Unloving You, Starting Tomorrow Poem by Gagan Khurana

I tried to walk the so-called path of God,

Hoping Salvation would scrub away the muck you left behind.



Even tried to lose myself in other women arms,

to anaesthetize the wounded residue of your memory.



Every night, I celebrate forgetting you,

by remembering you even harder.



Every night, I tell myself a lie, I have memorized well,

'She is gone now, and I shall forget her starting tomorrow.







I have traverse same cafes/ sidewalks, we once inhabited, thinking geography itself might provide flashback upon which I can re-read the script of our former intimacy.



I sit where we once laughed, hoping the air still remembers your voice better than I do.



I wanted to stop you, to halt your exodus from me, but alas, it appears, I was the sole gladiator armored with hope and delusion, fighting shadows in an arena, you had quietly deserted long ago.



My old friends still ask about you and I just manufacture a fresh fiction each time, raise my glass and sip on something stronger than my pride and change the subject before my voice start shacking.



Then again, I lie myself with the conviction of a drunk preacher that I shall forget you starting tomorrow.



I pass my day juggling shares, in the dealings of my liquor business and nodding through the corporate crap,

But when the light gets off and the bottle is half empty; damn it, it's still you in my head.



You wanted space,

You got galaxies, the whole bloody cosmos to breathe without me,

But I am the one still stuck in a city, full of strangers and not one, I am craving to call a friend.



You finally got everything you ever pined for- the distance, a clean escape, a life scrubbed clean of my name,



And about me?

I stayed back in the ruins, still picking the shards of 'we' that clearly only, I believe in.



I write verses soaked in cheap ink and cheap whiskeys,

no rhyme, no meter,

just words that sting like unspoken slaps,



Each poem is a wound, I reopen,

every line bleeds a little more of what you left in me.



They say time heals,

but time has only taught me to fake a laugh and nod when someone say, 'Move on'.



And so today, just like hundreds yesterday, I whisper to myself the most practiced lie,



I shall forget her, starting tomorrow,

I shall forget you starting tomorrow,

I shall forget you starting tomorrow.




© Gagan Khurana