SECRET TRAINS OF DESOLATE HEARTS

Words by Abul Kalam Azad

A grey tarpaulin spreads as a moist city squirms under the torturous beauty of rain-soaked alleys

A secret train with single compartment wets its wheels across familiar paths

The same people board it, from fortnight to fortnight

An elderly man with a red walking stick and a spider-like heart, slender webs of sorrow holding on to the winged memories of his dead darlings

Lovers on diagonal ends, their wrists chained to distant roofs, who send words in lieu of mouths to gently shut the eyes of restless follicles inside slashed armpits

Lovers stitched to the same seat, the umbilical throne of similar wombs, their lips so close in chromosomal dreams that any sigh which precedes a kiss would snap the slumber of shame : a tender defiant shame

A woman walking from corner to corner playing a blue accordion across her breasts, those stolen promises of endless Eros she carries in the curls of her greying pubis

A young poet in a broad brimmed hat, for whom loneliness is the longest line on his palms, frozen with the fright of a future without the warmth of a fellow being

“My words are kisses that cloud lipless seconds

My poems are stars that surround half-burnt moons”

The same people..

People, the scent of rum beneath their softened teeth, who stuff the silent wings of departed ones with the porous feathers of dissonant lights

People with unsheltered hearts writhing in the shade of eclipsed bonds

..the same people

But, tonight, the train stops at a strange station

A drunk couple, sweat circling the insides of their dark lips on the brink of a long blurry kiss, storm inside with unsteady steps

Unsolicited visitors who halt the numbing echoes of collective mourning

The bayonets of broken hearts curl back into velvet sheaths’, the trumpets under tired pupils mute out the rhythmic tears

Everyone lowers their heads, as if from a well rehearsed habit,

As If Waiting

for the guillotine of exposed longings

The couple rips the noose away from the womb of their foetal smooch

The salival sounds spread their tongues, and the bent ears of desolate neighbors run their fingers over those unshaved syllables that escape every language

For some, it’s a missive from the dead past : sand from a cracked hourglass the grief that was, before, a void on the bedside when they jolt out of nightmares now, briefly, has a shape, and a visceral verse at its every curve

For some, it smelt of quiet delight with an aftertaste of crippling fear the love, seamlessly dancing through the grooves of fertile desires, shedding, without a care, the kind garments of their veiled hearts, would, perhaps, someday, sit alone, caressing its own shadow, in the ruins of fibres it doesn’t know how to stitch

“Please let this not end in shards of broken hearts deep inside the closing lids of sleepless nights” , they pray to someone who forgot his ears in the purgatory of stale passions And for others, it took the carnal wings of a bitter envy

“Why should djinns of despair be so warm in the smokeless fire swallowing my being?

Why should fruits of regret ripen on bruised branches?”

As everyone lay possessed under the hex of those lusting hearts, the train halts, again, at an unknown stop

The couple seize tugging at the agile muscles of their greasy tongues haul their aroused toes through the opened doors

The lowered heads rise slowly as the whispers of those parting heels are snatched by the pouring night and, their dizzy eyes see, for the first time, the words that rain drops gathered on the slates of glass windows

“How did you lose so much?”