Women who’re hard to write about
limp their way to márquez’s desk,
with broken legs and strings for hands,
only to be discarded like expired whole wheat multigrain bread.
They are scratched upon torn page of diaries from 1947
that reek of martyred blood and memories of homeless nomads
who pay their homage through letting stories from the time
they went swimming in Jalandhar’s largest pond,
and from the day they scarred their tongues with
the hottest Raan in Lahore peek through every succinct exchange of
word they have while searching for a roof again,
and again, and again.
Women who’re hard to write about
sometimes find themselves between the lines of Neruda’s torn poems;
somewhere, amidst his twenty love poems, there they breathe,
in the song of despair.
Their chapped and tattoed lips are painted with clear glycerine;
their crow’s feet wear smeared kohl like war paint;
and when they meet eyes that of poets,
they are more of hollow black holes and moss,
and less of ebony wood that smells of a restless cup of
brewing robusta which tastes of pretzels dipped in maple syrup.
I’ve heard of poets who’ve spent the last of their breaths,
looking for metaphors in their plastic lips and aged eyes
like an orphan looks for his mother’s milk- in vain.
Women who’re hard to write about
paint their bodies with red wine on broken beds in motels,
and burn their oesophagi with all strength whiskey,
in hopes of burying agony at the pit of their stomachs,
Which are the deathbeds of a thousand poets’ diluted metaphors,
who dared name their skin, ‘skin’, and not
the burgundy coloured saree of their mother
who wears stars in her hair and words on her tongue
that feel of shrapnels thrown around like confetti
that tastes of rainbows, and dips her palms
in the barren lands of her green lush collarbones
and dares call herself beau-ti-ful, instead of waiting for her sons
to write her petty poems about her sliding youth.
Because,
you see,
their mother, happens to be one of
the women who’re hard to write about,
as well.
