Poetry 2016 Featured Debdip Maitra

Petrichor Stained Nights

It’s after 2 am,
And the rain is falling on the window panes,
Freezing time in a speed bubble,
And you’re trapped...

Trapped,
In a time warp,
With reality twisted and distorted on the border of your vision,
And your most intimate thoughts for company,
You’re trapped,
Caught,
With reality speeding by you,
As time slows down to a trickle of sand in the hourglass...

You’re trapped,
The very blood pumping through your veins audible in super high definition,
While your vision blurs,
You’re trapped,
Within yourself,
Only to be free....

Gloriously free,
For this is a time of the lowering of inhibitions,
And the unveiling of masks,
Masks,
That we wear for the sake of keeping up the facades,
Facades of daily normalcy...

And you’re free,
Free to stretch the cramped muscles of your true being,
To face your demons, accept them,
And let them come out to play,
For it is a time of epiphanous revelations,
And bad, bad decisions...

Bad decisions,
Influenced by a severe case of blurring and twisting tunnel vision,
In trippy moments of following the mad drumroll of this wild, wild heart,
With the counterbalance of the brain sound asleep,
Decisions,
That rock your world,
But sometimes,
A little storm is all that’s needed,
To shake up your world...

And it’s in these moments,
In the calls this late at night,
With voices slurring with the weight of drunk souls,
Drunk,
On poetry,
On love,
On loneliness,
On nights stained with the whiff of petrichor,
That you get to know yourself,
And others...

And in the end,
That’s what life boils down to,
Drunken souls uncloaked,
In glorious epiphany,

Teaching us who we are...