Myriad Reflections. Shastri Akella

Trapped Freedom
An ocean of sadness – its velvety blue woven with the inscrutable heavy brown of being,
Rises in tyrannical waves from my eyes towards the unknown shore of melancholic bliss,
Alongside its journey, crumbling the heart,
Like wood piled onto a pyre – discarded and unwanted,
Sepia toned missives from the bygone days,
Their letters fading like the memories of a distant dream,
Flutter in the room like an injured reptile,
The messengers of love and longing have escaped from their once crisp paper,
And have disappeared down the unending pockets of time,
A mud-stained satin blankets me with a vengeance akin to that of a shroud,
And I lie there resigned like a mould battered by the tears of despondent clouds,
Everything moves like the incessant tick of the clock – the clouds, the tears, the sepia toned letters,
But all within is still – the heart, the feelings, the dreams – like the sensations of an atrophied limb,
In the season of stillness, the beating of the heart churns like a cruel whirlpool, a reminder of existence,
Beyond a stratum where the rainbows and sunshine can no longer be seen,
Suddenly, the border of the other world appears stunningly near,
Filling me with the aplomb of infinite possibilities,
And the heartbeat – the enemy in the garb of an alley irks no longer as much,
I move towards that border hopes of the life gone by discarded like the skin of a snake,
New hopes to step the line of that boundary burn within like the passion of a tiger during the season of heat,
Evocative iridescence and hushed, stark whispers will interlace in posterity if one does so surface on that border between worlds,
But for now my gaze is filled with eclectic beams of seething light, that chars my body and blinds my eyes,
The failed hopes of yesterday, those sepia tones letters, and the tears smolder in that light like the carcass of a laughing hyena trapped in the jungle fire.