, cards,
chocolate wrappers, and dry flowers.

She opened it every winter, she once said.
I dared not ask why.

-

After she left, they grew louder—
Like echoes chasing shadows.
When she left, I wore them once.
They didn’t jangled the same.

Her Anklets
She never removed them—not in sleep,
not in sorrow.
Their sound meant
she was near.

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