#Poetry ‘The Worthless Heart’ by Fiza Pathan

The Worthless Heart

The numbed bleeding heart of my senses never knew how to fear separation,

But your love enlivened it into animation and your departure from its dark red shores brought misery and silence.

I picked up the red liquid from my chest and tasted its saltiness to season my sadness with your memory,

For your recollection is my repast and your name I have engraved with a sharp dagger of silver steel upon the arteries.

It throbs in pain and makes me gash my teeth to stop the escape of bile so bitter from my parted lips,

You took the forbidden fruit from my Eden and now I fancy myself the cursed serpent who has to slither upon a shore of recollects to its shame – what was my sin o lover of mine?

Love is the thirst that turns wine into blood and blood into unhappy drunken faints,

The God who made my body of metal…gave me a heart of glass which you o lover have broken, shattering our togetherness.

Sometimes I see red but yet I live, but dead; in your recollection I breathe out worms so ghastly from my mouth,

I have become a leper whom no one wishes to touch; insane yes but whom you did love and I see your image in the setting of my sun.

Your amour to me beats my breasts to a pulp and I clap my hands to this doleful song for sometimes love ignites but in my case it has deadened its steps,

It has paced the cardiac walls so dark pink finding no warmth but only a cold shelter to please the God of eternal damnation and anxiety.

I pray that you would turn back your blessed steps and return a song of sweet tidings back to me but you have moved on leaving me on my own,

So now I play the lute with blood stained fingers – slashing my wrists and my chest to remember the forgotten love of our time.

O worthless heart of mine──why must you slither your grey veins around my throat when I am mourning the loss of my one true lover,

He gave me a push and I fell off the cliff, wounding myself into pieces and tatters over the petals of the yellow and pink rose.

Now that he has married another, I cannot bear to look into my inner recesses for the hour of doom awaits me there,

So I keep myself busy by singing couplets to kings and queens of poetry while you, dear worthless heart, sell yourself to the vultures of the Zoroastrian dead.

If ever I need your counsel, do not shirk my tears away just as my lover did,

O worthless heart, pour thy life giving red blood into the cauldron of my witchery, to beguile a stranger into falling in love with me so that I may exchange you for his beating bloody organ, his red heart.

Image courtesy: http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/677113