When life's a burden,
filled with things I cannot take,
when I cannot recognize myself
and I tatter with memory like a gifted child,
when all rats abandon my ship
and I lose memory of what I can call "a home",
when death beacons me with sirens of howls and screams
and hearty laughter seems like a simper and smites my ears,
Yes, I have lost all hope and hit the bottom.
Hope.
There's not the slightest of its sign in the decibels of its hollered name.
The last straw that I cling on to is struggling to get away.
What can a straw understand a drowning man's last wish to be by its side?
The waves engulf me as the poet bleeds ink onto his paper.
Like the white spaces that have escaped the angst,
the straw floats on, dancing on the waves,
treading over them, slyly smirking.
The is no hope.
Fresh, untouched parchment welcomingly spreads its hands to embrace the blots of ink.
There is only fear of the cunning thing,
which could suck up all the ink there is and leave the quill exhausted,
panting and puffing gusts of air.
Air- too light to lift the parchment.
There is still no hope.
When the words, to which I was betrothed since the day I could read, swim into pools of unwonted idleness,
When the blotting paper lies wet with ink,
sickly, black, and dead,
When alphabets,vowels, and consonants haunt me even though I am wide awake,
When the tongue is parched and weeps for words,
When poetry seems to have forgotten to move,
There is no hope.
When there are watches on the wrists,
sans kisses on the lips,
when the thirst for those words kills us all,
There is drought on the scale,
words not uttered anywhere,
when there is a famine for lack of love,
There is no hope.
When at the end of a poem,
the words are bereft of their sense of touch,
If they carry no weight at all
and are just like doodles over parchment,
If they only tread the page without meaning, saying, nor conveying,
when poetry is dead,
There is No Hope At All.
