#Poetry ‘The Corroding Lover’ by Fiza Pathan

The Corroding Lover

by Fiza Pathan

I am a discarded sculpture and I lie in seclusions turmoil.

My face is eroded like a ruins surface

I’m a misery unto my own person.

I did not know that love could be so cruel,

So full of wrath and indignation.

But the day you flung the corrosive substance of gall upon me,

I knew then that the core of love’s apple is only the worm of hate.

Now in pain I pass my days while in the darkness

I scream in suffering with grace.

Since you have thrown your pungent acid upon my face,

It has become an effort even to weep.

What did I do lover of mine to beget this punishment?

The vinegar was harsh with burning, like Lucifer’s great fire.

It burnt my neck to a cinder and entered my throat,

Now not a swallow of agony can I push down my rectangular bony trunk.

Your action has broken my heart a hundred times.

With every biting prick of the surgeon’s needle I realise

That you did not care for my love or my nature,

All you could see was my reflection.

Now I wail as the charring liquid disintegrates my face,

Into a black hole of the ugliest hell.

The taste of bile now burns into my eyes

As I whisper a charge against love’s cruel name.

The sting of death cannot be worse than my scalding misery

As I bear your acid upon my skin.

It bites into my flesh and roasts up my emotions

Into a frenzy of curses,

I am blind yet now I can see.

Sometimes I know not where I am,

Sometimes I try to recall your loving face,

But now that cuts into my flesh so grey.

As your acid eats away my sanity

The sour taste of sulphur fumes upon my flaming nostrils helps me breathe.

I bow before you oh my gentle lover

Your liquid to me is like holy water

It cleanses every desire of passion

Now my peeling fibres stick to the hospitals soft blanket.

My body’s surface crumbles with every movement I make,

No medicine man can fathom my astringent unique pain.

More than your acid was your face of rage

That scaled my memory forever more.

No blood I can taste, upon my crumpled lips,

Only a hardness of bone do I feel and recognise.

Death has rejected me lover and life will not let me live

The satire of love is an acid drenched countenance.

Bravo I declare unto cupid’s shaft,

Bravo to the injections they make into me run.

But I will never forget lover dear

Oh yes, I will never forget your last kiss to me,

Instead of your warm mouth

My lips touched

The merciless bottle of acid.