Pejoratives and Prayers

Love is a letter lost
in the mail.
The problem is,
I don't know what the
envelope looks like.

I'm made of pain and sorrow.
For love is a pejorative, of the naivest kind
There's a child inside,
knocking on the doors that lead to a
tumultuous flood.
You live inside my heart
like an ache. A wail.
Turn a blind eye.
Or you'll just slip away.

This poem, the pain,
and the writer,
they're all tangled in the stale
branches of an old tree.
For love is an abuse,
of the softest kind.
I'm made of childhood
and memories.
An album of the
happiest ones
always open somewhere.
Let it flow away.
Turn a blind eye.

I'm made of waiting and
patience.
Or perhaps an aphasia
that doesn't last long.
For love is a prayer,
of the worst kind.
Turn a blind eye.
And hopefully,
it'll drown me too.

The syllables untangle
themselves and spill, all
over my tongue.
Love, a pejorative / love,
an abuse / love,
a prayer.
For love, is a letter
lost in the mail.
And to their relief,
I've stopped looking.

To write, she tells me
and to write brilliantly,
It is absolutely necessary
that you live a little.

So I get a knife and
dig a grave of all the
deaths that I lived.
Hoping to find the sign
of a life, whimpering
under the rubble.
Visible traces of all the
laughs dismembered at
the funeral. Like the
ending of a song
echoing in your dream.

A child, a teenager, a woman.
One funeral,
And a child again.

Bodies pile up.
Half dead, on the brink
of a breath.
I pull them up and breathe
into their mouths.
Tugging hard at the hem
of a life.
A whistle escapes through
their nostrils.
I step away, and find it gone
I lean in and find
a song.

To write, so I tell her
And to write brilliantly
It is absolutely necessary
That you die a little.

She sells
seashells,
On the seashore.
Stupid little girl.
Ludicrous woman.
It is she, your incarnation.
She, who sells dreams
at night.
An alliteration abandoned
at birth.
You distill the symbolism
on purpose / out of habit.
Clean slates and
burning edges.
The metaphor sits on a
rooftop and smears.
It laughs and its stomach
aches.
Cheeks hurt,
and tremble.
She kisses them and her
mouth bleeds.
Her body,
now an offering.
She sells her death.
Her life,
your Magnum Opus.
Sleep, on the ridge
of your eye.
Your eye, a burning
gold watch.
Tick-tock, Tick-tock
Pay a price,
Buy a dream.
She lays on the shore.
Her back embalmed in water.
Sand tourniquets
lapping hope in a haste.
A funeral,
A rehearsal,
A metaphor.
She sells
seashells,
On the seashore.
Bhairavi M. Ponkshe is a Psychology graduate and a first-year Law student from Mumbai, India. Her poems have been published and featured in various literary journals and poetry anthologies.
You can access her poetry online on her Instagram page