Missing the last step on the stair case.

Dr Sudhansu Dash

It constantly reminds me
of my unspent life,
before my bones are plastered with time.
Everyone used to walk
to where they do not know
not because the roads are smoky
but because it is so.
It seems that excuse is just not good enough
anymore.
At times I think:
I still walk the streets
It takes me a little time these days
to read the signs and labels,
the easy  calls of the people
standing under bigger names and brighter lights.
Nobody courts nobody anymore.
Hands are held far too easily.
 Intimacy seems to have become
yet another commodity.
I remember my years I lived in absences,
sleeping with a lie in a life of compromise.
My eyes stared past the darkness of the room,
beyond to something, somewhere,
far from where I found my life to be.
I remember well amongst the ruins of my years.
How desperate were the days
exchanging futile words
 I meet over letters,
My  eyes scanning and reciting  an inevitable loneliness
And fear of never finding a place.

 Life feels little more than an emptied school
In the endless weeks of summer;
A  lantern left to bleach in the sun.
I’ll take the hit that comes with it.
If it permits me a moment of belonging.
The air is cancerous with the noises of the streets.
I used to stop and listen now in a near-silence.
It has been weeks since I spoke to someone
who did not rush me through my sentences.
I am trying to learn the patterns of today,
A way to bow my sad head and pay up for my goods
In a way to defy that I am old and slow
To kill the silence that forms
In the spaces you would have spoken in.
 Missing  the last step on the stair case.

A light he is not to himself but to everyone.