Age

I have always imagined you permanently.
The sun curling against your ankles
To form shadows in the leavened craters of your sole
The edges turned white as though there is only so much
Of light that you can reveal yourself to
Until you begin mirroring it.

I imagine you slowly being washed by acid
That leave colour shadows into your skin
Something that breaks through skin made me believe
You were delicate-
Someone only had to whisper your name
Before you turned into, washed into
All the colours of the ocean.

I wore your presence like the hanging beads of water
Breaking from the valley that flowed
Down my spine every time I was anointed.
As if to imagine how light broke against
The twist of your finger and ended in sunset
Where your edges ended
Left me tainted by you in a way
That could not be cleansed.

There were lines somewhere, that you added with age
And created ripples over the harsh edges-
Some thing lost to life every time
You tossed a fragment of yourself in the air, as if
Testing what could change you, what could dare to take that
Ankle that broke the wind in a burst of light
And sully it with the spittle of mud.

When I see the cracks that have split open
And left incisions like tiny rivulets
That have forgotten to drain out,
I touch them like you could not be touched
And feel the sudden edges of your face
Like I could not brush the end of your heel,
And leave the faint taste of skin that only
Age can
Taste.

Bed Time Stories/ Fuck Phases/ Litany for Future Loves

1
We're on the verge of something beautiful.
Babe, I'm a poet.
In my head something expanded and exploded the moment
You decided to let go
Of the toothpick
That was holding your skin together.
There is something in peeling your skin off that
Tastes like your soul
And I would have it no other way.
I know you envision me as a predator and you're partly correct
But partly I'm sinking because
They don't tell you how slight and wanting raw is
They don't tell you that if we are on the brink of breaking
We are going to hope
Something larger than us dismantles and shifts in the sky
And all we can do is hold us together and pretend that
There is something greater than us
Something cosmic, something numbing, something soul-shifting
Something we are protecting.

2.
Tell me we'll never do normal again.
The stains on the edge of the table, the nail paint that spills over the edge,
That scratch on dry skin, that little one-inch gap in the window, Promise me we won't do normal again.
That tying down that daily schedule that waking up with definite knowledge the fill in the blanks we fill everyday with the same word our limited vocabulary
words more words
words to feed us when brokenness is starving us
hope we're going to collect like alms
tell me
we're
never
doing normal again.
Tell me we're drunk at the edge of a precipice, tell me being with you
Is being drunk on the edge of a precipice
Tell me your presence or your absence will mean one thing only:
I'll never know normal again.

3.
That thing about 'ever after' ...
No, I don't want you to give me a shoe on a fucking pillow
the fucking pillow is fucking bullshit
And you know glass shoes would fit me but I don't want to wear them.
I didn't ask for normal, I didn't ask for you to stay
In a shape I can constantly find and know to be Prince Charming,
Keep your damn Prince Charming.
I don't care for shapes, I care for how you are colouring inside and
Funny how 5 years old fill shapes in art assignments with single colours
Give me the whole damn colouring box
Because I don't care that you're marked 'R'.

I want magic.
I'm looking for a spectrum.

Mind Games

I think we were inviting an end from the beginning.
But you know we like stretching and breaking
And curving into one other like white lines, white lies,
White lies we spelled out over and over again with our hands,
sometimes with our mouths because
It is easier to just keep walking
than summon the effort to read a map
At least that's what I am, at least
I think that's what you are
At least I think we are, we are.
Remember that old game of tearing flower petals
Making physical deaths of our own indecisions
I think we could make our legacy the flower we gave, the flower we tore
The number of times we got the flowers wrong the number of times the flowers
Weren't flowers at all but kisses, sometimes a little more before it was enough
And I mean the 'Oh God' the 'Oh yes' the 'Fuck me' the 'Back the Fuck off'
We read words that didn't exist because sometimes lines criss-cross in pages and we're too reckless
To actually find time to use our fingers to trace
What exactly a word was meant to be
Sometimes we've broken into fits of giggles, clutching our stomachs like we were preventing every bit of us from losing absolute control, like there were some things
worth holding in
I think that's how you invite an end:
When you laugh in a way your toes curl and you lose your voice
and you hurt so much inside and you realize the only other time all that can come
it will come with water.
Sometimes I think you can only spin a bottle so many times and choose 'truth' before you
Realize that all it takes for you to break open/even is a bottle
Because the bottle is the only time someone really asked you something you felt your organs needed to feel too
And I think this is about claws
and I think we're good at growing them.
Let's go slam each other against this wall and cry a little bit because

Where else do we go?
Where else
do we go?

Girl Talk

Hey girl.
Listen up.
I'm writing you a love letter,
Not because I think you need reminding of who you are
Or what you need
-I lack the expertise to unravel that part of your being-
But because I have known too many people
Way too often,
Who've walked around as
Voids
Echoes
White noises
Without realizing.

I've lived too little
To know so many people;
Too many people who've been part of a hole.

Hey girl
Someone's been reading you all wrong.
They've taken out their pens and straightened you up against
The table and broken you up to their own design
Some cartography, some sculpting so that you become
Some stray concept of a globe.
Christopher Columbus
Looking for India,
Finding America.

