I Am Too Old To Write About Love

BY KSHIPRA PAL

"love each other or perish"
~Auden

I write instead about
the gong, beside riverbed
And how I catch it sound
from across the bridge
beside whose rainbow arch
my home and the hearth
where I hang my coat
and write about evenings.

Evenings -
when I go soft in senses
scurrying good hormones
remembering the girl with
hot summer scrunchies
lamenting, how once
it tied her down

And the following revolt
As I cozied up to words
birthing thunder in guts
tongue, railing free
over a heap of clay
sheltered under tattooed hands
and wordplays

Wordplays,
were simple and fun
I beseeched life
from only one spectrum
Riding wildest winds
on Chandni Chowk lanes
Movies, friends and video games
carefree laughter and popcorns
It turned out later
that people were not unicorns

I began seeing more dimensions
and shades of gray
I knew I had to grow up
with each passing sun ray
with every struggle in day flares
in attempts of catching breath
under nights' hollowed air

Too much oxygen
at times made me bubbleheaded
I suspired with apprehensions
hatching words like zephyr
turning papers into chagrined piece
a directionless fire I contained. Beneath
the eye of this poetic storm
was a hateful weltanschauung

I recall my past life
particularly vividly the day I recited
"the solitary reaper" in a competition
and how I choked on the word 'melancholy'
about how my first ever poem was copied
to fetch praises from my father serving the Army
and my indulgence in poetry
actually had begun as an
embarrassment to my poetic self

Have been donning multiple star lights
since. From towns to different cities
have found lover and confidence
have found and lost-
courage and belief
Have hosted poetic soirees
from mountains to plains
from deserts to cove
Avoiding although
the topic of love
yet brightest of my life
is its trope
darkest of my life
was still, a yearning for love

I believe now
we are never old, we are naive
we write and live and hustle
we seek and fight and perish
for that thing, dense and deep
Even if promises are betrayed
and the decades lost
even if old dreams slipped
between the fingers
like a frond of leaves

The universe that expands with love
is the universe that expands for it