These Days...

I

These days
I find everything staged:
the words of comfort you plant,
the concern that I fake,
the platitudes that we toss,
twirl, throw into each other’s face.
How brittle is our truth
that we wrap it with pretexts
believing love holds good
only in certain contexts.

II

The other day
at Carter Road,
when the Sun was
a speck of orange in your eye
and the world
a soot covered portrait,
I felt I had a poem for you
but then, these days, I don’t write poems.
I look for words instead,
words that string into freshly minted idioms;
idioms that burrow into the silences
you puncture our conversations with.

III

In the quietness of the night
the simmering underbelly
of this ever-changing city
explodes into a shrill scream
unheard from the glistening
living rooms of Malabar Hill
draped with Bach's Symphony.

But I strain to hear your voice
In this mutinous noise…

© Dan Husain
March 25, 2006