Tuesday 18 July 2017

Vase ...

I have been choking on the lump in my throat for quite some time now. And the temporary relief of lust has lost its touch as well. I realize now, lust is nothing but the bottom of the emptiest vase, with the void above filled with unperceivable loneliness. It's like a child's fleeting obsession with the new toy. You can never be sure how long it's going to last, but you know it will dry out eventually. My heart has been surviving at the bottom and every effort I've made to climb back up has been in vain. For someone who has not felt the dryness of their own veins in their throat, this is not for you. You are the lucky ones. You do not have to excuse yourself from a conversation because suddenly, in the middle of a regular busy day, you are reminded of all the "what ifs" that could have possibly existed. You do not go to sleep haunted by the memories of her sleeping beside you, her hands clutching on to your shirt because she fell asleep on your chest listening to your childhood stories. You will never drown in nostalgia like I do.
So I pull up the covers, call in sick for the n-th time, and just lay in bed wishing I had the words to shroud my helplessness. The smell of you is gone. The wrinkles on the sheets are gone. You're gone. And I'm still here, longing for a place, a person, a version of reality, that I know doesn't even exist.

Unfulfilled wishes ...

Here it is,
A body without a soul,
Just flesh, blood, and bones.
Here I clutch in this greased scabbed fist
The sins, the wrongs,
The overburdening guilt.
For whoever dares to love this filth
Will ash up and flare
Like tiny wish lanterns
Carrying unfulfilled wishes in lost air.

Strange mind ...

I have a strange mind of stranger times
Shameless is my speech
Conscious of my bodily crimes.
I drift like a leaf of Autumn's fall
Wired black, white and colorless
No sound made, no noise, no call.
I am the true fear you bury in you heart
The anarchy you want to let loose
So tell me, when do we start?

Neon lights ...

I want to be the neon lights that buzz in your head in the blinding light of day and the distorted version of reality that keeps you up at night. 
I want to be that chaos that glows in your brown eyes when hit by sunlight, expanding and dilating.
But more than that, I want to be the secret you hush under your breath because you know you can never understand it yourself.

Promise ...

Daze and glaze through darkened hearts
The ribs that break and tear
Weeds of agony that grow under skin
Mulch of melancholic fear.
Now I hold you in my arms
Here forever you shall rest
Turn to dust and dirt and grit
No more will your heart explode in your chest.
Here tonight, beneath the gray
You'll nail scratch the sky to bleed
I'll gift wrap a coffin of moonlit covers
With a promise that it will be all you need.

Hulo ...

Look at us, we're a mess.
We both like those Christmas lights because rolling around sheetless beds while they twinkle sends the butterflies already fluttering in our stomach go on a crazy ride. We are clumsy, repeat clothes after sniffing them and have no sense of dressing for an occasion. I sleep too much and you destroy your eyes on the laptop screen. Sometimes we cook like we mean it, but mostly we just put whatever we find in the pot and eat it like it tastes exotic. Yeah, we read, but rarely. We have new books that lie around the room, ignored, but who delves into pages when we hardly ever have time to finish learning each other's stories. I tell you about the fat kid I was and you tell me about how you swung on the home windows while refusing to eat. We laugh a lot, mostly without legit reasons. We flick through social media in search of boys for you and girls for me and get high on conversations that drift far from reality. And on stormy nights, we lie under the plastic cup lights drinking wine and talk about how we'll miss each other. You sometimes pull my hand over your waist while you sleep and probably don't realize it and when it's 3 am, and you're literally snoring and I'm awake, I kiss your forehead like it's the last time I will do it. You don't know it, but you twitch your nose and sometimes, just sometimes, you turn and kiss me back.
We're a mess of unfelt emotions that float so comfortably without the weight of tags that we often forget how limited these sunsets are.

6:45 ...

I woke feeling like 6:45 pm.
Strange and disoriented from a sleep that wasn't quite peaceful, not because I had bad dreams or anything, but from all the fuzz in my head. I woke up to half a cigarette hanging from her lower lip, a power cut that had gotten everybody pretty jittery and a sky that was a strange shade of blue. I sat there and for the first time in a long time, felt nothing. Nothing at all. And I suddenly remembered how familiar feeling nothing felt, how light and how hollow; the kind that slowly drowns you into your own self. That was what 6:45 felt like: a stretched figment of time that seemed to have lost itself somewhere. But she sat beside me and we smiled and before we knew it, the clock had lived its moment and all was real again.

Perfect darkness ...

Aren't we much like these clouds?
Broken and whole at the same time.
Keeping ourselves intact with the friction of the millions of pieces that sometimes get out of place and pierce our ribs.
A complete picture of blue, or maybe black, or maybe a color not yet named by us.
Aren't we like the night when we sat in the darkness under the water tank, laughing like complete maniacs,
And it was only when the street lights came back on to fill in the surroundings did we realize how mesmerizing and perfect the darkness was.
 

Brown eyes ...

The room's not big enough like it is back home.
It's clumsy, very messy and hardly ever cleaned.
But there are two beds that join like bones and somehow manage to sustain our beings on it.
There's one window, with one view, that glorifies that one tree visible and lights up the wall that has all your pictures up but we hardly ever pay attention to.
Sometimes, it's 2 in the morning and my sleeping pills don't kick in hard enough and I lay there listening to you breathe.
And some nights, when the moon is full, and your face is towards me, I can see just how your eyes curve and your lips curl and how the skin you hate so much glows with such grace.
Some nights are sweltering and you snore ever so fidgety, ever so loudly. 
But when the morning light hits your face and your eyes adjust to the brightness,
That's when I realize it's so true:
Brown eyes are just brown eyes, till you fall in love with someone with brown eyes.

