Born to a *******,
He was her worst nightmare.
He had rendered her out of shape,
and thus out of business.

He was thrown into the streets to look for work
When other kids happily went to school.
Soon his repertoire boasted of a variety of jobs...
Working, begging, stealing- he'd done it all.

The dark, filthy streets were his home,
Where he was abused and bullied
by those who were his brothers in fate.
He was a prisoner of his own childhood.

Sleep was his escape,
Where he was a king of a distant land.
The sun shone on his face,
Jolting her back to him to his grim reality.

He dreamt of escaping this labyrinth of pain and suffering.
But what did the future hold for him?

Perhaps his story would have a happy end
And he would be a lotus in a ***** pond,
A diamond mined from a coal mine,
A messiah to others like him.

Or perhaps his life would be devoid of any happiness,
And he would become a thief, a dacoit, a gangster,
Like a maggot, which is born on the rotting,
Lives and feeds on it, only to die there.

When the world had descended into chaos,
and whole cities were ravaged and burnt to the ground,
when the value of life was that of a 7.62mm bullet,
and men slaughtered men at the orders of stone-hearted generals

On a cold winter evening in a harbor,
were a hundred ships with ten thousand men
ready to sail, to fight, to die
for the glory and honor of their motherland.

In the crowd that assembled, there was a puny, anxious girl
kissing her newlywed husband a farewell.
Time stopped sudden, and the moment stretched to eternity
the universe shrunk to what was left beneath their feet.

He then set sail
and she stood there as the ships sailed into the setting sun
until they became mere specks in the horizon
her heart tore to a thousand tiny fragments.

She came back to a house haunted by his absence.
She would see and hear and feel him around herself.
she stopped eating and grew weak and insane.
She had become, but a ghost of her beautiful self.

When the war was done, and news came of their return,
she ran to the harbor and waited for days.
The ships that had sailed in such grandeur,
eventually returned, barely sailing, in half the number.

As she waited for him, she saw some men
running to their kin, some barely walking and some being pushed.
He arrived last- albeit draped in a flag, on shoulders four.
he had died of his wounds just a night before.

They laid him at her feet
at last, he was so close, yet worlds apart
she let out a deafening shriek, burst a vein
and fell to the ground, lifeless and limp.

Dark clouds of gloom immediately lay siege to the skies.
It rained like never before- drowning everything there was.