When a Friend Does Wrong.

By Malvika Vazalwar

There’s a burning flame

deep in a dark hollow

that won’t flicker or die out

whom a thousand nights

won’t agree to swallow.

 

I feel its rage aching inside me every day,

many a sleepless nights but it won’t die away.

 

Watching it from so close, I feel so restless,

for this flame could smolder even the snow to ashes.

 

I question my memory, I question my faith

How could I let someone light this flame?

 

For warmth it gave me for a moment or two

but it flared wild and grew wicked before I knew.

 

With the birth of this flame, countless beats my heart did lose;

flung all gates open for a tempest to stomp off its rule.

 

The one who lit this flame simply walked away

leaving behind a blurred portrait of my yesterday.


I read those convincing words,

remember the assuring smiles,

quiver at the assertive promises and wonder

how triumphant must feel the miles;

leaping and soaring in between, pushing us away with mighty thrusts,

so that I can’t recall ever saying the words `we` or `us`.

 

Those expressions, a good game of words,

only, I begin to accept them as a part of growing up;

an innocent part supple enough to mould the rigid days to come -

that silently surrendered to the part when you are done growing-up,

a part that sacrifices, allows you to call it a mistake, a lesson learnt;

too mere to be longed for, too far away ever to be reached,

laughed away and shrugged at while narrating your life’s tale

demeaning its right, its one little wish to be thanked,

acknowledged, or to be smiled at -

 

like an illegitimate child sulking all the time,

brilliant, beautiful but with no name

and whose parents want to forget

and bury his being with no hint of shame,

and they don’t bother, don’t dare to look into his questioning eyes.

 

The one who grows up carrying a moaning flame within, 

this is that child who carries a full grown but invisible beast inside,

like the one I have in my burning hollow,

once a heart, it’s walls scraped now, a memory dwells in ruins …

 

so that’s what remains when someone’s just gone,

No, not a wrong friend, but when a friend does wrong.

 


1 comment

  • ‘Snow to ashes’, what a lovely contradiction!!!! ‘How triumphant must feel the miles’, I can feel the pleasure running through me!

    Another Boy

Leave a comment

Please note, comments must be approved before they are published