When You Forget How to Write a Love Poem by Nalini Priyadarshni

When You Forget How to Write a Love Poem

You try different places at different hours,
dipping your pen in psychedelic summer skies
then switch to inky silence of monsoon clouds
when it doesn’t work
But vanilla days leer at you one after the other
until you realize that you are beyond salvation
So, while you continue to ransack your pockmarks,
for that elusive spark, you know in your heart that
you’ve forgotten how to write a love poem

You desire its cadence and metaphors as much
as the warm body of a lover in your bed on a winter morn
You finger the crumbling dry flowers rediscovered
between yellowing pages of A Hundred Years of Solitude
and long for its sinuous form to unravel in your hands
You smoke a week old stubs leafing through old loves
until your body aches under the weight of indolence
but, it refuses to be coaxed into existence

You convince nobody when you say it’s not your fault
that you’ve forgotten how to write a love poem
least of all, yourself,
a kleptomaniac in emporium of love
primping your garment of frailty
surrounded with smutty mannequins.

Craving for an escapade to run its finger on your lips,
you are offended only by the mundane,
lest it becomes your destiny.

Nalini Priyadarshni has been writing poetry and other stuff for almost a decade and has been published worldwide in literary magazines and journals. Her poems have been widely anthologized and collected in Doppelganger in My House and Lines Across Oceans, which she co-authored with the late D. Russel Micnhimer. Her recent publications include Better Than Starbucks, Different Truths, Duane’s PoeTree, The Ugly Writers, Counter Currents and more.