Me?
Oh very much actually!
I’m this gooey, leaking heap of emotions.
Not subtle ones, oh hell NO!
Each feeling hits me like a fucking natural disaster.
Each hurt raging up like a sixty feet tsunami wave.
So, the cracks in my eyes are bound to leak that way.
So what?
Everyone has disasters within.
And I choose mine quite well.
I’m not very scared of drowning,
But famines terrify me to death.
I’d prefer torrential rain on my cheek,
Than a barren landscape in my chest.
I never want you to be my poetry darling,
Never do I want to rhyme a word to your name.
I don’t want to dedicate any verse to you love,
Or hide you in a story under a stranger’s name.
‘Coz if I do
I know for sure,
I’m not hearing you laugh
Or hearing you snore.
‘Coz if I do
I know for sure,
I’m recalling your face
Instead of kissing your brow.
I never want you to be a song I write
‘Coz I write of sorrow
And regret,
Not love.
I write out of tears and not out of kisses;
Of endings and pain
That sears and sears.
I pen down longings
And waste ink on heartbreaks.
I paint in blood
And write of times
When my voice shakes.
So never do I want you to be my art darling;
‘Coz never do I want for this to have an expiry date.
Translation:
DREAMS
I put mirrors of my dreams
Near your feet.
But in your carelessness
You walked all over them.
Now
The shattered glass of those mirrors
Are mere dust under your feet.
How to create new dreams
When only old mirrors
Made me look beautiful?
It’s not like I love you or anything.
Don’t get me wrong,
And don’t freak out.
It’s just not like that.
It’s just that whenever you are around
Or I talk about you,
Or even think about you
I suddenly become fifteen again.
I become the one with floral frocks, falling fast
For the first time –
Umm, In confusion (Not love, it’s not love)
It’s just that whenever my phone blinks
And your name flashes on it’s screen
Something somersaults in my tummy.
Something inside it gets really excited
When your name is mentioned
Or is even co-incidentally scribbled somewhere.
But don’t get me wrong.
It’s absolutely nothing romantic.
Maybe it’s just hunger you know; in the tummy.
A hunger for your awkward and slightly slanted smile,
The one that squints your tiny eyes almost completely.
It’s really adorable.
But wait, I don’t adore YOU per se.
It’s really just that smile.
Well sometimes the crooked nose as well.
But that’s just general.
Nothing deep.
I don’t want you to misunderstand so I’m making it crystal clear
Its nothing like one sees in cheesy movies
Or reads in corny novels.
Not at all.
It’s just that mostly I don’t feel normal when your fingers brush my skin.
But wait again
I think I have medical issues regarding pulse rate and breathing in that case.
So
It’s not you.
Don’t get me wrong.
It’s certainly not love for you.
I know that for sure.
But I do love your red tie.
It does something to me,
Something that would ruin the innocence of this poem.
You should have it checked though.
It’s a little hypnotic.
It’s not like I care about you madly,
I care ofcourse, but not insanely.
But yes, when someone hurts you
Scenes of all my favourite serial killer documentaries flash in my mind.
And when some girl you like doesn’t like you back
Leaving you heartbroken;
I want to shake her existence and ask her
“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?”
That sorta thing.
But not love.
Nope.
I don’t know if you notice but you say my name differently
When I’m sad
Or drunk.
Yeah.
You kind-of pour all the care in that tone itself
And everything becomes just fine.
But that can be imagination.
Because of drinking you see.
Not love.
So you know
It’s just not what you might think it to be.
But I cannot deny,
Your silly jokes are quite loveable.
Though wrongly timed,
They still do the trick.
Trick to what?
Not the one that makes me fall for you. No.
The trick to just make someone laugh.
Gosh, the misinterpretations.
Do you understand me now?
Its not affection there,
No romantic feelings.
It’s just that I feel fifteen
And end up writing
Teenage “Love” poems at twenty two.
Oh Crap!
Not Love
Oh behold!
A funeral.
Wailing women,
Sobbing men.
