Chest Of Bruises & Battles
Chest Of Bruises & Battles


My gaze shifted from hither and thither,
Far and wide over every cranny
Of the space around me.
And I saw them, heard them,
Inevitably felt them sans any ease -
The melancholic claws of despondency
Crawling from every one of those crannies
Before enclasping around the base of my throat
While I stared with an ever so known blankness
Right at the voids of an unknown nothingness
That whirled and waltzed in front of me.
And there it was, the weight
Of one or umpteen burdensome hollowness
Soaking up my insides
While the corners of my mind
Entangled and disentangled
With emptying turmoils
Before crumbling bit by bit
With the tints of darkness sprawled all across them
Until the inner hellhounds of that very mind
Ravished and razed each one of them,
Devouring every shard of sanity out of them,
And leaving behind nothing
But the vestiges of sheer bleakness.
My gaze lingered mundanely from here and there,
While this self of mine sank deep and deep
Before immersing wholly in the abyssal pits
Of one perpetually benumbing emptiness
Until that something, the rectangular blank pages
That remained strewn and scattered
Merely a few feet away from me
At last, beckoned me to look at them.
A warmly bitter cry fled through my lips
As I stared at the familiar blankness
Breathing within me etched across
Somewhere else apart from me.
And I saw, my reflection or perhaps
A fraction of it, erupting across those pages
With an abrupt vividness
While my eyes remained adhered
Not to my sunken face
But to my chest upon which
Laid countless scratches and stitches
That still bled with hues of numbness.
The tips of my fingers,
Trailed across the rims of those scars
That peeked through the ragged camisole,
Sneering at me while mocking
So many of those fruitless endeavors of mine
To escape the knots of nothingness
That relentlessly clenched and unclenched
Across this very chest of mine.
And none of these scars of bodily anguish
Had ever diminished the barren anguish
Wrecking every tad of my mind.
My grip seemed to tighten
Across the edges of those pages,
As every bit of me screamed
To crumple them one by one
Before tossing all together across the trashcan.
Yet I couldn't help but halt the moment
Shades of unparallel lambency flashed across them,
And I never knew a blankness such as theirs
Could also hold such an illumination.
"Would this dazzle of the twenty or so pages
Staring at me with an alluring emptiness
Embedded in them,
Be able to gleam its way
Through the hollowing pits of my being?" -
My lips mumbled out loud
While my fingers ceased tracing
The numerous imprints of all kind of bruises
Carved upon my flesh solely by myself
Before ardently seeking bits of solace
As they now commenced tapping out
Words afterwords on the once
Emptily whitewashed pages
With every paint of blue and black.
I gathered the strewn pages,
Placing it on my lap as I held their seamless edges,
With tenderness this time while it tugged at me,
The old and too well known brutally vengeful claws
Of that very despairing nothingness
Pulling me to the verge of fragmenting all over again,
As it hardly forgot to rip my head and heart apart.
And I knew whatsoever that would happen next,
Such as the familiar frowns of angst
Would soon bloom across my temples
As my chest would constrict achingly
With tinctures of dejection all over it
While the cuts and gashes residing upon it
Would once ag
ain laugh at me,
And at every futile attempt of mine
To find that one escape from this agony
That ruthlessly raged on through me.
And were we not that escape? -
The pages resting between my hands yelled at me,
That were now a chest, stacked with tons of words
That retained the invincibly invisible battles
That were ceaselessly fought and forfeited
Right inside that skull of mine.
And right then and there,
Something seemed to happen
That I never knew had happened before.
I placed the back of my hands on my chest,
As the ugly knots of unheard and unseen trepidation
Seemed to unbridle as the jagged heaving of it
That throbbed neath the flesh of my palm
Felt to be slowing down with every word
That I inscribed upon temptingly blank pages.
The unkemptly painful pounding of the heart
Between my ribs seemed to thrum
With a rigor lesser than before
With every tale of those uncountable inner conflicts
That I penned down in utmost incoherence.
The breaths of mine that remained hitched
At the base of my throat
As the mighty panic of derealization
Welling up in every inch of my insides
Seemed to weaken its clutches around me
With every brokenly strung prose and poem
Of my vulnerabilities and deadening valor
That made my fingers writhe with an ardency
To only string more and more words together.
The nooks of the mind,
And every bundle of fibers along my spine
That profusely bled with a hopelessness
Seemed to dig out scraps of hope,
Along with a door to redemption
Amidst the words engraved so furiously
Yet soothingly upon the pages.
And that, something
That I had been sickeningly losing
To the hideous hands of my inner demons
And their havoc of dismal
Seemed to seep back slowly but surely
Into the pits of my shredded soul.
And it was that core of my being,
That sought out to reclaim itself
As every bit of my worst of worst
Continued to be inked down on those pages.
There was a bubble of haziness,
One of the dauntingly dreadful kind,
Draped around every limb of mine
As my knuckles continued to turn white
While clutching the pen so tight
Between my numbed fingers.
I knew they hadn't gone away
Neither would they ever go away in the entirety -
The very melancholic claws of despondency,
I could see them coming for me,
To seize me by my barely healed insides
Before wrenching their way dismally
Through the depths of my mind.
But hey, I had found my shield now -
I half-whispered staring at the bare eyne
Of that weightlessly smothering nothingness
That went by the synonym of depression
As I latched onto the blank pages beside me,
As if these were the sole and lone anchors
To a driftingly detached raft just like my soul
And, grabbed them almost in an instant
Before tucking them under my chin,
Right atop my scarred chest
That now stopped bleeding
With the hurtful pangs of numbness
And began to mend every ounce of its flesh
With an anew veneer of hopefulness
Shrouding it from the vicious clutches
Of the demons that still dwelled
Somewhere inside my skull and above my neck
Banging and beating to be freed
But to no avail, for they remained on leash
With the chains of abeyance around them
While I lived holding onto these very pages
That were nothing short of insignificance
But were only a chest of every bruise of mine,
Depicting every other battle of mine
Against the very self of mine,
That once had been so desirous of dissolving
Into every tinge of nothingness.