Why would someone flatten someone
That holds fire and lava and life inside and skin it?
It is no longer about maps,
It is about meat.

Hey girl
Someone once told me
- maybe more than once-
Something that was intensely beautiful
Sunlight breaking apart into fingers
And reaching out for a brook
- Intangible comforting intangible.

I have known too many people
Way too often,
Who've walked around as
Voids
Echoes
White noises
And somehow the 'people'
Are always girls
Girls genetically mutated to talk

Talk, girl, talk.
Tell me about this line and that one and
How neither of them define you
Tell me about how your body was softened and smoothened
Never really stabilized
Tell me about that time the anger was a glacier bursting open
At the back of your mouth
But you 'needed' to hold it in
Tell me how you create winds of laughter
Because in recounting a 'history of abuse',
It's easier to begin with, 'ha ha, it's absurd'.

Hey, girl.
We have our history and geography all wrong.
When I saw the first calendars man ever made,
They were lines in the sand, set in stone,
Scratched out to keep track of monthly blood.

Women made the first calendars.
These calendars
were later adapted by prisoners to mark
Imprisonment.

Separate Verses on Everyday Living

Someone throws a word up in the air
And you run behind it and catch it.
Sometimes someone whispers words
That you engrave into the tabletop
Over which you sit and wring your hands and
Think of the incision on the wood
And how much you regret having made it.

Occasionally you wash your face with cold water
And most of the time it is an act you decided you wanted to do
Cold water dousing any semblance of fire
Cold water abetting cold water
Cold water that was cold water in you.

You have this strange collection of flowers
Flower names you learnt out of a book and
Flowers you collected and stored with a passion
That no one ever would ever understand
Because preserving flowers
Amounts to withering away.

Sometimes you pull out words from a conversation
And draw threads from the words
And stitch a blanket for yourself.
Sometimes you shiver despite the blanket.

Occasionally you sit on the window seat
And press your nose against the pane and breathe
Slow, shallow gasps of air
And you watch the colours of the world outside spilling over
Each other
And you think how real your skin feels and how you find assignments that begin with 'Imagine you are a ...'
Hilarious.
You draw a smiley face on the cloud of air you made solid.
By the time you get off the bus
The smile fades.

Once in a while you switch from channel to channel
Swipe your timeline up and down
Open and shut your refrigerator door
Watch porn, finger yourself, and fall asleep.
You look for a reason.
A word.
Sometimes you find it.
Most of the times, you don't.
So you get another word to tattoo in your veins:
Ritual.

Sometimes you sit at an empty bus stop and watch the buses go by
Once in a while, the bus stops
And goes when you shake your head.
It isn't like I will run away, you tell yourself.
It's just the principle of wanting to.

Everyday, you reserve an hour for mourning.
You turn off the lights
Because you know displaying feeling and confronting them isn't the same
And you're trying to muster enough courage for one.
Everyday, you spend an hour crying
Over the things you knew
Over the things you wish you knew
Over all the things you do.

Air (Version B)

'What does one want in any body but the world?'

1.

The other day,
I drove to the pond we grew up near.
I don't know how to drive
And the distance will always be too much or too little
For a drive,
But that day, I drove.

It was quiet, it always is.
When I say quiet, I don't mean silence, I don't mean peace,
I mean the stillness we knew to be palpable
To be so delicate that even whispering it would be
Acknowledging it
And acknowledging it would mean
Destroying
The silence which was truly that.

It's a safe space, not because it offers comfort,
But because it doesn't offer danger.

In the recent past, I've learnt that.
I've learnt that how are you is a question spilling over with potential
And doesn't necessarily formally inquire after your emotional state
I've learnt We exist in the spaces we create
Between our individual selves
And we can't breathe when we talk because
You can accept either the words or the air that existed in a body.

I'd rather take the air because there is something you can't control
And swerve and veer and stop and slam the door on
And there is no safety valve, no fire escape, no water to swallow pills
No first aid no punctuation no rehearsal
No moments of indecision over conversations and situations you handpicked
And stitched together in a patchwork of
Bad sentences, bad beginnings, terrible conclusions, a body that
I completely ignored because of the ringing in my ears.

No, I'd rather take your heavy breathing into my mouth
And your heavy breathing when you slam the door
And believe that both of them is love.

2.

I watched the light break open against
The surface of the pond
And ripple through the water into a somersault of fire.
Some part of me still believes
Everything I touch can burst into daggers of light.
That is the part I want introduced to the quiet
Because there is so much that is wrong about
Thinking of breaking open and thinking your fundamental state
Involves thousands of glinting daggers.

When I was really young, I read this story where
Somebody killed so-and-so and created mouths
That only spoke silence because that is what the dagger- god
Created them to be.
They did not need to speak betrayal to claim betrayal.

In my head, each mouth was purple and red and drinking in the air
Like tasting a slow, long drag of smoke
Before letting go.
Like each wound chose air because there was something
In the silence that the words would be interrupting.

3.

Interrupt me
With your silences.
Interrupt me
By your presence.
Interrupt me.
Break my silences with the sound
Of air.

I do not need your voice to twist around and form words
That let themselves into the receptacle of my senses
-My senses are vacant.

