Differences

Rimika Banerjee

 

Your love is like poetry –

Vertical, indiscernible, and fleeting.

My love, a novelistic progression –

Horizontal, steadfast, and ever-growing.

You start not to find your conclusion,

Yet in haste you conclude.

And I find solace in sifting

Through the smallest unit of your speech.

You dance in dialects I have yet not learned;

In conjectures and connotations I fumble and fall.

I am the leaves of pallid pages

You have touched to turn,

Narrating my story in myriad expressions

And hapless sighs.

And I flow with undaunted babbling,

Stumbling and staggering, recovering

As the mountain stream beat against the weathered rocks.

You speak in countless words, unheard, muffled,

And even in silence,

And like poesy give not but the deepest content.

And I lie amid the flesh of my pages,

Stranded and stagnant. Feelings

Like words mount one upon the other,

Forever open, revealing my unending depth –

Garrulous, gushing, and… constant.