Where the spirit falls short

My voice slumps
In conversations with you
What do I talk about?
My tongue hangs dry like tinder
Ready to catch fire at petty provocation
Then, as you say, I keep the phone

The new sun beams cold rays
On either side of the peninsula
Where we lie, at the mercy of geography
Chained to the remains of last night’s dreams
Distance is a poor excuse for what separates us

I bank on memories
To offer you some vestige of lingering affection
Being apart breeds new images
It stiffens the soft cotton of your sari
I somehow forget: Of the nine yards you draped
You kept the longest to shield me
From His harsh gaze

Now, I think of you as the Past
A temporal truth
The Present has saddled me with a different version of it
Teaching me the composition of silence,
And the war that wages when human beings retreat into themselves
This is a more lasting truth, I tell myself

You and I
Travellers of different landscapes
Cannot concede
That we are separated by a wilderness called human nature
Intermittently, we make cripples of ourselves
In trying to reach out

The boundaries between are not physical
They rise where the spirit falls short
There’s little place for largesse
In hearts that have shrunk with time

Yet, like all cruel/blessed things in life
You dare to believe in your notion of me
And allow selective ignorance
To eke out pounds off irrational happiness
Preserved even in a deluge of ready evidence
Against a son
Who is frugal with love