I need what comes naturally
The rise, the fall, the ebb, the rise again
That steady rhythm that is permanent
The constant presence that
I will find shadows of in every person I meet
That requires nothing of us
Except to simply be.

I need.
What comes naturally.

Consume me.
Drink in the silence I have to offer.
Accept the air I have drunk and let go of like the thousand
Words of love and hate whose meaning we've destroyed
Time and time again.
Teach me again
How is it that we breathe.

Air

'What does one want in any body but the world?'

The other day,
I drove to the pond we grew up near.
I don't know how to drive
And the distance will always be too much or too little
For a drive,
But that day, I drove.

It was quiet, it always is.
When I say quiet, I don't mean silence, I don't mean peace,
I mean the stillness we knew to be palpable
To be so delicate that even whispering it would be
Acknowledging it
And acknowledging it would mean
Destroying
The silence which was truly that.

It's a safe space, not because it offers comfort,
But because it doesn't offer danger.

*

In the recent past, I've learnt that.
I've learnt that how are you is a question spilling over with potential
And doesn't necessarily formally inquire after your emotional state
I've learnt We exist in the spaces we create
Between our individual selves
And we can't breathe when we talk because
You can accept either the words or the air that existed in a body.

I'd rather take the air because there is something you can't control
And swerve and veer and stop and slam the door on
And there is no safety valve, no fire escape, no water to swallow pills
No first aid no punctuation no rehearsal
No moments of indecision over conversations and situations you handpicked
And stitched together in a patchwork of
Bad sentences, bad beginnings, terrible conclusions, a body that
I completely ignored because of the ringing in my ears.

No, I'd rather take your heavy breathing into my mouth
And your heavy breathing when you slam the door
And believe that both of them is love.
*

The other day,
I drove into the pond we grew up near.
Because I don't know how to drive
Because the distance will always be too much or too little
For a drive,
So that day, I drove.

It was quiet, it always is.
When I say quiet, I don't mean silence, I don't mean peace,
I mean the stillness we knew to be palpable
To be so delicate that even whispering it would be
Acknowledging it
And acknowledging it would mean
Destroying
The silence which was truly that.

It's a safe space, not because it offers comfort,
But because it doesn't offer danger.

'Of course it is happening inside your head. But why on earth should that mean that it is not real?'

Carcass Regions

For Aylan Kurdi

You smell like disaster.

Imagine something beautiful
Something sea green unfurling like a baby bird
In your hands imagine baby birds falling out of falling trees
Falling nests
Imagine baby birds confusing identities so baby birds flapping their wings
Because you tried to teach baby birds
But baby birds flap their wings
And nothing happens

Imagine spray painting GONADS and believing it is art
Imagine spray painting GONADS and believing you could make everyone believe it is art
If you know, you said it often enough
It's art it's art it's art it's art

STAND BEFORE THE GODDAMN MIRROR
It's art it's art it's art it's art it's art
Wake up hungover on the sleep you wanted but couldn't get
It's art it's art it's art it's art it's art
Draw a baby bird with arms and teeth and
No not teeth fangs really
Draw blood for it to feed on
It's art.

If you repeat it often enough
If you repeat flapping your wings often enough
If you run fast enough
If you honestly solemnly seriously get high enough
If you definitely sincerely absolutely let it touch you enough
If you don't
It's art.

You disaster like smell.

In water I could lay down and pretend that it is more than this second this half-submerging this quietness this senseless this
In water I could stand having drunk water washed water renewed water
In water I could wash out sounds of narrartives
In water I could be flapping and maybe
In water I could be a penguin
Black and white
Art.
In water if I could breathe enough long enough if I could recall enough to know I am enough
Art.

I don't remember the water
The water has washed enough to wash away sediments of memories
And set it down on banks to choke empty seashells
To cling on to someone else's finger prints
To leave the disaster smell of the sea and all the empty carcasses it carries with itself
To be washed down with boiled bland tea
To create a carcass region in the skin of every man it seas
To create a miniature island, one sediment-sized memory deep
And goddamn it, it will touch you.
definately. sincrely. absoultely

Just don't call it art.

Pillow Talk (Sequel to Small Talk)

I see you in epic proportions
Like you stripped open the earth
And emerged in a cloud of dust
And raised your arms
And rain happened.    

I told everbody everywhere
-The every body I knew
The every where I knew
(Which was a lot
But not enough)-
That where ever you went
They would be asking the self  
They knew a nanosecond before you
Became more them than they  
'Who the fuck are you, anyway?'


I imagine you naked more times than
I'd like to admit
But not because that is arousing
And not because you were always an absolutist                  
But because
I think (and you'd agree),
That you were born too natural to be anything
But self-explanatory.
 
There is only one way to end
And there are just so many kinds of death
But then, you'd never buy the idea of something that obvious
And end up leaving yourself in everything
(The every thing
I see
Smell
Hear
Taste
Feel
Be)
Else instead.

