Still warm by M. Shende

I am a fairly strange man.

How many more years

will I keep hugging ghosts,

pretending they were always alive and breathing?

I wish I was braver than this.

I have so methodically disappointed

the very few people who did love me,

didn’t I?

The strange ways they held me,

I seemed to betray that.

Instead, I thought I was unworthy enough

to love these wayfaring women instead.

The ones who never knew

I was enough.

Maybe this is what burnt embers feel like:

once useful for the fire,

then realising

that it was supposed to burn them.

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