black prose

Writing at the back of your hands
or at the front of your wrists
stings the skin
that forever labors
love, faith and hope.

But your desires
written in sentences or in paragraphs
with thick ink that
swelters your wisdom connotes
lust, foolishness and hatred.

If you can then write it
on paper, floor, or anywhere you want
the skin that forever labors
love, faith and hope
will be void of the sting,
clear of a dark crusty veneer
of the darkest black.

* * *

The title of the poem haunted me for three straight nights and kept me awake even up to two o’clock at dawn. Starting from May 21, those two words (‘black’ and ‘prose’) rang in my mind like an unbearable sin trying to burst out of me. And finally at the dawn of May 31 I got up from bed, turned on the lights, and took my yellow booklet and pencil by my bedside and wrote this piece of work.

It was just mysterious that after I wrote this poem in a mildly dazed way, on the following nights, I slept well without the usual nocturnal disturbances.

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