Prisoners of Love
written by: Sobhan Pramanik
@SobhanPramanik
I remember our first drink together.
I had brought you home to
rejoice my first salary, picking
on our way, a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
Driving the corkscrew spiral to
its very last thread, I had popped
the wine open, carefully pouring
into glasses that sat light-filled on the table.
How then you held one by its narrow stem,
your white thighs carelessly crossed
over my knees on the sofa and raised to your lips.
I watched stars flow into your mouth
from a yellow night – the sour rising to your eyes,
making clouds out of your thoughts.
And then when you lowered the glass,
the night was half drunk with distant stars
still swirling in it, and a matt red stain
of your lips printed to the rim.
I saw in that moist graze,
the fine lines on your lips vividly etched.
Thin cracks where the lipstick hadn’t reached,
the pearl sized aperture where
your lips don’t touch when you round them
and the drooping arc that completes your mouth.
Few more sips later,
with the night emptied inside,
there on the rim remained only
a smudge red stain of what
was once an intimate print.
With each slow raise, your lips
had met the crystal slightly moved
from where it last touched, even overlapped,
leading to a vapoury blotch of red lipstick,
spit and words unrolled.
What’s unnerving is that after all
these years of having gone our ways,
and my failing brain barely catching
any remembrance of the souls
I had drunk and got laid with;
it is your eternal existence
that glitters unsmudged from
the crystal edge of my redundant heart.
No one and nothing ever came
remotely close to reconstruct
my landscape, you left all dilapidated
with your promises.
Like fingerprints on the hilt of a dagger
that had claimed a life, I am but a
violated evidence of your love
with your lipprints on heartbeats
down my neck, sentenced to a
forever of yearning to be together;
this life or any other.
- Oh! Poor Man - February 8, 2018
- It’s Okay - January 20, 2018
- Fools, Flowers and Falls - January 2, 2018