Children playing in the backyard
In hushed voices.
Someone told them not be loud,
“But why?”
I heard a small boy shout.
People streaming in
Like cascades of white water.
Some close, some distant.
Mostly silent;
Or with praises of the dead
In whispers.
Red nerves clouded the white of
Several eyes.
Cries,
Sulks,
or whimpers;
No dry eyes.
Except one.
That had laughter laying on the lids,
As her lips broke into a
A mellifluous Ghazal
Beside the shrouded figure,
Dissipating all the heavy silence,
With perfect notes and rhythms.
Creating a gaping audience,
Out of mourning relatives,
Instigating me to break through
The crowd
And take the front row.
The trance lingered,
For a five minutes or more,
Then a sudden hault,
Vacuum,
And a distant giggle
Of a kid in the yard.
“She is waiting for the corpse
To sing the male verse,”
I heard a tiny murmur
Didn’t see it’s source.
And there
Amidst a funeral
In a funereal atmosphere,
I witnessed love
That transcended spheres.
Tears of glee
Trickled down my cheeks,
For the unknown dead
And little known wife.
Morbid are things related to the death
But mortality adds to love,
The dark tinge of red.
Skin that once was chocolate
Is raisins lately.
I sit and count the wrinkles around the sockets
That had eyes shimmering with purpose
Once.
Now
There are hollow grey mouths of guns
Shooting out vacant stares towards me
That pierce the soul
For hours;
Sometimes days.
I wonder
How long does a day feel
When the breaths you take are fabricated through machinery?
How lengthy is an hour
That battles with air every second?
The belly
I witness inflating,
With pumped breaths,
Rattles every organ there,
Also,
Every organ here;
Within me.
Steak,
I see in a magazine
And then gaze
At the wretched food pipe:
One of the plenty
Attached to the limbs.
“Food or Sex?”
“Food!” I’d hear with laughs.
Food or Breaths?
Who knew,
Would be the options.
Treatment,
They call it:
Prolonging of pain
I deduce.
No words for months,
No songs,
No fights;
Not even humming.
Just
Fake breathing and beeps
Breathing
Beep
Breathing
Beep.
I breathe twice instinctively
Amidst every beep,
First for her,
Then for me.
Silly assistance;
Futile, I know.
But every desperate gasp for air,
Is her
Disguised agony.
I’d like, O lord, to hear now
Just the shattering
Beep
Beep
Beep.
I pray and plead to you O Lord,
I’d like the breathing
To finally cease.
Won’t you hear
These desperate calls
And
A mother’s plea?
All I want for her is now
The drowning to be
Complete.
It was Light you see.
Piercing skin.
Squinting eyes.
Blinding.
And you thought
Your ruins;
On which young men
survive,
Would never be found.
But it was light that was making,
Your blacks, white.
Tell me
If you were so sure
You love darkness inside.
Why put net curtains
Against windows that shine?
Just the other day
A coffee circle on the white wood
Took the shape of your face.
I swear I saw your lines and smiles;
I had stared long enough.
I didn’t wipe it off,
Fearful it won’t form again.
Next morning Ma wasn’t pleased
To see me cry over her wiping off,
Of a brownish blotch
Of the coffee mark.
Silly what people do
To behold someone again.
Silly I laughed at this silliness once
But now I was
One of them.
My mind metaphorically compares you to
Nothing but watery stain.
It’s funny how even cleaning that off
Could cause someone so much pain.
“Who put my honour between my legs?
I’m sure as hell I didn’t.
You know my OCD quite well
And I expect you not to fiddle.
I assigned it in my hard skulled head
Or fiery heart within.
But never did I place such a valuable item
In my flimsy sheet of hymen.
He would only bruise it if you put it there;
Left to me, he just couldn’t.
No I won’t explore the pits of shame
Because you displaced what you shouldn’t.”
-I heard her shout to people lamenting over her loss of honour after being raped.
Letter No. 3652
2305 hours
Hey you,
Remember Van Gogh?
One who swallowed yellow paint?