See, I don't even know you yet.
But I don't hold that against myself
Because I have learnt all the steps of
The dance sequence that's
Set to the tune of when
Rain happens
So that when rain ends,
It will end with me screaming into the  
Rough edges you left when you
Split open my skin
Like the earth
Time and again                          And rain became:

'You are the most acceptable kind of madness'

Three Verses for a Rupee Each and One for Free

My language settles more comfortably on my tongue
Like thick bhaat that breaks into pasty starch
Whose sweet is countered by kali daal's
Jolting old-world flavour    
When my language wears words like rice and lentils.    
 
Science textbooks taught me a counterpart to
Everything that reminded me of going home
So that alien words became more
Familiar-
I was asked to put various lentils
In air-tight ziplock plastic packets
And label them using their other names.

I don't know what the point of that was
Because my daal settles thick in my mouth and
Its searing heat burns my insides every time I walk down an aisle
Instead of an alley
And look for a placard titled 'Black lentils'
Instead of saying 'Kaali daal'.  

*
3 rupees.
3 rupees multiplied by 28.
84 multiplied into 7.5 million.
What do you think when you walk back home
With no change, and only change?
Do you toss it up in the air and catch it?
Do you ball it into a fist and use it to wipe sweat?
Do you simply stare at nine lion heads?  
Do you calculate how many days until you eat again?
Do you tuck it away like a secret aspiration    
In the lines of your wrinkles,
The folds of your skin,
The cracks in your feet
And the hollows of your cheeks;
In your earthern ware
And save enough to buy a rope
Or fertilizer maybe
And drink it like the kali daal
You sold for a profit of 3 rupees?

Small Talk

When they came up with words, I wonder how they assigned meaning to them. 
Did they hold it up and feel it in their palms,
Get weighed down by the words 
And divide it up into categories 
Based on how similar they were?

*
You sat there, one leg over the other,
One arm splayed across the head of the armchair 
And I noticed that your shirt had a spot of yellow
And your stubble seemed more intentional than
An active attempt at passivity.

I didn't say anything, but 
A cigarette in between your fingers would have seemed perfect-
Typical, actually.

*
The Type of Word That Means Sad
The Type of Word That Means Happy         
The Type of Word That Means Love
The Type of Word That Means Hate
All The Words That Are Extensions and in-betweens 

 
The Words You Will Look For In Your Mouth But Which Will Make You Feel Like Your Mouth Is an Abyss And You Could Say Everything But It Would Still Not Be

The Words That Will Come Naturally To Your Mouth Because They Were Fed To You From Mouth to Mouth Because Your Mouth Is a Clock Repeating Itself Daily

*

I could imagine you dressing up for a party
And putting in effort if you didn't like the other invitees 
And laughing and making small talk

And laughing at yourself (because that's small talk as well) 
And going back home to shave that pretentious goatee
And washing your blade with an extra intensity
And twisting your tongue in your mouth like
If you could, you would slice it clean.

*

I wonder what they were thinking when they were thinking about 
Speech. 
Did they know they were the original creators- the pioneers, the real Old Masters
The Founding Fathers, the Invaders, the Everyone Who Would Make Everything Be?

Did they know that shouldered that kind of responsibility? 
Or did they throw around terms like

absolute, temporary, definitely, always, never, depression, ecstacy
Arbitarily? 

*

I can imagine 
You tying your shoelaces with extra care
And people calling you pedantic,
You walking down the road with your fists in your pockets
And people calling you nonchalant,
You knocking on the door once
And pausing deliberately.

         
And opening the door 
And staring at you blankly
Because though I've imagined it so often
It will be unexpected.

I can imagine
You tying your shoelaces with extra care 
Because you needed extra time of not looking into anyone's eyes
You walking down the road with your fists in your pockets
Because your defense-type is 'Constant Crises'    
You knocking on the door once
And pausing deliberately
Because you aren't even sure you are wanted. 

And opening the door
And saying 
'This is unexpected'
Though we both always knew that you would land at my doorstep anyway
And you responding with 
'Is this a good time?'
Though we both always knew that every other moment besides this
Was irrelevant
And making small talk with each other  
Even though we both know

You came to my door, looking for an escape
A comment on how you look like shit and how you haven't changed
Because God knows you were only going one way.

And you'll not tell me how you

Never cleaned that shirt, but stopped sitting 
Leg over Leg 
And I won't tell you that that was because you stopped being an invitation 
And started being a 'No Parking' sign instead.            
And we'll talk about Important Things-
Using words that are should mean everything to us-
Which hold no meaning really- 
And we'll exchange a handshake as the only admission

That we wanted to know each other through more than words.

And I'll say it was a pleasure you came 
And ignore the desperation in your eyes
And out of courtesy, you’ll ignore the hopelessness in mine

And respond with 
'Likewise'.

From a Teenager's Diary

                 I have ached for you
    From bone to skin
                 I have ached for you
  With an ache that defies gravity                                                                        
                Every movement of mine
     Is halved by your absence                                                                    
                And doubled with the hope that the distance is
Breaking

                Every so often when I speak out a word
                 It lies
            Ringing in the air like it     needs  
               To be stilled in your mouth    

And every so often I
Ache for you
Heart to vein to vein
Like every new pump of life
Is flowing life into  
You    

                   And sometimes
        I swear I look into the mirror
                     And whisper  
                         'Appear'.

