The hoax of your hopefulness — Poems by Tabassum Hasnat

Here you are October,
they heroicize you for having fallen in love
during one of your autumnal days,

I romanticise you for having fallen through
the cracks left behind by the brutish bearings
of life, over the seasons elapsed.

In the coziness that you bring with yourself,
the cracks reclaim their long-sought repose
to unwind after an epoch of keeping them
cemented through the hustle, haste, and
humdrum of the last nine months.

In the arcane embodiments they carve out of your arrival,
the cracks become comprehensible than ever,
throbbing against my thorax.

Cracks, burgeoning with untamed flowers growing rugged leaves,
giving off an unsweetened smell of resentment as my lover's grievances only garnered,
like the aftertaste of the bitter part of the tiramisu on the back of my tongue
that he used to feed me in spoonfuls.

Cracks, through which antsy silences peek
before crawling out to procure words that had finally taken a form around the edges of my mouth but to be nipped in the bud like shiulis plucked off by my over enthusiastic mother,
on her way back home after dropping off my brother at school, only for her to have forgotten where she put them following the nosefuls of their fragrance after an afternoon nap.

Cracks through which my sophrosyne slips,
pieces of prudence prick at my belly as they erode
while whims win the tug of war but,
I was never the whimsical one and so,
one virtuous wave of apathy awash me whole
like a wraith of winter that creeps into our senses
witnessing the morning fog,
before the crisp breeze of transition brings us
back to an autumn only deepening.

Cracks that shrill through my seasonal sham
of wholeness- as the threads made up
of persons and places,
moments and memories,
nostalgia and necessities,
words and whisperings,
laughter and laments;

and all that I had picked up on all along
embroidering this patchwork of a being,
kept unclasping with seams disarrayed;
while a hereditary hollowness gathers me
in its lap like the perfidious downpours
that only remember to ambush on days
we deliberately leave behind the umbrellas
adding supplemental tinges of frostiness
to the winter set to coldly commence.

Here you are October,
the cracks have become crevices
and now a chasm.

A chasm, the claws of which I carry
clasped around my ribcage
letting it feast on the air I breathe
to survive perhaps,
like a mother's grief always finding
a way to plant a diaphanous part of it
in the daughter's fate regardless,
of the seasons changed,
regardless of the Octobers
that have come and gone,
regardless of the way the autumnal air
ages with wintry wisps eventually
engulfing it awhole.

Acrimonious appendages
of assumed anguish agonizingly
ambush my ankles
my feet in consequence remain
frozen to some frivolous spot.
Two lines are all I muster
to have meticulously uttered,
the rest of the prose tumbles
down to lay in ruins
at the base of my throat.
You tell me to put my finger on it,
what is it - grief, grievances,
or grisly reminiscences?
Your knuckles must have been
bruised from all these thuds
on my door, gone unheard,
unanswered.
Your ink, whose dreamy devotee
I've always been, must be repulsive
of me, from having all these letters
penned down, gone unread,
untouched.
And you must have been
worn out from this wearying duty
that you've brought upon yourself
of keeping me happy
midst all my capriciousness
to add to your chagrin.

Timely tides of trepidation
and turmoil tinged with shunned
spumes of nostalgia, nausea,
and neglect awash me whole.
Attempts of keeping myself afloat
preoccupy me now and then
as I forget to love you
perhaps more.
The water now trespasses
the unruly seams of my comfort blanket,
the corners of which are being wrenched
off me, leaving me bereft.
I, am again frozen to some frivolous spot.

Your shadow suspects me
of scheming to seek shelter
in it every now and then
for mine gives me away
to the darkness by subterfuge.
Huddling me in your arms,
you ask if I'd been able
to put my finger on it,
what is it - grief, grievances,
or grisly reminiscences?
I am at the heart of it,
incapable of getting
to the heart of it.

How do I complete
what I've commenced.
Coherence chortles as it exits,
leaving me to simmer in this cauldron
of alternating states of being.
For your sticking around does not
make any sense, to which you say -
a home is a home irrespective of what
ashbabpotro is in store for one.

I have hit a limbo, I tell you.
Eat sleep and repeat has become
this life's motto, I tell you.
The most beautiful writings you say,
are those random thoughts of the mind,
my frontal lobe frivolously simpers
at the lack of contents inside my head.

Commotion no longer
causes me discomfort,
its silence that nibbles
on my skin the most.

The insides are a necropolis
of foregone passions, pursuits, and purposes.
The outside is a metropolis of monotony,
where every lane leads to a concocted
merrymaking of this existence.

Behind the eyes, a meaningless montage
of laments accrued from dearth, and
dereliction over time, relentlessly reruns.
From the tip of the tongue,
finessed phrases portraying rationality,
and a splendid state of being
tumble down tirelessly.

Pretty in pink I look, you tell me.
Your shirt hugs my frame loosely,
the residues of black ink dried up
against my fingertips spare no effort
to tightly pull at the proses that I had-
abandoned to perish even before they
could have been put together,
as I trace my fingers along
the features of your face.
I giggle just fine as you splatter
every inch of my face with smooches
while my words, wails, and whispers
all lie wizened at the base of my throat
make a fruitless attempt to leave me
gasping for breath -but that must've been
only the work of your lips against mine,
something I'm happy to have surmised.

I'm not the lover to write a book on,
I'd warned you before.
You're a stats person, and look at you
forgetting to keep a count of all,
your labors of love going unreturned.
Nonetheless, I keep a count for you and myself,
walking you through it along with me then and now
only for you to pull me back into your arms
half whispering into my hair -
"We've never learned to take it easy, have we love?"

"On days, I'm racing against something
for your attention and presence", you say.
But here I'm, racing against my own head -
as your fingers run back and forth
against my forearm.

The starting, and the finishing lines,
all remain blurred. I've checked myself in,
at one surreptitious stop - the track
around me, keeps moving on its own.

My toes, attuned to treading along
this desultory trail, and my fingers
adroit at remaining clasped between
the spaces of yours while everything
keeps shamelessly slipping
through them.

I am but a wraith of the woman
you had fallen in love with.
I have hit a limbo, I tell you.
Clandestinely held captive in a kaleidoscope
made of mosaics of my own massacred versions.
I hit the sack at the crack of every down
with no scintilla of slumber in sight
for my eyes to revel in.
Amidst the war waged for ascendancy
amongst the dreads of the past,
present, and the future -
you peek in
through my partly closed door
with your warm wishes for a good night's sleep.
How long would you bear with me? -
seems to have been coldly left behind
as the only real question of the hour.

The hoax of your hopefulness
tugs harder at my receding residues
of redemption, with every day that elapsed

with every graze of my shoulder
against that of yours, the tips of your fingers
become ever so determined to detour their way
back along the lines of my palm only to inhabit
the interdigital spaces of my hand

with every morsel of distance
I plant between you and me, by turning away
the heaving of thy chest finds a way to feast on it,
leaving behind a stench of proximity and in turn
an inevitable subversion of my sense,
the moment my back rests against that self same chest

with every word I swallow back
before it could even slip off my tongue,
the arc of your smile only sharpens for some
other-worldly melody seemingly rings in the pits
of your ears, only in the presence of our silences

The hoax of your hopefulness
tugs harder at my receding residues
of redemption, with every day that elapsed

I bid adieu to this daydreamer-dwelling
inside of you, at the end of every dusk
perhaps preparing to be poised,

when on some arbitrary dawn the dreariness
of my world, prevails over the hopes
you so dearly harbour

till then I'll cheerily keep confessing
my culpability, every time my prose alleges me
of having penned down each of your daydreams
in between the asymmetries of its allegories.