on loneliness

can i believe my own empty sighs
when they appear too far and too little
between my symptomatic need for
despair and disrepair?

“be strong,” they say, “exercise your
agency over your adust remains,”

i wonder if wisdom lies in being aware
or being a practitioner of that awareness —

i, for one, seek redemption in verifying and living
the knowledge of destruction, holding it like
a cosseted corolla of memory,
that is becoming of me — a spoiled sepia-
sequestered detail in the possibility of
existence — a fierce idea without a fulcrum
to safeguard harmony.

“you are not lonely,” i say to myself,
but i do not know where it becomes me
and when i become an evidence to
breaking, and a splintered sensation
of nothing.

i am the last inhalation of smoke,
a testament to the fallacy
of my name.

after all,
where did loneliness surge & stage its act
if not at the juncture where my words trigger
an acid reflux, and transmogrify into aphanitic ash?

.

© Anmol Arora 2018

Image source (Falling by Clara Lieu)
For “How Does the Story End?” at With Real Toads.