Daily Times

Too much life we discard
In everything we abandon

Empty cigarette packet
Looking askance from the dump
As if missing all tobacco and smoke

Few sensual tomatoes
With rotten yellow bottoms
Smelling of love dulled by time
And punctured by doubts

Few broken brushes
That tired licking a canvas’ face
And caressing all those curves

Rolled up pizza-restaurant advertisements
Where one spends more on manners
And comes away empty like summer evening

A broken cup
Hurled at the wall opposite in frustration
And regretted over later
For it cupped tea in all rainy nights of winter
And turned into a silent friend

Few wet pages of a local newspaper
That screams loud of corruption and deaths
But wanders nowhere near truth

Beside lies a young kitten
Only few days back
It climbed up and down stairs
But now dead probably out of hunger
The only constant which echoes through history
But very few hear it

A tiny bag of coffee beans
That missed dying in milked water
And emanate those reddish blue romantic scents
Like bundles of affection
That one stores deep within one’s heart
For the one who is coming but not reached yet.

Or wasted, inspired thoughts
That one resists turning into poems
By leaving them long in the brain-furnace
And they wane away like steam
Rather than ferment like yogurt.

Several shreds of a broken mirror
Reflective of human soul
Shattered by millennial past
Of shame and horror

And a disordered clock
With its pendulum lying by its side
As if time has forgotten
Oscillating between binaries
Of night and day; evil and good
But has strayed into a subliminal desert
Where nothing moves.

Not only animals and people
But objects die too
More sadly
For who mourn them?

The writer is a student of English Literature at Government College University, Lahore and can be reached at rosseautolstoy5@gmail.com

Published in Daily Times, November 13^th 2017.