question mark?

17.06.19 (edited an older piece)

heartbreak is a familiar hand slapping me across the face
I have been hit so many times, I do not feel each sting
but an ever-present pain.

I prefer this sociable sea to the white of
blank canvases they sell off as art. Unfiltered light
traversing my eyes is much worse than any kind of dark,

The only way to lend colour to grayscale wonder
is to survey through rose-coloured glasses-

so what if sometimes they simmer a broken blue or the striking green
of wanting somebody to want to talk to you?

I do not care if red makes my blue a burgundy,
dried blood is more vivid than no colour at all.

I have bled because of some specific incisions so deep,
that now I only see
the lids of my eyes (as life’s fluids drain by)
flutter, the untrained wings of newborn butterflies.

This is a game of lost and found where I know what it’s like to be lost
and to keep wanting to be found,

we play hide and seek,
only you stay hidden behind sheets that I seek
to unwind, and at the end there is never any prize,
only price for letting myself think
“just friends” could be your lie,
just like mine:

acting like I’m really fine when all that tumbles
in my mind is the lingering trace of hope,

maybe “coffee” means a date and maybe “my place” means more?

spontaneous disintegration

28. 04. 19 (yes I wrote this a while ago, but it’s too beautiful to not share)

Tears are just a symptom
Of an inner agony
Of an emptiness that threatens to fill the days and spill over into the night
Of a vacuum that makes balloons explode and hearts collapse and talks in code
Of photons that transfer nothing and everything
There is so much light around me yet it feels like nothing matters and I am on an infinitely fast moving journey at a stagnant pace
Time doesn’t exist,
I only measure my life by the number of people that have thrown me to the curb trying to pretend they care

They see me a beggar on the streets, meant to pity from afar but not to love
Lest the act harm both the actor and the audience,
All the world is a stage
I stand a straying tree,
Blending into the background
Of monotony,
No character chooses to talk
To me,
No body really wants to get to
Know me,
No one to care or give or take from –
I am a constant and when you differentiate me you get nothing-
The lack of any change in my state vaporises my entire being spontaneously,
I decay
Exponentially, and though reduce fast,
Never quite disappear into the void of non existence,
I am forced to die on amongst the living.

objective listing: a poetic endeavour

25. 04. 19 (in response to a previous prompt related to lists or something)

objects that annoy me:

blank white walls. books on my shelf that I haven’t read and don’t want to read. pages that I cannot remember why I ripped out of notebooks I threw away because I no longer want to remember. polaroids. tickets from an Ed Sheeran concert. the smell of sweat and sound of music. earphones that are only partially functional. pens that leak but not so much that I can trash them with a clear conscience. a broken sharpener. the dirty dust left behind once you sweep pencil shavings into a box you tell yourself you might want while working on some art project. more photographs. ink stains. a sponge you use once in a while to remove the dust that collects because of your own negligence. a device. a breakup text. a memory of a friend telling you she lied when she said she was telling you the truth. pencils wound down to stubs. paperwork. smudges of beauty products you have wiped off your contorted face over the ages. old calendars you cannot bring yourself to discard.

objects that prevent your tears from raining down upon trees and washing all the grime of the past off the backs of leaves-

you think you want a clean slate;

I think I want to begin again,

but it is always just too goddamn late.

what I think

21. 04. 19 (completely random, largely senseless, and originating from a prompt asking for absurd imagery)

Coins slip down pinball machines and into slots that chime with the ringing of religious notes that I do not rhyme, but resonate to the sound of.

Strings stretch themselves across cardboard boxes to allow me to sing to the young of heart that though far apart are roped together on the same vine that ties your meaning to mine.

Walls are created to be climbed, atleast the rough talus slopes imitated within rooms designed to falsify nature unto a mere physicality that can be replicated.

Copy machines pretend they know the content they produce but really they serve as mindless mazes that I get lost within as I try to navigate winds that carry the fragrance of spirit.

Adventure lifts our souls out of the tyrrany of conforming and into the pillowy clouds that soften the blows of whips cracking across the backs of those that try to stand in your way.

You are cruel in the mechanisms through which you interact with a world that has nothing but love (and even blind) for an image of yourself that you will not confirm nor deny.

You string us along until we jump and trapeze off into the unfaithful vacancy of space that feels empty but it crowded with hundreds of millions of stars threatening to end my existence.

Life is but a dream that memories found themselves upon and the base tastes a lot like thick concrete in ways that seat your unsure mind places its representation upon.

Resurrect not the masses but the few that have lived massively extraordinary lives and been the queens of their efficient but cruel hives, for goodness is only a treatise with some version of You.

I float away on a donut the size of the black hole at the center of our galaxy into a planet that disappears as you approach its atmosphere, in no direction other than one away.

I drift away not from you but from the hidden rules those that tell stories of your fates impose upon the most few you refuse to bless with the proof of your muse.

I wonder and I write about the beauty in art and in the eyes of somebody you truly love because the depth of that emotion transcends the platonic or romantic nature of an association.

Some links run deeper than the metal that they are made of and represent deeply ingrained biases in the very twisted fabric of spacetime itself.

