…..Snehashis Parashar……
When I dissolve myself into the letters you wrote
to your beloved Felice and Milena,
I try to understand the absorption and emission spectra
of the pathos that fortified your love beyond reality.
In the no-man’s-land between my reality and your surreality
I wait for you with two cups of tea
longing for a conversation of empty spaces and sleeping time
and a hope of picking up scabs of you to forge my own skin.
I have stopped dreaming in my sleep
for quite a few years now,
but I tell you, Franz, I see things
beyond what the sun and the moon allows me to see
just like you did, maybe not as clearly,
I see meteor showers amplifying lines of unknown poetry
and your words come down with them
becoming pieces of a human that I long to be.
I’ve written to you countless times before inside my head
while you sit atop your Great Wall not waiting to read them,
I’m an insignificant one amongst thousands of Felices and Milenas
that still long to become one with you
to meet you one more time
to have a conversation, to peek into that tumultuous mind.
In this poem, I meet you, Franz.
Can you see me?