To Love, In Retrospect

The thing is
Something about the way we pronounce desire
Something that is born from the core of our bones
That grows disproportionately
to the extremities we've known
That grows till we begin spelling it with
In the chatter of our teeth
In the skin maimed by indents
In the way we swirl tea
Some call it charting a destiny.

"Build a map".
The cartographers' skill we used to mould
Shapes, like imagination can only bend in so many ways
Before it becomes a repetition.
"Build a dream."
Like the house my mother's mother made in pencil
And the home she makes everyday by the art of breathing.

Build a fire, a song, a whistle to create in empty corridors
The kind that makes the glass hallway shake.

There are so many kinds of incineration, and
Words that light up in the shadow of absences
-Like the cigarette butts you lit
But I burnt out into blindness-
Are my absolute favourite.

The Unfinished Capsicum

Maa ne kaha tha,
Shimla mirch ki sabzi nahi banate,
Bachpan mein
Bettiah mein
Shimla Mirch nahi milti thi,
Jab milti thi toh sabzi nahi banate.
Kam tha na.
Fridge mein Shimla Mirch rehene se
"Rich lagta hai."
Ghar mein aaoge toh,
Fridge mein shimla mirch katti hui milegi.
Puri shimla mirch aaj bhi nahi istemaal kar paati.
Rich lagta hai.
Marwar ki raeth mein,
(Oasis)

My language enters my mind in a flood
Alphabet soup
That drowns me out with possibility.
I have sat on the edge of the flood that is self-perpetuating.
Some say that a flood like that
is a lake
But I know the difference between a resource
And an inconvenience.
Ghar ki dalheez par khatam hota hai.

I walk home
having waded in the flood
having floated paper boats where wooden ones would break
Having seen/imagined the tadpoles
That swim past me and return, as I do,
Home.

I wipe my feet and dry my calves
And hear the sound of rain muffled by dryness
Roll down my jeans
And walk inside.

Maa kehti hai,
Tumhari poetry samajh nahi aati.
Kuch kehte ho,
usse sirf thora sa
hi samajh aata hai.

If you ever come home
You will always find
unfinished capsicum.

Something Other Than The Desperation/ The Morse of Understanding

How much time before we keep mouthing 'I love you, I love you, I love you'
Before we realize that the only parts we ever
Picked up and blew dust off
Were parts we could wear around ourselves.

Call it a disorder.
Call it an affinity.

You once told me night and day were conjoined twins
Ripped apart by sunlight's parentheses
I laughed and told you I could build a story around that sentence.

This is that story.

Can you keep that Chinese delivery bag where I wrote you a haiku?
Can you pretend you remember the first three sentences I ever told you?
Can you convince me that we have been Good Hindus
Because I don't, I don't want our flesh to singe this way
And believe there was no reason to.

Can you draw lines in the red plastic box
I left accidentally
When you begin to hate me?
Can you tear the pillow cover,
smash the last dredges of black in the kohl pot,
Break glassware into the wall till
You can absolutely erase
How I feel?
Can you love me enough
To absolutely hate me?

Call it extremities.
Call it existential need.

In retrospect,
All we will have is movement,
Light chose to settling
In between the crevasses of your hair.
Wind making twisted mountains of your shoulder,
Your laughter seeping into every 'Bend over'.
And silence.
Wafting in silently like the dust
like parentheses
In sunlight that made us
That tore us.
I will always remember the sunlight
Best.

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.