A Vapory Noose – A poem by Syed Rabe’a Bukhari

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Away from din and delusion of the city
When evening skids down my glum shoulders
And darkness stalks
Like a lost sobbing child
Rambling down a blighted wild,
Weeping clouds accumulate
And sky of my memories turns overcast
Ominous speculations trickle down
With a melancholic black rain
Creating torrential ripples
In dry corridors of brain

Again this parching night
Somersaults
In bottomless vaults
Of my vacant gaze
And I wonder
Under these sultry scarlet skies
Why is sleep such a costly affair?
Smothering behind rusty bars

Of a blind window
I scratch into the skin of night
Carving out a little sky
With my bleeding fingers
And endlessly I gaze
Into the sinking eye
Of this unfamiliar bronze sky
And upon the withering face
Of an absent pale moon.

Restless upon a solitary bed
Somber shadows dissolve
In my open eyes
And dawn germinates
Shredding the doleful robe of night
I sit up
Perspiring in gloom
And guzzle down odd sips of fractured water. I choke.

Chasing the glimmers of my half burnt shadow
Ugly facades fretfully muse
Kashmir crawls within like a vapory noose.

R bukhariAbout the author
Syed Rabe’a Bukhari, published her first work when she was in 7th Grade in 2003.
For her, writing is something which keeps coming back and acts as a potent device to portray the simmering anguish and choking emotions of those around her. She writes so to carve a memorial, however small on the fleeting pages of time. Now she writes to cure her maladious soul