My thoughts constitute a whole lot of chaos that often more than mildly resembles the dissertation above, yet I desire no escape from a prison that does not trap me.

I am free to leave
yet I choose to live
My thoughts are wonderful people
to spend weary nights with.

oceanic devices

12. 04. 19

Do you know why the ocean is my favourite metaphor?

because tides rise and fall, but even when they leave
one can chase waves on lonesome boats off a stranded beach;

the water may sting of salt and make you cry
but it promises never to leave your comfortable side;

the shores feel weathered down, but know Love only carves
the most exquisite rings to adorn the easy curves of their hips;

channels – the wavering fingertips – meet and leave
they play games but none need to plunge for the other to succeed;

the winds may vaporise her voice, but their tears
flow through sandy streams to return the hearts they steal;

she may flirt with invisible underwater isles
but never conceals the resultant tides;

the ocean, my love

and indeed being the same,

the sanity to my poetic reign,

do you know now why I love thee?

origins

11. 04. 19 (this one felt so good while writing I’m not even re-reading it before putting it out there)

I was made out of the dust. I was made out of shells collected from sand that slipped between His fingers. I was made. I was not made. I was only planted in a vessel through which my worth could project itself into the world. I never needed to be made. I was made in a bedroom.

Yet pleasure in a process that should transcend physicality is unwanted, so I was flown in on chariots by storks or in a dream. I was born in a Gooseberry bush. Yet, the making is of no consequence without space (in houses and in hearts) to be shaped within.

I was shaped out of sleepless nights. I was fed the sight of the moon. I was grown on stone cold mosaic floors bearing chips that looked like insects. I grew and the growth was commemorated with a shaved head. I was made out of prayers and out of love. I was raised on pawns and dice. Yet, the raising is of no consequence without a purpose for the risen to rise to.

I rose heavy hearts. I shaped a hollow space in my pillow for my head. I made out of blocks the pillars that would hold up dreams for the stars. I grew in my yard messy, but bursting-with-love birthday cards. I fed my own hunger. I grew into somebody I wanted to be. I grew into somebody I didn’t. I rose on my tippy toes to hide the last square of chocolate on top of the fridge.

I became somebody. I was made somebody that became somebody. I started to know myself. I knew the books that I liked. I knew how turbines worked. I knew I’d never be able to pick just one color when asked which one I liked best. I knew Your name. I knew the name of meaning, and then suddenly I didn’t.

I thought I knew. I think I do. Experience says I have been made and will be made, that I will make until I will not know. The making changes the maker in stages of evolution till the maker kicks the bucket. Yet, the end is of no consequence without a book to turn to the end of.

I write. I write the story of the living. I write about the way the waves feel like home. I write about family. I write ballads about escapades too wild to recount in open forum. I write a poem. I write that I was made. I write a story. I do not know when I will run out of pages, but I sense there’s a long time left to become something.

I am made out of lines and lines of letters. I am made out of tales. I am made out of rumors blown in by the wind and glory brought down by the sun. I am made of mortal flesh and skin. I am made of love and passion and despair. I am made of odd addictions and faults. I am made out of frappucinos even in the winter, but mostly I am made out of what I make.

I am made of a story that I write even today.

// side note: I absolutely love the existential seagull cover image for this post! //

a room in review

09. 04. 2019 (been away for 5 days on account of a wildly entertaining trip to Goa; day 9’s prompt asks one to write a poem that makes a list of some sort; I ended up completing a piece I started over a year ago)

i.
red headphones –
that punk metal drummer’s anger
bleeding through
lyrics someone else wrote-
I bet they found his too bloody
messed up, and never once
paused to wonder why.

ii.
dust forming a shroud
over a dead painting-
I thought I would finish it six months ago,
and once more six weeks before that
but both times
I forgot- I tell myself once again today
so I can pretend it’s just a function of my memory
for the third – or is it thirtieth?
– time

iii.
broken strings
from my sister’s guitar-
she brought it over because-
I don’t exactly recall but
something to do with
the phrase “self expression”-
what’s wrong with words?
I ask her,
as I write.

iv.
paint peeling off the walls-
AsianPaints was shut yesterday
because they changed closing time to five-
the economy is going to die-
the wall ain’t going anywhere anyway.
It can wait.

v.
books.
a lot of books.
house-fulls of room-fulls of shelf-fulls of books
and books full of stories.
it’s all very full
up to the rim and-
it’s a wonder
the glass hasn’t overflown yet.

vi.
crumpled bits of paper-
unsent letters and love notes,
a sheaf of blank sheets,
an empty mailbox,
words
don’t seem like enough anymore-
perhaps I will start playing the guitar after all;

vii.
a broken chair
that cannot wrap its own arms around itself
without screws that I drive in every day –
I try to replace
this freak, but cannot break
into shoes that do not reflect
that comfort in their own
broken nature;

viii.
lights
which when I squint,
seem like stars –
I suppose the mediocre
when seen loosely from afar
can seem magical;

epilogue
are objects as objective as they seem?
or is the inanimate scene
a reflection more of ourselves
(the shades we wear and the ways in which we see)
than of an omnipresent reality?

love story

03. 04. 2019 (for a prompt that asks the poet to write a poem that takes time to get to the point, I picked a subject that itself takes time to get to places: love)

On days when the sun glared
(angry Indian teachers catching kids making out in hidden corridors)
and shades filtered out only the harshest heat,
The girl of eight lay stretched along the floor,
head propped on weathered elbows and eyes swallowing every second of a new version of the same old love story;
Rom-coms always seemed magical,
Yet they possessed a sort of distance that she could not describe.

