This ring on my finger has a few stones missing,
There's an empty chair in the family picture.
Let this emptiness prevail...
Let heavens peep through this hollowness,
Let heavens know what they have taken away from me.

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I sit by the sea, the fine sand pricking uncomfortably in the webs of my toes, watching the waves crashing onto the shore and feeling my world crashing down around my shoulders. There is a gaping hollow within me, a nothingness that consumes every particle of my being, leaving a consuming desire to fade away into nothingness. I gasp for air praying for tears but they refuse to come. But then, you never liked tears, did you?

-

....

-

In the battle of
attention and ignorance
what do we get
except hollow silences.

-

you know
its a hollow feeling
whenever i see your face
in the shape of the clouds.

(full poem in caption)

-

I lost my smile.
Eyes have become numb.
So dry and empty.
Stomach is hollow.
Soul feels over fed,
So bloated I feel that
I can’t even exhale
how much I have consumed.

-

...

-

i smell
poetry
wrapped around you
having
broken fragments
of chaos and peace
differentiated in paras
but,
similar in hollowness.

-

Do kitab parh ke wo khud ko allama samajh baithe,
Yahan har shakhs, sanad hath mein liye firta hai 😏

-

I'm a Netizen
a different kind of citizen
I live in cyberspace
I inhabit virtuality.
I'm not allowed more than 140 letters,
and not getting 'likes' gives me jitters.
I don't laugh anymore, I LOL!
I don't socialise or have friends
who I can meet physically,
my existence is measured in retweets & followers, technically.
I use thesaurus to sound Victorian,
just to hide myself from being called a plebeian.
My heartbeat is the internet,
my mantra is connectivity,
my friend is my phone,
it's battery is my longevity.
My favourite pass time
is to stare at the mobile screen,
waiting for a like, a follow up or a ping.
Its been ages since I've heard a live voice sing.
For days I don't come out to see the sky or bird.
What for, I think now, for the bird is just an icon, and the inverted comma is the new 'talisman'.
I'm a netizen, a different kind of citizen,
living in virtual reality,
forever connected,
yet when dissected,
absolutely alone as an entity.
-Rohan Srivastava

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