Growing Up

It comes slowly.
Think of it as gradually stepping into water
Testing, tasting, moving in inch by inch.
Until your limbs are extended into fathomless depths
And they find comfort.

It comes quickly.
Think of it as breaking into water
And breathing out hot bubbles of existence
Which blemish the surface    
As desperate certainty that you existed THERE
Even momentarily.

You breathe in air and take in a world within your lungs
Which expand to accept the air
And contract to let go of all that was unimportant.
You have the wind knocked out of you and you watch as
The world comes undone and you realize
That you breathed in more than just air
And you didn't let go of
All
That was unimportant.

You spend days in the bright light staring at a white ceiling observing how
It changes so suddenly into  
Orange as though
Change is just That sudden and
That transformative
         
The white ceiling becomes a cream-coloured ceiling and
You spend days in brighter light staring at a cream-coloured ceiling observing how
The shadows of fans dance faster than you ever could    
But as fast as you once wanted to.

Which becomes a lavender ceiling with light that hurts your eyes and
You spend days observing how that was
Supposed to be transformative and beautiful and how
It isn't.                

You burst into laughter and break into tears and
Realize that bursting and breaking aren't all that different anyway
So you burst into tears and break into laughter because
They don't feel all that different anyway.

You know loneliness like a parrot on your shoulder
That speaks only when not spoken to
Like when you are in a crowd
And you realize you empathize with the centre of a circle      
Because centres are surrounded
Equidistantly by isolation.  

You experience things unique to 2 AM
At 11 AM
And you nearly-strip
Both your clothes and soul
At 7 PM
Before a crowd of strangers
Who have faces you know you'll forget
But much like death,
That doesn't stop you from being afraid
That you will forget.
         
So once in a while you strip only in your head
For yourself                        
And you realize everyone's dirty little secret
That no one ever tells:
There is liberation in nakedness.    
                       




It comes slowly.
Think of it as asking yourself
'Why do we grow up?'
And answering it with
'Because we forget we don't have to.'                    






It comes quickly.
Think of it as asking yourself
'Why do we grow up?'
And answering it with
'Because we realize we want to.'

Back Wash or Boys Who Know Their Poetry

Today
You told me that sometimes after you meet
Someone New
You want to go to the bathroom and scream
And scream
Till you cannot breathe.

I didn't know how to respond, so I told you that it was okay.
It was okay to vomit a steady colour of
Grey-green-black
Conversation that hurt you so much
In all its perfunctoriness
That you would rather claw your nails
Into your fist
And leave five little unformed moons each
Than meet someone new again.

I meant it was okay to see the world
Through infrared
Broken lens
Half-formed sentences
And expect every word to unfurl into your lap
Revealing something else

And don't you tell me
That that is beauty.

I meant that when they diagnose us with
Idealism
It isn't equivalent to a report reading O negative.

Today
I meant to tell you
That conversation is back wash
A less-acceptable form of intimacy
But if you exchanged the image of two people
Drinking the same poison
With two oceans meeting and twisting
And breaking
Like two tongues
Meeting and twisting
And breaking
Apart
You'd realize conversation is intimacy made naked.

You scream because you want to unleash
Into an ocean that will drink you in
And accept your back wash being
And for the eons of extended metaphor-shaped oceans you can see
Everyone is screaming
Their grey-green-black disgust
Silently.

I meant to tell you
That you learnt your poetry
Before your tongue could move around your ABCs
And your screams are synchronized to
Play and pause at every halted heartbeat.

And don't you tell me
That that isn't beauty.

I meant that when they diagnose us with
Idealism
It isn't equivalent to a report reading HIV.

In response to an ad which said 'We can cut anything except your throat'

Interesting how the centre of a cyclone is called an eye.

As though a three letter word that captures
Basic identity
Is the pin point of existence.
As though everything else is of
Destructive inconsequence.
As though your entire meaning stems from
Eye.

There is a trauma growing
Malignant
Despondent
Respondent
I can see it frenzy out of control
Even as nothing appears
Because Eye can see only
As much as Eye let it.

And then some.

If you could, would you
Work your miraculous diamond edged scissors
And tear it all apart
Like it was nothing
And offer me a factual
Contextual summary
Of what I am supposed to feel?

No, it is not the throat I want
The throat is part of the problem
I want you to cut it down to the eye
Tell me what makes it
Malignant
Despondent        
Respondent
And so worthy of
My notice.

No, I did not choose my eyes
But someone gave them to me on a platter
And I accepted them, dumbly.
But then I.
I chose to manufacture the sheyene.





P.S. This poem has nothing to do with what I feel about advertisments. Banksy explains that better than I can. This poem is just something that came out of the advertisment. Cheers.

They Rebuilt The Playground

They rebuilt the playground
Because it was overgrown with too many weeds
That dispersed from there to never return
And because the tree fell
Succumbing to emotion
Because too many of us
That hung from it like fruit
Outgrew it.

They rebuilt the playground
And now the slide is where the swing-set was
And the swing is where the slide was
And it's like a beacon of hope for little girls
Who will now pretend if they throw themselves
High enough into the air
They could kiss whatever concept of heaven
Is up there.

