by Vineet Kaul

Fingerprints a la prima facie

Of a sin consisting of just us three.

Me and you, then, and it:

In our involuntary, regressive, redundant fit.

Locked in the solitude

Amongst a consortium of faces,

And we?

Chose the closed comfort of silence:

Communication blasphemy.

Turn around turnaround.

You passed me the pillow and the music stood down.

Played like a fiddle

Then burnt like a witch.

Incessantly embedded earworm twitch.

Tongues rolled with fervor

But 'twas endeavor's hitch...

Broken attention in that Machiavellian pitch.

The music was loudest between the songs,

With too many strings attached

To all the puppets wrong.

Who once was the judge

Is now wagered to play clown,

The red nosed historian of a banana peel crown.

Sly vaudeville -

Out to conquer all the boudoir action,

Vain valency -

To explore a fabled opposite attraction.

Pass the buck like your pillow,

Cross-armed till the pause.

Vengeance is vehement in jilted applause.

Subconsciously engineered –

The promises thrown,

Flawlessly faulted and out of necessity grown.

Rolled up sleeves don't help with wearing your heart

Whence subjugated to savoring scars.

For it's the same place from where we started

And worse yet

The same place from where we depart.

These memories shall time, both, erase and unwind.

Truth is in all negligence of presence of mind.

The journey will dictate to the journal

The methods to err

In a manner to overlook as the gradients blur.

Long after, in folly, we our destinations skip

Yielding to emotions that time can't ascertain

Recollections of Confessions-of-love will remain

Nothing more than a listless Freudian Slip.