DEATH OF LOVE

The button from your T-shirt fell somewhere

You’re starting to forget which way gravity works

Does it eat you alive or vomit parts of you

All over the space

Maybe the stars you see isn’t your dead grandfather

But pieces of you that could never survive on earth

How do I know that mother’s smile won’t cease

When I ask for a eulogy at my desire’s funeral

Then I recall that my mother died at nineteen

She threw off her face upon the wall beside

A mirror that showed her suppositions she believed

The bloody wall never caught fathers

Attention but I often gazed at it for hours on end,

Counting the drops that drifted from the splatter

I even conjured shapes out of it

One looked like a noose without a body to caress

And the other was an ill-carved knife waiting to

Mingle with the milk white skin and drink from

The vale of blood and bones

All these years I’ve been trying to redefine life,

To give it a name no other has experienced;

I call it the death of love

When my silenced shrieks shatter the heavens above

And loosely tied weft threads finally untie themselves

While I lose all buttons bit by bit

To the great unknown

And my white T-shirt swallows scarlet stains

Just like my mother, number nineteen becomes

The eulogy God writes for me

-Nameera