Among the prolific pages of this maple tree
are some leaves that forgot to ripen with age.
There were spaces, blank and white
where language failed.
In retrospect, miserable failures when the heart screamed.

Those were spaces meant for love.
And arguments upheld by ego and pride
were ushered in. They careened in and spread over;
and sadly a misplaced bookmark was inserted to keep them live.
The damage that such bookmarks do to the life of a book!

In some unfrequented coffee shop,
not in the presence of the sublime sea,
but in some lonesomely crowded coffee shop,
is the space to find the blank space
mistakenly overlooked by the tirades of words.

The miserable maladies of language when language
was oblivious of its origin in the heart
and forced to walk in the labyrinths of the brain.
These days the gorge of the sea scares me with its an insaneness
The sea is not for the writing of words.
It's for reading the forgotten spaces for silence,
spaces usurped by the chaos of words.

Sushama Karnik (c)
28 Dec. 2019.