Fallen Wings

She stares at the blue flame
while cutting lettuce and carrots,
fine chopping the greens and oranges,
mindless of the whirring, humming, buzzing,
and other numbing noises
which fill the frozen space-time
in her little kitchen.  
 
He hasn’t lied,
at least to her knowledge,
but his presence around her
is piercingly suffocating.
He hasn’t been unfaithful,
but for some minor breaches
that involved some one-night stands,
no strings attached,
no emotions involved,
no serious commitments.
He’s not capable of one.
 
Her own heartbeat
in the silence of the night
is louder than his snoring,
her muffled screams
in the shower
are louder than the roar of a passing airplane above,
her welled-up tears
in the middle of a busy marketplace
are louder than the boisterous bargains.
 
She always felt
the man of the house
has a weird sense of humor.
‘Whatever she is,
she became
because I allowed it,’
he remarked to his best friend
at the dinner table,
and guffawed.
 
She always felt
the man of the house
has a misplaced sense of romance.
Every time they become intimate,
things seem more distant.
He starts a timer
and writes an entry in a logbook.
He jibes:
his act of fucking
is the art of fucking.

She always felt
the man of the house
has no sense of acknowledgement.
He takes her for granted:
her space,
her time,
her consent.
He loves to see her naked,
her fears exposed
and dignity bared.
 
Sometimes she stares out of a train window
or into an impenetrable void for too long
and escapes into her internal landscape,
a personal portal,
filled with swatches of neon colors
and a montage of shots from the past,
Neither sad nor ecstatic.
It’s a smooth escape
from the drudgery
and the dreadful monotony.  
Inside the sanctuary
she frantically searches everywhere
for her fallen wings.