A few years down, the piercing sun having shed its rays,
Lay her bare unto the isolation of a lonely stalactite,
The tales she once dreamed of living seemed to slither away
along with the skip in her step and in her heart
wandering inquisitions now settled down for good –
Will I ever love somebody?
Will I ever love somebody that will love me back?

When the sun knocked on her door with flowers, her mind replayed reels
she dragged him in the only way she knew
And found ways to live out the scenes she’d only seen –
Holding hands, then a kiss
Intermittent chase, hit and miss
Only, her heart never really touched the clouds,
her eyes never expanded at his sight,
and though they spoke, his words never urged her to fight
for the man she did not love.

She has begun to wonder if the reason she craves the heat of the sun
Has more to do with a prescribed comfort than imminent cold;
The charms of distant stories crack and the devices that display them overheat;
(trashing the ways and tales that never lead to love in any case,)
She turns around and swings towards the Moon:

She gives her what he never could.

Rain

01. 04. 2018 (a clumsy start to NaPoWriMo 2019)

I want to feel rain trickle down my face for the first time again;
I want to catch the scent of earth in the wind
and wonder what it brings,
I want to watch the clumsy clouds fall against one another
and bruise a navy blue,
I want to gasp when the first drop grazes my arm,
I want to wonder if it’s just my neighbour’s air conditioner leaking,
I want to stare in horror as the onslaught deepens into a stream,
I want to pretend that the clouds cry,
I want to embrace their misery with optimistic dance,
I want to be by their side when the wounds flush
and the crimson of the night plasters a spectrum
across the reborn sky,
I want to believe that if I chased this dressing to the ends of the earth,
I’d find a casserole of the most exquisite gold,

I want to feel rain trickle down my face for the first time again.

entropy

29.06.18

currents cross the Atlantic ocean and spill
out onto the folds underneath my eyelids
that buckle and bend like the Himalayan plate
grinding against rock and bone to hoist mountains
atop its shoulders

streams run down broken runways
where shattered glass crowds icy marble floors
like shards of chocolate sprinkled across
honey glazed caramel cake waiting to burst
into a beehive of chaos

rain trickles down the car windshield only to be
swept away by doors slamming themselves
upon rooms hiding within haunted houses
with ghosts that leap like frogs waiting
for their princesses

chaos is not just a mathematical theory
but a direct reflection of the increasingly entropic
universe expanding unto nothingness
unlike a balloon that has the whole world
to catch it if it falls

my mind is a hive of nerve fibers intersecting
like yarn knotting over itself and into tangled hair
that lies sprawled across my self
esteem on the bare wooden floor begging
to be swept up

and away into the stagnancy of dustpans
that are reservoirs of motionless marbles so cold
they draw the life out of dragons and slink
across the infrangible threshold into the warm sanctum
of supreme serenity.

 

28.04.18 (Edit: this didn’t upload until the morning of the 29th due to internet connection issues)

If you apply pressure to shear thickening Non-Newtonian fluids, their viscosity increases rapidly and approaches that of a solid state. If you sit on a suitcase, you can get the modern form of the clasp locker to clench it’s teeth all the way to the edge. If introduce crushed flowers into a solution of oxidane and heat the infusion to inhuman temperatures, you produce dyes that will permanently stain your wardrobe. If you stare at the sun too long, your eyes will start to correct for its preference towards wavelengths near 580 nanometers and upon diverting your gaze, a cobalt patch will imprint itself upon the upright image formed by your visual cortex;

locked in a customary state of existence,

I cannot remember the last time I emptied a jug of water and let it grow
(I understand we have wooden floors)
I cannot recall when last I tiptoed into the sea and let it carry me away
(I recognize the risks of clandestine currents)
I cannot fathom when ever I fell asleep to music drifting in and out of my veins
(I devour my time till I have none left to dream)

elegiac

24. 04.18 (kinda hurried – opinions and thoughts welcome!) 

the waves recede, 
the ocean floor
lies uncovered
once more

the sun goes down
the curtains close
night sky, naked 
and overdosed

all things that die
have long since lain dead
and all things that cry
howl in good stead

yet within the night's blanket
I find pockets of brilliant gold, 
within the sunset lies
new hope for tomorrow  

the sea bed reveals corals
and rare shells of unknown kinds
the bare nudity of terracotta
is beautiful, one finds

somethings when stripped down
to their leaden core
uncovered dirt does unveil 
some rare form of ore 

all things that die
have long since lain dead
and all things that cry
howl in good stead

and the gods are not worried, 
now they go to bed.