One January dawn traversing through the haunted mountains he pointed at the heart in his chest and begged,

Said he has been trying to free it, unravel it and disentangle it from the fetters of the normalcy

And he wept holding his knees close to his mouth in the deserted lanes of the city he died in

And you are in the same lanes trying to find your way out of the never-ending spirals

Sunlight and lavender.

You soak your bruised skin in it in hopes that you will feel better

Do you?

We’ve been taught to hate

This is not love and this is not accepted.

They stop holding hands when they see strangers eyeing their every movement,

The boy who loved a boy doesn’t smile anymore

He lives four lanes away and he stays with doors shut,

Four walls collapsing in on him,

They’ve filled our mouths with their unholy prayers

And told us that we don’t belong

They told us that the universe regrets us.

He murmured his secrets to the cobalt sky and in hushed whispers he accepted who he was

“We are teenage tragedies”, he cried,

Our mouths full of unsaid lamentations

They mourn the deaths of children we could never be.

He sees the prayers and hopes in his mother’s folded hands

In his father’s hopeful eyes

“we will not be accepted’

And he could swear that he has seen ghosts.

The boy with tired hopeful eyes, he moves like winters falling on the trees like he’s full of abrasions,

He talks about golden towers and gasoline and roses

He says it burns a little more everyday

And he crawls in the mist-dumped evergreens and he grins at this foreign feeling making a home in him.

By Fiddler