To get happiness inside of him?
“Ridiculous!”
I remember you exclaim with mirth.
Doesn’t seem so ridiculous now
As I gaze at a picture of my heart.
Doctor says it’s grey,
Made of ash,
Slowly crumbling and dismantling under the storm of each
Deep breath I take
To keep the pain from spilling out.
And I stare at the squeezed tubes of water paints,
Yearning to mix yellow with my grey,
Red with my grey,
Violet with my grey.
00:00 hour
The moon is high up
And yet again,
So am I.
Its desolate when sleep refuses to assist you most nights
And when it does,
I sleep like a seal at sea
With one eye open,
Dreaming to rest my head on the land.
“New environment does that,” I read somewhere.
Since you,
Every night is a novel environment.
With the same curtains and the same bed
But a very new
Set of anguish
With each sun down.
0012 hours
I recall your touch.
I recall transforming into a cigarette
That you put to your lips
And its body
Burned.
Turned into smoke rings that swirled in the thick monsoon air
To finally lose its form and disappear.
I transcended my corporeal self
Into a spectrum of timelessness-
Of time past, time present and time impending.
But now,
I’m an ashtray.
I put out cigarettes with my thumb
And let others put them out on my chest
Neck,
Collarbone
To replace all your gnawing marks.
And hope what my mother says is true-
“Fire purifies darling,
It gives solace to the dead too.”
0121 hours
I tried to be with Mr N.
And H and A and H again.
But I tried to turn them into you.
Furious and frantic when N’s laugh didn’t sound like yours,
When H’s eyes were a shade darker than yours,
Not my colour I always thought.
And A- brushed the hair off my face
Using two fingers instead of one.
Unlike you.
I took all the love I could from them
And gave not a speck in return.
See, I learned your ways at last.
And slowly but surely I was that girl,
On whom young lads
Practiced unhooking bras.
Practiced to get it right when they do it with their love.
And slowly but surely I was that girl,
Who asked for bruises, cuts, and scars
To get orgasms
Or to feel something at all.
Mixing red to my grey at last.
01:30
Tiny truths can reframe your reality,
They can reframe your existence.
The earth was flat once
And I was happy.
Then someone bent it
Made it round
And I got lost.
In search of the flat one.
Now thirty-two and married
My spouse sleeps next to the crumpled sheet
Where I should have been.
Or pretends to sleep
While I hit the pen on old yellow pages
And strike a gashing cut on his heart.
All my words become his gaping wounds,
Fresh ones each night while I cheat on him
With a paper and pen.
And he tells our son he knows exactly why
Swords are blunt
But pens are vile.
Very vile.
0303 hours
He makes love to me while my eyes are open,
Forming your shapes on the rusty ceiling.
Your rounded nose and your big brown eyes.
The bump on your neck and your lips on mine.
His touch is tender
But I yearn for your scratch.
Masochistic they label,
I rename it love.
Sadistic they call me,
I rephrase it to “in love”.
Hypersensitive. Melancholic. Insomniac.
They have so many tags.
But I break them down
one by one
And call them all
Your love your love.
I was taught to glamorize it all
By words on flowery novels
And pretty people
moving in the television box.
0315 hours
“Love is a rose
Every petal an illusion
Every thorn a reality.”
Baudelaire I think.
So all the thorns
Struck in me by you
Are now perceived as affection,
Your love.
And the oozing crimson fluid from the pricks,
The colour of that rose.
“Romanticize, Romanticize
Romanticize your pain”
Is the chant that always made me stay.
So when you abandoned me at last
I loved you deeper
With the echoes of delusional facts from films
Running through my head
At every instance:
“You only hurt the one you truly love.”
“Love is another word for pain”
“Pain is beautiful, it keeps you sane.”
0400 hours
And here I am
Ten years ahead.
Refusing to let go
Glorifying pain
In melancholic romantic poetry
Yet again.
But mocked conveniently
By the hypocrite world,
As Insane, depressed
And a twisted sort of girl.
Love, me.
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