By Amruta Gijare

Is there something to hide?

Facades are breathtakingly majestic, while they cover the structure within.

Is there something to hide?

Tears are happy and smiles are grim.

Shimmering tapestries

conceal dark doors

Is there something to hide?

Seemingly amicable curves

above the chin

Yet the dead eyes, and

the averted feet

Stop the heart before the leap,

Is there something to hide?

Not once, but many times,

Not just here but everywhere,

There’s elation: finding a face that’s real; or at least until the masks fall off;

Weep and weep some more, except to see, alas! Even that was a simulation.

There’s a lot hidden; But why?

The tale that comics tell, never is overdressed, bejewelled and in a golden veil

It is but something naked as naked can be

A flashlight, the dark door never before sees

Why not? In a world of facades with no real structure within,

Truth is the only joke; at least a real joke.

A heart aches, why is a lot hidden?

But there is solace, however doubtful its utility maybe;

For the box also had hope; So what,

if it was part of Zeus’s treachery?

At least it is now known – it was

the shadow that was dead; the

eye was alive and blazing within.

And perhaps that shadow, was of a

treacherous world, with the false

facades of the hurting true?

The deadness was perhaps the crocodile

membrane – evolved to protect, yet ended up pricking.

For it gave a blurred vision, a half-life.

It’s a boon and a curse, that a lot has to be hidden.