Your fangs open like lips.
I am ready for the kiss of death
at a war zone, where I was adrift
holding the flame, moments
stabbed by hot bullets.

Black and white words break the
embrace, I cannot study the bandona now.
Eyes winged, were sailing to distant
lands of smugness, a darkening calm
taking over the poems.

The pungent stink hurts, I swim
without water on dry riverbed, becoming
target for kalashnikov, the courtyard
filled by encroaching blood,
dominion of silent sobs.

Satish Verma