"A Prisoner of Shadows" - by Sreelekha Chatterjee

​Is this the life you longed for?
Your house is in shambles—lonely and forlorn;
your tale a macabre one, a sea of lingering emptiness.
A musty smell wanders behind the creaking door--
imposing but not welcoming, the lock enforced
to keep away the trespassers;
guarded by Hecate, Cerberus, and flesh-eating hounds,
spraying poisonous slobber, plugging minds with slumber.
Food littered on the several decade-old dusty floors,
dotted with clothes, toys, books, and innumerable plastic bags.
Cobwebs scattered everywhere like an estranged mind.
Murmurs heard from the caverns of ones long gone.
You serve as a vassal with skeletons of those
who have crossed the worldly line,
found camaraderie with the long-hushed walls.
On your bed is nestled a clothed corpse of your lover,
covered with a blanket to ward off
the cold that no longer affects her.
At the foot of your bed lies
a heap of bones of the unknown.
Your burning eyes, sunken and cloudy,
have the intensity of a bolide--
expressionless, nonchalant like a funeral pyre.
Your thoughts wander around
the dirty dungeons of your shackled mind;
feelings pale, receded, frozen
like the polar ice, never to thaw again.
Your body is restless as if snakes are writhing along it.
You have consumed water from
the Lethe River of benightedness
to immerse yourself in a state of complete oblivion.
 
Is this the sleep you wished for?
To have exited like a poisoned rat,
blood foaming up at your nostrils, ears, and mouth;
body charred like the interiors of a coal mine;
as if you never existed, unheeded and unseen.
You lie now never to rise again,
never to feel the burgeoning pain
that spurted out within you like molten lava.
Your unvoiced scream is now one amongst
the whispers of the otherworld.

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​Sreelekha Chatterjee is a poet from New Delhi, India. Her poems have appeared in Madras Courier, Setu, Verse-Virtual, The Wise Owl, Ghudsavar Literary Magazine, Porch Literary Magazine, Orenaug Mountain Poetry Journal, Poetry Catalog, Creative Flight, Pena Literary Magazine, Everscribe, and in the anthologies--Light & Dark (Bitterleaf Books, UK), Personal Freedom (Orenaug Mountain Publishing, USA), and Christmas-Winter Anthology Volume 4 (Black Bough Poetry, Wales, UK), among others.
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Facebook: facebook.com/sreelekha.chatterjee.1/, X (formerly Twitter): @sreelekha001,Instagram @sreelekha2023, Bluesky: @sreelekha2024

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