Slow Death, Bitter Vinegar by Fatima Kapadia | Thursday Verse No. 18

  Love seldom ends cleanly. Most times it drips, stains, and settles into the corners you thought were empty. 

  Slow Death, Bitter Vinegar by Fatima Kapadia is a poem that explores the slow burn of abandonment, the weight of repetition, and the quiet violence of loving anyway.

Slow death, bitter vinegar

Photograph by Karola G. on Pexels.

Let’s put it this way, shall we?

I’ve never been shy of tears and their aftermath.

My hands never quivered wiping their tracks,

Licking up the taste of this slow death in my path.

You were like that stubborn teardrop, clinging to the tip of the eyelashes—

One blink, and your image gets distorted,

Sliding down the bridge of my nose,

Leaving a bitter aftertaste, like too much vinegar on a side dish once devoured.

It felt like a daze,

Slowly taking the shape of a bluish, burning haze.

Convinced myself, loving you till my last breath is just some sort of a phase—

But loving someone is never a walk-in-the-park kind of a case.

It’s giving your all,

Till love becomes a competition of who leaves first and wins the survival race.

A sticky note with your name still flutters

Somewhere in the darkness of my closet.

My eyes are still glued to that place

Where we shared our last kiss—at my doorstep.

This burning grief now has no place to make its home,

So it keeps digging through parts of my heart,

Burying itself within this place of doom, all alone.

Did you really think pushing love away

Is the way to slip past its claws?

Did they not teach you

That’s not how it works in the law book of love?

So used to being talked down to,

Degradation became a kink—

Always dished to me with a side of “I told you so”

On crockery so pale, so pink.

So used to being left,

Abandonment is not an issue anymore.

It’s like I’m waiting for the door to slam shut after you,

So I can add your exile to my board of “left again” score.

Is love really as cruel,

As when it goes from “call it what you want”

To “you’re losing me”?

Did Shakespeare know he was setting us all up for disappointment

When he wrote Sonnet 73 so eloquently?

Cascading, ricocheting—

Love finds a way around every sort of tragedy,

Probably can’t help reciprocating.

Drying, decaying—

Doesn’t it get tiring?

All this constant running and betraying.

Take a step back.

Try to become that crinkle by her eyes,

The one she now lacks.

Isn’t being the teardrop rolling downwards so exhausting?

When you could be the dimple that rarely appears—

But puts even the flowers to shame.

Oh! How detoxing.

- Fatima Kapadia

About the writer:

  Kaneez Fatima Kapadia didn’t choose poetry; poetry cornered her at 2 a.m. with too many feelings and a questionable sense of humor. Her work is where irony meets insomnia and somehow turns into art.