Your Alleged Absence in my Poetry
Akhil Katyal
You alleged of your absence in my poetry.
Not a sentence, you said, for you. Not a word or two.
Did you not mark those turns
in my lines where the sense alters?
You were present where
one meaning falters into another.
Where a word spurns
another. You were in the pauses
where I halted for breath. Perched
at the edge of consternation.
Between unrelated things and phrases
you stood. You were punctuation.
The latter remembered the former
by you. The words were warmer
by you. Sometimes you were the comma.