For The Eyes Of Strangers

By Anusha Garg

My soul had no skin
Like the buried stars covering the fragility of glass,
The morning sky as it leaves the folds of my chest,
Slowly rescued by the thought
And the breath runs parallel,
Pulling me up again
From my soul I hardly dare to wear,

That empty corpse feels like the target of darts
Their petals to be guarded,
To be named after a library,
Paper bones on the corner of my hall,
Lit only by the bottled sun,
At peace with the sea foam
Granting me a clue.....

The undressing of the dotted lines,
As if it ends here tonight,
Every space that air holds on my way,
Accompanied by sobs that my lungs drew.
The poetry I fear to be,
The liveliest last portrait of you

Parts of my pieces were stolen
By the eyes of those tainted windows,
Which were the lies on my wrist,
The caged ashes, gone like a smokeless burn,
Forages for hope,
The Auricle waving towards the nape,
Of the touched skin of price

The burn in my fingers, my ribs, my jaw,
Poison in my veins spread through poetry’s bloodless heart
There’s a wall with a man inside,
Bruised by the confrontation of love,
The piercing boredom peeled away from my roots,
My thoughts sitting on that chair,
With the paleness of being still.....

I collapsed to that child’s tale of being,
For I almost did believe
I'm a bleeding cloud in a sandstorm,
When winter was absorbed in poetic orange,
The lover was breathing art through the fingernails of a passer-by,
Like the moon’s twin is the keeper of face,
Peeling back the dawn,
Wearing scars like constellations

So was Truth found in borrowed eyes,
Born from distance,
The gaze that knows nothing, yet sees all.
I stitched my silence in the mouth of a clock,
My wisdom settling in like dust,
and the stars read my journal when I forget to close the window
Marking every pause of mine with their fading script                                                         
In the quiet they left behind, I gathered what remained—
I built a boat from every letter I never sent,
And folded it like a map                                                                                                         
The map left me stranded on an island of mirrors,
Where I always wished the mirror was kind,

I watered my boundaries into the lining of my laugh
and wrote a letter that outlived its owner                                                                            “The night is loud when you owe it a confession”

My armour was filled with shapes called lies,
The backwash of the innocent stains on my lips called for hope and
Earth’s dry breath breathed life into a half-remembered figure
with scarecrow-like skin

The stranger kept offering the world a poem,
And it kept asking for blood.
When I praised the stars, the stranger said,
The stars are just holes where light forgot to die

The sunflower heart started singing in empty rooms,
As if they are the calling,
witnessing a miracle…
While the rain fell in love with the pause before my name,                                                      But the rain never let me keep a secret;
It returned every secret I tried to bury

The stranger said the light never saves you, it just shows what’s left
And then I traded the light with my bones, left in the cities I never reached,
Dying in the drawers, the weight of things I let go                                                                   In decay, there was honesty, but it begged to be let go
My ceiling cursed the drought….

At the end, love begins with two strangers brave enough to speak,
But the stranger kissed the greyscale sky through his flawed eye
I was able to see how smiles just end in eternal lines
There’s a metaphor there somewhere,
Of having only one pair of eyes