A SNOWY NIGHT _Last night,

I kept smoking until half-past 4.
Cigarette after cigarette until I went out of them.

Earplugs were plugged into my ears,
And listening to the songs that I used to listen to at night,
What I had queued in the night playlist (Jagjit Singh/Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan/Khamaj/and Bayaan).

But
Nothing was making any sense to me
As I kept changing by the swiping of my right thumb before it had reached the middle.

Maybe,
My heart wanted (needed) something else. Something like there, outside my room; What the darkness was carrying over the damp shoulder of night. Yeah, it had needed to listen to the silence of falling snow, slowly and softly.

No one could sing the silence was delicately and softly as silence sings itself (not you, not me)
Only snow could sing that silence, right?

To be honest,
My heart wanted to listen
But I kept pretending,
No, I don't want to.

I was intended to cut my fingers with a shaving blade and make them bleed
I was intended to open the window,
And let this silence plunge inside.

But a feeling was running through my body, turbulently.
Like cocaine through my veins, my body shivering like a typhoid patient there, in the hospital bed, scared. The place where I do belong, where I do live.
What do you call it?
Yeah, you are right./Kashmeer. Isn't the snow always carrying an unlit candle of loneliness on the forehead there

A feeling of homesickness in the falling flakes there

A poem of nostalgia in the sense of togetherness along with the silence there?

Beneath the quilt of peace,
Isn't snow crocheting the pain of disappeared ones,
The pain of the barbarous chest of my mother there?

Isn't snow carrying the smell of martyr's
The smell of war there?

Then,
I sank deep down into the dream (longing) of freedom (Azaadi).
Before the tickling hand of a bed clock struck the alarm what I had kept for today.

_A Snowy Night © Dar Eijaz You held me like a mother holding her baby in the bosom
Like a father holding his baby in the lap for the first time
kisses his (her) mini nose, delicately and tenderly.

But now,
You left me, I lost the address of my home
I orphaned again
Untouched by the gale of tenderness like the keys of an abandoned piano
Like the blades of the flea-bitten typewriter.

The arid flowers in between the russet pages of good novels and poetry
couplets dying for your fragrance

Hands marked by lines of your fingers
and there in the cupboard, beside the black T-shirt that you had gifted
me on my birthday
I hid the warmth of your hands inside the pocket of an old school coat
like a toffee.

A half-decade ago,
There on my left shoulder, I engraved the first alphabet of your name
with a matchstick like a memory - - -N.

Now, now whenever I utter your name,
I hide the pain underneath my tongue
behind my quivering lips like a sinner - - -Gone. © Dar Eijaz