Weariness has the same texture as cloud

I give up. I have no more arguments. Inevitability falls like snow upon snow. I wrap defeat like a shawl around my head. It keeps out the world. It keeps in my world. Words taste of incense inside my mouth. Truth burns like gunpowder. My face is cold.

Infinite beauty will never be fashioned from a finite set of words. In how many complete ways can I say I am broken? I sing myself dirges. Each splintered part wants its own song. A complete person is a set of infinite dirges, many never heard, many never sung, many never remembered. An incomplete person ends in silence.

What am I without the shroud of poetry that covers my nakedness. It is the only way you could have known me: translated into a poem. Into a shroud. Some verses, some lines, some words are lost. Replaced by spaces. A person, a part, a poem, a word, in the end, becomes a space. Space something else will occupy. Loss is white. The colour of erasure. The colour of forgetting.

Half of me wants to live inside a quietude, without the other half. Half of me wants to die inside a wild festival, without the other half. We make do, sometimes, one half and the other, under a waning moon. It too has other parts. It too wonders if I am celebration or silence. There were nights when I was both. There were nights when there was no moon.

My weariness is weary. I watch everything move like the earth. At great speed. Yet motionless. I cannot put one foot before another. Movement implies direction. Transfer. Destination. Perhaps within, I too race around in some orbit. Motionless. That implies a sun. Light. Alternating dark. Dreams. I watch everything, weary. Weariness has the same texture as cloud.

Of all sounds, the worst is the beat of rain. Like an anomaly. I need a solid sky. That keeps out the rain. An umbrella that filters out the light. Getting wet was never the plan. A shredded sky was never the plan. Comfort needs roofs. Roofs that keep out sound. Roofs that don’t shred themselves. Roofs that don’t mend themselves the next morning, mocking your still broken face. Rain is the opposite of dirge.

So I will stop. Stop is not a tombstone. Or an electric pyre. Stop is just a road that ends in an open field. No signboards. No memory. When I am recycled, I will have wings. A butterfly. A moth. Something in the air. To hover over my shadow. I have planned to leave it half-sitting-half standing, half-quiet, half-lit, half-weary, half-fashioned into finite words, half its head covered in a shawl, in a place where it never rains. The moon knows. I will wait with its other parts. My shadow is a forgotten space. Snow upon snow. My face is cold.