But because they rebuilt the playground,
The angle to heaven is all wrong
Or maybe it is all right
But I think I'm old enough
To condemn it anyway.

They rebuilt the playground
And the flowers that fall there now
Aren't the same exercise in translation
For them as it was for me
So now when they let themselves give in to
Gravity
They won't be accompanied by
The slower, smaller, equally persistent
Falling blue flowers
Whose name I can't remember for the life of me.

They rebuilt the playground
But before it was a playground it was something
I'll have to ask someone else about
And in the middle, it stopped being a playground too
And someday
Someone will want to ask what it was in the middle and
I'll be that someone.

They rebuilt the playground
And I am going to record the Middle,
When the playground wasn't a playground
Just a transition phase When they tied up the swings
And the slide broke down
And there were too many weeds
And they'd make you trip
And that's what I told myself
As some strange consolation
When I stopped going.

They rebuilt the playground
And maybe
The angle to heaven is better now.

Wishlist/ Recipe for Fixing Broken Hearts.

When I paint you
I will paint you with colours
As raw as wild flowers
And I will tell you things like
'I miss you.
And what comes between us is not distance
Or vacant conversation
But time.'

If you ever let colours disintegrate into
All sorts of potential powders
Imagine for a second that you are synaesthetic
And the powders aren't a mish-mash of potentials
But each a distinct feeling washing over you
And for once,
Please don't escape heartbreak.
Let it sink in.

Let the potentials of the future
Fueled by the dwindling possibilities of the past fill up that crater
At the centre of your heart.

No, feel the crater first
That is the deadening, semi-silence
That each heartbeat trips over.
Let that crater spread through all of you
Although if the diagnosis reads 'heartbreak',
You won't even have to
Before you try each colour.

Try the sex, the brown, the chocolate, the red, the clothes, the blue, the weight-gain, the green,
The weight-loss, the mauve, the tears, the black, the cigarette, the grey, the music, the goddamn rainbow
Spectrum, neon, RBG, primary, secondary,  disco damn light
Try every colour pulled apart and fed to yourself
Try hunger, try thirst, try travel.
Try rebound.
Try each colour until you know
That if I left you in a room
Raw with the smell of all wild flowers
You will feel like
Deja Vu.
Colourless, colourful deja vu.

Lick pain, in all its lemony-yellow, like
An ice cream flavour that seems too
Spunky to try.
Let it dissolve on your tongue
And numb it, momentarily.
Then try a little more, before you know
You can taste all of it
And finish a whole damn scoop of it.
Graduate to a tub.
Pass the pain test with flying colours.

And then, for once, dampen your hair
Like it was a paint brush
And wring it tightly.
Watch as each one of those potential powder colours drains out
In the colourlessness of water.
No one will see it like you do
No one will see that you emptied out
the goddamn rainbow
Spectrum, neon, RBG, primary, secondary,  disco damn light.

Feel a different emptiness,
Like emptying out a crater.
And carefully, prise the crater shut.
And breathe, just so that
This time, when you hear your heartbeat,
It isn't tripping.

Kiss yourself a matte-red lipstick imprint.
And make yourself a wishlist using
Wax crayons.
Make a list of every heartbreak in
Past
Present
Future
Potential
And repeat process.

Are You Gonna Stay the Night?

Hi, you.
I have a dream for us
That involves having laughed so loud
That we could stick our tongues out
To taste the air
And we'd feel that light twinge of blood
And smoke
That laughter tastes like.

And because that's not funny at all,
I have a dream for us
That involves us laughing even more.

And because we were just laughing,
I have a dream for us that
We fall, staggering, on the bed
Without all that conventional music
And create our own kind of
Hit-head-against-the-edge-of-the-bed
Static.

And I have a dream for us
That even when we are silent and
There is nothing beautiful except the night
You whisper something irrelevant just when
You could have said something like
'This moment is quasi-permanent.
So, I love you, in all our temporariness.'
But I have a dream for us
And that is all about imperfect lines
Because if you said the perfect one
It would kill the quasi-permanent midnight sky
And damn, I hope you say it is more beautiful than either you or I
Because the moment you climbed that train of hyperbole
I'd get off, because for someone who eats stars up with her eyes
I'd know stories die
When you try to make them outlast time.

And I have a dream for us
That involves me saying it's my only joint ever
And you laugh condescendingly
And I laugh superficially and tell you that you are trying to destroy
A virginity
And you say it isn't you who will fuck me over
But a collective, generic, Generation-specific we.
Because I would like to believe that somewhere in the span of laughter and smoke
We developed a similarity
That will leave a (w)hole
When there is nothing left to us
But
My dreams
Of one night stands
And what they shouldn't be.

Psychosocial Stage 5

The sky was ashen.
You do not particularly need
A window placed just right
To detect the broken pulse
Of an oppressive sky.      

The static gets to me because
I have known more sounds at the
Brink of the night            
And I have slept to the sound of a whirring fan
As though it was a calming lullaby.

But have we known enough to
Sit still without a single thought
Of static breaking the very singular soul
We have devoted our whole lives into pretending?


