October rushes inside with mourning petals, losing its freshness due to the shrill emptiness melting parallelly over my mother’s ‘maang’

Tiredness slept in her smile while she watched me pruning a family tree out of its circumference

She collects ‘bordoisila’ in flower vases that cry life as a palanquin of inherited storms, changing directions clumsily

Don’t plants grow flowers to shed them knitted as garlands over corpses?

I chew just one-fourth of the sorrow valley ploughed over my mother’s clavicle
while she keeps mixing
her over brewed past
with clotted tears
in a 4:1 ratio and
uses it as manure
celebrating sad glimpses,
that probably gains more audience

A brothel of emotions moistens her larynx,
taking shelter behind the Adam’s apple
and I’m the exudate of
those unsaid words
cradling desiccated hormones
at the feet of regret & betrayal,
leaving more pain to swallow than to share

My mother and I are two ends of a sentence, complete when together but still far apart

We are the two parts of a garden, one that nourishes love and the other that just consumes

We look at each other just as the dry earth chases the damp sky, the aftermath of our agony groping the abdomen with hope and failures; symptoms of hibernating lies tied to my little finger unable to fit into her palm of baking realities

She feeds my ears with harmonium grains but I inhale jarring chaos, evaporating cities on the opposite sides of the same page left appressed with pale ‘kopou’ petals groaning unfulfilled promises as growing buds

“afterall flowers never die, they just reincarnate”