Fifty-four

Fifty-four, 

fifty-four long days and 

fifty-four poems for you, breathing 

lifelessly on the crumpled yellow pages lying on the feet of your framed picture in the drawing room, decorated with the garland of death, each flower withering away without its roots, just like me, belonging to no one in your absence, like an orphan having no home.

L-O-V-E is a four letter word 

and so is L-O-S-S. 

Fifty-four, the number 

symbolising the need to make

better choices in life, but our love was 

the game of jenga, and with every wrong 

move we kept on losing a part of us, our love. Or were there any right moves at all?

D-E-A-T-H is a five letter word 

and so is G-R-I-E-F.

Fifty-four eulogies and still

counting, hoping I could have 

delivered you the final apology for 

all the wrong moves and desperate 

attempts at winning the faith of your 

family on my religion, 

for our love was the game of jenga 

and we were meant to lose, 

you, your life, and me, you.

Fifty-four, 

fifty-four long days and 

fifty-four poems for you, 

each consisting of fifty-four lines 

and it's been exactly the fifty-fourth hour 

of reading them all, word-by-word, thinking only if the foundations of our society accepted the blocks of my "5 times namaz" to fit into the buildings of "your 4 dham", 

our jenga would not have fallen like all the other stories of honour killing.