For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror

I woke up before you to weave from every ray of the matutinal sunlight a cocoon of our shared dreams; the cities you are travelling to can be abrasive. I have also packed you the vials of memories, of lotion like balmy nights and the crystals of freezing ones spent together. Use them sparingly on the wrinkles of loneliness. On a distant beach when you have worn the light of setting sun, save some of it in your eyes, for I would want to taste its saltiness later. Remember the time when our squiggling bodies were the only blemishes on the blushing moon. That moon is lost. If you find it crumbling over a desert bring me a handful of its spangles.

From a neon-lit parchment of ether, we cast runes into the bosom of the cosmos and wait for the echoes. And with an ear against the shell of the universe we listen to the patois, sloshing in the space-time, of the language forged in the tumultuous hearth of the stars. In the warps and the wefts of the molecular syllables can be heard the rhymes of life and the sonnets of creation

I hesitated, for I was not sure of our return, together, from this journey across your skin. Our lively whispers, which had once blossomed nights of sibilant brooks, were spent, sprouting abattoirs where words bled memories dry. The streets, which had pursued us till they got entangled with the creases of our palms, the facades, which had spied upon us as we kissed under the neon lights, seemed hallucinations of the fornicated flesh. Sleep, which had once slurred the distance between our dreams and had plaited our limbs, lies undone. Now on this trip time had traveled on and had left me with a zipper, that was stuck midway of a long thread of breath. I let go, for I knew I had become a fossilized memory of your flesh.

The book was gasping for breath when I picked it off the shelf. In the alleys, where the words scrunch like gravel under the feet and the musty smell of ages weave a maelstrom of questions at every step, where bereft of human caress books were dying- letters hemorrhaging from the wounds of time; had I come searching for the fugitives of my memories. Rustling pages whispered, of the rustling leaves. Rotting ink had diffused like the blotting pigments, of summer. Petals had curlicued and had become the alphabets. The flower had died and had become the book.

In the moments before waking  when the city was weaving dreams of concrete, the tide of the night receded and left in its wake creatures of the deep, forms from the void. On the sidewalk an oyster lay unopened, preserving a drifting dream from a land alien. The blanket in its filigree had trapped the night just enough for a home to thrive. A sardine gasped for breath in the last puddle of darkness on the pavement. Through the rancid stream of traffic had she waded in the night to sell the ministrations of love, And now she was exhausted. Two stumps for feet, the Barnacle,  clung to the uninviting shop front. The incoming tide of day, promised salvation. For with the alms from the gratuitously generous could he unleash the stupefaction of the night,  stacked in the bottles behind him.