I have not known good graces
Or learnt yet how to fully remember faces
Because I would not be able to
Recall what the shine of eyes speak of
Or what the curve of a jawline
Absolves itself of.
All I have are vagaries
And vague impressions oppressing me. 

Pencil Outlines

They said it would be the real-est real reality could really be.
So I waited and waited and wrote a letter
That I left unfinished
Because the wait stripped me of commitment.

It was now, and now, and now
And just a little more.
It was ten minutes
And nearly there
And Shut Your Mouth.

Just when I was completely spent.
It happened then
Like a mistake, a fountain not a jet  
Between your legs
Like a folly, not a full sky,    
But some twilit bereavement
Like a skyscraper that has risen
In anticipation of its own incline
Like the metal scaffolding
That stood like a hanger against the skyline.

It wasn't enough.
Whatever the built it to, it wasn't enough.              
They painted Older like some classical shot at beautiful  
And when it came down to me,
I was given pencil outlines.
     

Cinderella

Did you realize we shut the lights
Long before it was midnight
And prostituted our souls to each other  
Conveniently forgetting semantics because
Once it is midnight
We're going to pay.

Love is Growing Fat Together

There was casual separation
And a stiffness to their position
A sense of awkwardness to their expression
And surreptitious glances of hesitation.

He was going to say something,
But then,
There was something else that would have been interrupted.
She was going to say something,
But then,
There was more meaning to silence.

But for the sake of convention,
And conversation's sake,
Some action had to be made.
So they glanced at their menus
Two strangers on a date.
Call it serendipity, or simply fate-
But the first thing they said
Together, was, "Blueberry cheesecake".

Six years down the line
Amidst the clattering of china and glass
An abstract pattern of white camellias,
The husband and wife looked away,

But when it came to vows of forever
They glanced at each other
And smiled, knowing no words needed to be said
After six years of regular blueberry cheesecake.

6th May, 2014

What Love Should Be Like

I need you to understand

That I may move out suddenly

From the bed

At 3 AM like

A word I had been hunting down

Had returned to me

And I will offer you no preamble

Nor let you ascend the solitary train

That goes where greater forces force it to

But simply say, 'I need poetry.'

I will describe the exact specie of the poem

And look at you, hungrily, almost Electra-like in my desperation

And you can Google a poem if you like

And read it out to me groggily,

And that would be enough to let me sleep for the night.

But I would want to hear you whisper a name

Like it was permanently lodged in your memory

Even if it had nothing to do

With my particular specie.

I will smile at you

Offer no epilogue

And sleep again.

It was not poetry I needed

But the knowledge that if I did need it

Even at,

Especially at,

3 AM

Your voice would be enough.

Three Verses on Lingering and an Epilogue on Not.

'I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
and that necessary.'

I am walking home.
The heat has burnt me
Like an incense stick
If you will
Believe that I lack any palpable scent
Nor am I that that fleck of food
Stuck between your teeth
Leaving a bitter after taste.
But I have been split from home
Leaving a ghost in my absence.
They'll call out my name
And mid-word; stop and shake their heads.
I am a word
Referred to in third person.
As if euphemisms are to pain
What condoms are to sex.
Protection.

I am wearing a new pair of pants today.
Mannequins wear no expression
Yet whisper, 'Come hither'.
From now on, when I am attracted to depression,
I will think of mannequins.
When you put your hands into a bowl of water,
Science predicts they will look different
They are still the same.
I have bathed in so many kinds of water
4 AM, Holy, Tap, Chlorinated, Toxic
You'd think something would change.
You can put the best clothes on mannequins
But they wouldn't know, they wouldn't care.
They are still the same.

I am making my own pasta.
When I envision myself, it is always in third person
Like eye is divorced from I
And like eye c I better than anyone else possibly could
See
I mean, better as in
Better version
Like I was white and put into a pot and simmered until I turned into alien colours
And if you weren't there to see it
You wouldn't know if I've eaten.






Epilogue
'Tell me a story.'
'You're beautiful.'

Anatomy of an End

Come away then,
Because I do not know how
Else we say goodbye
Except tearing limb from limb
And letting limb come away from limb
And even then there are
Phantom limbs.  

Vaguely lit half lit dusk lit
Faces
Phantom faces
Are like the irritating redness
Of closing your eyes shut
Sprawled beneath the light,
Defeated by the sun.
The redness that punctuates the blackness like
You can know no single thing
For even your lonely will be broken in
By period shaped blood.

When you lie down on your bed
Do you press yourself against it to see
How much can be swallowed up
How much can be emptied
And do you try to make every part
That tries to maintain contact
Silence itself and become numb
Dumb?

I can see you still
Like you aren't a phantom limb
But a definite solid breathing
Living thing
And I know where your body turns in and out
And where it remains so straight
That I could conjure you out of nothing.









I try drawing a smile
On a fogged up window pane.  
I draw the anatomy of an end.

Old Music

Secrecy is a potent thing.
A secret kept well can develop into
A radioactive toy that some inner mechanism
Topples and turns all the time
Willing it to fall
And destroy.

Secrecy is a potent
Thing
Because there are things that
Are kept by you well enough
To make your veins question
Whether they are as reliable.
And when veins enter into that
Level of self-doubt
Blood will flow.

