The Plagiarist

She lay on the bed like an open book
And in the dim yellow light
In the diaphanous albumin desire
To surrender and to conquer
I dreamt that I could read her
Line after line
Passage after passage
Page after page
Till nothing more remained
Other than the bookmarked memories
Those handwritten notes
In the folded corners
To revisit and renew our love
That obsolete imitation
Of imperfect life's pursuit for perfection

Mercury in my mind
I hold solace in my sleep
If shallow is my heart
Why would my feelings run deep?

She was written anonymous
In a language I couldn't read
I was a gardener in need of shade
But knew not the type of seed
So I waited with bated breaths
With my hand close to her spine
Should I turn the first page of her tresses
Or lay her open and in my hands supine
In my listless mind I would picture her
As a shape I could never comprehend
So I went for the last pages
To see if I could know her in the end
But the ending was the same as beginning
She was holding herself too close
As if the hand that wrote her never bothered
To find if she was a lily or a rose

Do not open your heart
For you would have to borrow it’s beats
And the lending would stop
If another heart she meets

Night after night
I searched for her sorrow
Against the scale of her past
I weighed her tomorrow
Numbering her pages
I stained my fingers deep blue
But her corners remained same
Nebulous and new
I went through the hyphens
The colons and commas
I passed through every comedy
All tragedies, each drama
Till lo and behold
I could feel on my lips
The words of her next chapters
As if by my fingertips
But O was I wrong
And I was so wrong
For it was her voice
Singing my song
And her pages they were
Black from my hand
Having unwritten her story
In a rage to understand
Mine was the fault
For I should have known
I was just a plagiarist
Writing her as my own

I can feel my skin
Drip on the floor
Like the ink in my bottle
I hold words no more


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