Love in Times of Violence
I am the artful voyeur.
-Seamus Heaney
like a poem, you are dying to come out
from my system, I caved you in time
but now standing in front of a window
I want to eject you from watching
city’s upheaval, crowds robbing syntax
slashing words, and you are cowering
behind a memory, it gives me a guilt
abandoning you in the middle of
this orgasmic rattling and then seeing
aborting like the mist that we embraced
unfadable promises of geography,
grammar of love, sentences muddled
the reading of history paraphrased, we
begged metaphors from politicians, so it is
safe to die without any final confessions
somewhere our names are not italicized
where silence would bury this very attempt.
Rizwan Akhtar is a writer from Lahore, Pakistan. His debut collection of Poems Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) is published by Punjab University Press. He has published poems in well-established poetry magazines in the UK, the US, India, Canada, and New Zealand. He was a part of the workshop on poetry with Derek Walcott at the University of Essex in 2010.
The Marbled Sigh 