Tall and majestic pines
followed by some small,
unnoticed ones,
all underlining the empty road
towards my new place.
A green stretch on both sides
left a grey strip out of its reach
just like my life between
a bunch of sunflowers, peonies
and sweetly prepared homes.
The one maintaining the road
really has a long way to go and
a bucket full of strength. But then again,
I wondered, what the road had done to deserve
the maintenance that only kept it
from grabbing the touch of the fine dust,
the dried leaves and someday maybe a tree or two.
Jokes on the helpless road,
jokes on the silly cleaner of the road,
jokes on the dried leaves and the fine dust and
on the trees and on greens and yellows and reds
that all see each other and maybe sometimes converse
but don’t ever meet the eye.
Perhaps the tree doesn’t deserve that friend,
the friend that seems distant even to heart.
Perhaps the road is just a flood,
a flood that forgot the warmth of gentle water
and in the sequence of that mayhap,
had accepted the barrenness of his skin.
I may have seen them today and
maybe we had all conversed our queries,
but I don’t quite recall as to how I was able to do so,
that too, with a tree, a long road having a long body
that makes me feel weird to think of as a living thing.
I wasn’t my mother who cared for her trees
more than her jewelery
nor was I the sweeper who
would always start his day with the statement,
“Let’s get you cleaned up, eh?”
But today, I felt like I wanted to listen
to the greyness of the road, to the emptiness of the tree
missing a friend away by a thin strip of road
and to the crunchy sun that was melting
at the end of the day when the sky got dimmer.
Since the heart only ever feels.
It doesn’t respond to the logic of deserve,
unworthiness and worthiness.
Since when the heart takes over,
we all know to an extent or more
that our head even obeys its wishes for our soul.
The scenery got quieter, but quieter didn’t mean lighter.
It was as if the scenery was painting a piece of my heart
and it was all too overwhelming to see it with two eyes,
hear it from both ends, smell the heartache of all the pieces
and walking away with no words
because of no answers.
And I too understood the pain and felt it under the skin
and just like how my spectator understood my pain and
felt helpless as they watched me fall,
I too felt a lifetime of helplessness
that couldn’t be escaped.
It is the dilemma of a spectator,
the paralyzed eyes of an observer
whos’ heart has frozen in the time of that moment.
In the end, we are all but passers-by,
We’re all the travelers of an empty road and also,
a road that empties and fills in as it wishes.