Secrecy is a
Potent Thing.
Your heart will keep one idea
Experience/Feeling/Thought/Idea/
Song/Dance/Poem/Memory
And/Or Something
That it will be highly selfish about
Selfish enough to not part with it
Not let it flow out
Not let it escape into words that
Have the potential to be recorded,
Even if only,
In the universe.    

Secrecy is
A Potent Thing.
Freud dissected the mind into
Unconscious
Preconscious
Conscious
And gave Freudian Slips a chance to slip from top to bottom
And reveal what is it that you want.
Really want.
But some secrets aren't slips.
Some secrets are entire essays
Called Autobiographies
That you wouldn't speak out
For the fear of giving it/you
The importance it deserves.

Secrecy
Is a Potent Thing
You uncover yourself in Past Things
That the world hid in alcoves
It forgot to              
Remind you of    
Like Something you forgot you once heard
Like Something that wasn't loved
Like Something that draws parallels between
Who you are and Who you were.

And secrets can be hidden in deepest darkest alcoves
Of places you think
You'll never remember to search
But it'll come flooding in
Catch you,
Half part known, half part disarming
And if you're lucky,
Maybe you'll learn to love
Potent things.

Limitless

"I thought we were limitless."
"We are, we are. In present tense."

*
When winter came
And lingered, smitten with the scent
Of all that makes unfathomable sense,
I waited, feeling the heavy weight
Of atmosphere
And hollowness.

Doorsteps are never easy places to be in.
They signal at half-life, half-lights
And a question mark-shaped sky;
A punctuation mark to
That overpowering, uneasy thought,
"I wonder if I can knock that door tonight."

Folded sheets.
Half-made, half-anguished retreats
Into constant, callous dreams-
Maybe under a printed sky,
I'll fathom out the night
That borrows its liquidity
From your eyes. 

*
"I thought we were limitless."
"We are, we are. In some sort of sense."

*
Technically, a minute is sixty seconds long
But some minutes are longer than others.
That sort of discrimination 
Is born in only some desperate sort of
Anticipation
And you know what is truly desperate
If you've stood with your hands in your pocket
In silent, suffering, limitless wait.

I know the limitlessness of thirty seconds
Can be equated with an infinity of patience
Of watching, hoping, wishing
That you'd turn to see
The limitlessness that comes sealed
In a minute of watching you 
And being me.

*
"I thought we were limitless. "
"Well. Yes."

*
I like our limited conversations.
They entail nothing, contain nothing
And the greatest inventions were born out of
Nothing.
Except, of course,
Wishful thinking. 

I happen to know a lot of words with d, 
Having Dissected, Dismantled and Defragmented
Every conversation we've ever shared
And on finding nothing to them,
Another d-word:
Despair.

*
"I thought we were limitless."
"Yeah. I guess."

*
When summer came
And shook its flower bracelet
Right into my face,
I realized sunlight had me handcuffed-
Today had to be the day. 

"I don't like doorsteps!"
There are some words that mark a threshold to new beginnings
There are some phrases that are make the greatest openings.
There are some thoughts that go unnoticed
Even if there is a whole crowd listening.
There are some sentences that
Become ink-written on heavy paper
Because no one realizes the desperation they came in
Until much later. 

And no one will hear, no one can hear,
Unless they've seen that same fear
Staring, wide-eyed at them, 
In the mirror. 

So I walked up and said,
"I don't like them either."

*
"I thought we were limitless"
"We were. In ... past tense."

*
There are some diagrams
That you can never forget
Because pictures have secrets
That make insomniacs of men
Who wonder if they ever will be
The drawing of the most complicated kind-
A straight line
Which is to say,
Whether they will ever be
Limitless. 

Our diagram,
Was a circle.

*
"I thought we were limitless."
"I... have something to say."

*
The first thing I ever said
Right after you knew
Of all my anticipation, all my wait, 
"I'd always hoped we would be like a line."
"Like a line?"
"A line. Limitless."
Silence. 
"Are we?"
"What?"
You repeated.
"Are we going to be limitless?"
I smiled.
"We are. We are. In present tense."

*
"Why don't you like doorsteps?"
"They embody ... indecisiveness."
She smiled and said,
"You know why I don't like them?"
"Why?"
"Once you've crossed them, 
You don't know whether the place is always
Going to be the same."

*
It wasn't the same.

*
There are some diagrams
That can never be made
Because those pictures are people
Who lend the liquidity to the night
From the listlessness of their eyes
And they are the drawings of the most complicated kind-
Alive;
Which is to say,
Everything but
Limitless.

Love exists,
In anticipation. 

*
"I thought we were limitless."
"I want to separate."

*
Doorsteps are never easy places to be in
The signal at banging open that which 
Locked itself shut
And an echoing silence,
The wordless timpani to
That overpowering, uneasy thought,
"What has she locked inside?"

*
The last thing you ever said
Right after you knew
Of my love for d-words, was
"I don't like doorsteps!"
Ink-written on heavy paper
Because I hadn't realized the d-word, Desperation,
They came in
Until much later. 

*
"I thought we were limitless"
- Funeral-sized silence.-