Not Ink, But me

The Portrait That Bled

Not every masterpiece is made with ink. Some are painted with longing, silence, and the quiet offering of a heart.

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They watched from afar—

my poetry,

my flushed red cheeks,
a blank page,
and an ink chalice.

My crimson lips
held hymns they could never pronounce.

My cheeks carried
the quiet fever of your name.

Your eyes—
two stained-glass windows
where every colour learned to kneel.

Each line brushstrokes another glimpse of you.

I stripped thee slowly upon my canvas,

slowly tracing thy silhouette
until the page came alive,

tracing every broken metaphor with reverence,
finding beauty in the places you censored,

bearing the scream of colours beneath the enjambment,

embracing the hues you buried before they could breathe.

Thy stoic mouth remained unfinished—
not for lack of skill,
but because no language survives
the architecture of longing.

Until colour forgot it was colour
and remembered it had always been blood.

The chalice had never carried ink.

It carried me—

vein by vein,

prayer by prayer,

wound by willing wound.

I have loved thee since the frost of red first kissed my lips.

Thy name stitched into every prayer at dusk.

Were I a poet,
I’d trade all verse to hold thy hand.

I watched thee dance with winds
that never knew my name.

A thousand colours,
I kept thee company in silence.

Every stroke is an argument with canvas
and colour,

that we are meant to dissolve in watercolour.

The red upon thy lips
was borrowed from mine.

The blush upon thy cheeks
had travelled through my veins.

The light within thine eyes
was painted with every sleepless night
I survived loving thee.

Even thy stoic gaze
betrayed a tenderness
no silence could conceal.

There—

when I gather my hair
to the side,

at the base of my nape,
where it meets the crown of my spine—

there
thou mayest mark thy name.

Not upon my skin,

but upon the place
where devotion first learned my body.

So I surrender pigment theory.

I choose instead
the trembling, breathless proof of me.

For every shade I named as paint

returned to its first language—

blood.

Not spilled.

Offered.

Thou art the beautiful chaos
my colours keep chasing,

like a wish whispered
at 11:11—

a promise
softened into suggestion.

I am in love—

the way thou seest me

against the tapestry of dreams in thine eyes.

My soul enraptures thee,
and thou findest thyself spellbound in its hold.

While thou stood there—
stoic as cathedral stone—

watching

as though

thou wert grading

every stroke of my longing.

Thou art my poem
and my painting too.

Thou art my canvas
in every universe.

I am thine.

And if ever this portrait is remembered,

let them never call it ink.

Say only—

she loved him

until her blood learned

to resemble colour.

~a

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©️Ashu Singh 2026. All rights reserved.