Lingua Franca Of Lost Love Poem by Ananta Madhavan

Meeting an alien,
I banish language,
That liquid muse I share
With others of my tribe.

We grope within our bags
And bring out in lost hope
Vocables of bones,
Shards, all broken bits, so bare.

We play a guessing game -
A rib, a knob of elbow,
A fractured femur, skull.
We both have recognised

The pity of those inkwells
Where, in other times,
Eyes of a liquid muse
Had laved us in grace;

The bleached poverty
Of fiddlesticks that once
Were snow-soft thighs and nude
In passional welcome.

We smile. The skeleton
Of epileptic twitches
Gathers up its members -
A mimic of our muse.