Dead things ...

I have a thing for dead things. Or rather, the almost dead things.
People, feelings, desires, hopes, aspirations, leaves, twigs and trees.
I like the way they shape up so differently from the alive. No pretense, no rigidity.
They snap at the easiest blow and prick the strongest.
They stand out in the lust of nature's art and refuse to waltz to the wild winds.
They make noises and whispers of the other worlds and realms they caress in and out of.
They're there but not there, both at the same time.
They twist time to stand still on the edges of their degrading selves and they make you fall in love with the truth of their non-existential existence.
In all honesty, I have a thing for almost dead things.
They leave behind the scabs of life and delve into another version of reality that is far from apprehension.
They are the proof of non-permanence and that is beautiful in its own raw way.

Lights ...

Maybe the lights are more of us than we could ever be.
But we're going to try and make a safe landing from this inevitable crash.
And the only words that will resonate are your morning voice asking, "how do you know you're in love?"

Imperfections ...

I like imperfections.
Especially yours.
The tugs, the hugs, and the nags.
I like the hunger pangs after every two hours.
And I like the random wrap arounds in the middle of the hottest afternoon.
I like your emptiness and the way it resonates with mine.
I like the silly faces and the voice overs and the way you always forget to hang your clothes after washing them.
I like your crooked way of sleeping and the frog horn snores.
I like your face buried in my neck the first thing in the morning when you're nudging me to wake up.
I like your procrastination and the constant irritability that comes along with it.
I like it all. Every crack, every creek, and every corner.
Also, I like all these a lot more than just liking. I might just start using the word, Love.

5:45 ...

My 5:45s are weirdly nostalgic about something I cannot put a pin on. They're sad and happy at the same time, in the same proportion. But sometimes they're empty and hollow with orange blue skies.
My 5:45s are hard to type out and harder to say out in words. But they knock on my ribs every evening and rustle much like the leaves outside my window.
My 5:45s remind me that some things and some people will leave, no matter how much you wish otherwise.
My 5:45s smell like you. And sometimes, they even echo your voice. They hold my hands and curl their fingers in to mine. They carry the warmth of sleeping beside you, a habit I cannot ever shake off.
My 5:45s are mostly with you.
Distant. But they're always you.

My demons ...

I'm terrified of the demons that lurk within me
The ones that send my brain into overdrive
They remind me that the night is long and the days short now
And they have unraveled my secrets like dug out bones
I'm terrified because they remind me, I'm one of them.

Hollow yearning ...

But sometimes I yearn for something I do not have the words to define. I cannot point to a particular thing or place or person or emotion and say, "I want that". So I just sit there with my ribs crumbling down to my bones and I feel the universe whoring up on my time. Whoever said that empty spaces have no weight, was so wrong.

Tuesday 14 March 2017

That is what poetry is ...

That is what poetry is
The picked at scars on a hurting chest
Some that bleed with memories
And some that are healing
Slow and steady
The struggle of getting up every morning
Grabbing your pieces again
And reassuring yourself that you will survive
It is that nasty knot in your throat you carry around
Inside your composed and calm self
The mid day panic attacks of your missing self
The hopes you feel crumbling within
More than that,
It is the what ifs and maybes that bleed in your ears
And the slow realization that you have to let go 
Of the part of yourself that you loved the most,
The one you sacrificed,
The part that made you truly happy.
And whatever else remains in the hollowness,
That is what poetry is.

Saturday 11 March 2017

You...

You.
You are the broken piece that hurts and pierces me inside.
You are bloodied pages I set fire to,
The thoughts I sacrifice my nights for.
You are the morning voice I miss
The sleepy noises that I crave.
The smell that lingers on my sheets.
You are the ruins of everything I want to discard
Pack up in a big bag and throw it far in to the ocean.
You are the cigarettes and alcohol that refuse to leave
The scars on everything hopeful
Your confused heart is the reason I'm here
Wanting you and almost telling you the same.
You are everything I wanted engraved on me,
Everything that will always remain empty.

...

We were the worst thing to happen to us
A wildfire on a frozen body
Raging madness on an unclaimed heart
Recklessness through a nebula
We were the poison that separates us from the world
The toxins we warned each other about
We were never a love story in a small coffee shop
We were nuclear outbreaks waiting to fall apart
You cannot make poetry out of ruins.

Talk ...

One day we will talk.
Leave aside the strangers that drift apart within us
We will inject our veins with the cheapest wine and untwist our tongues.
I will tell you my thoughts and you will elucidate your silence.
I will lay bare the questions that consume me in the bright light of day
And you will answer with sheer obscenity. 
We will talk about the way we still remained strangers between sheets
And everything we have been in reality.
There will be nudity in words and raw statements of truth.
One day we will talk and it will haunt you forever.

I Laughed ...

I laughed.
I lay beside you and I laughed.
At the humbles jokes,
At my breaking heart.
I lay there intoxicated by the way your tongue promised forever
By the scars on my abandoned ribs.
We talked of music and men
Of numbered days, of infinities.
I laid there, two different people inside out,
One clutching on to the hopeless imaginary figment,
One with whisky blood.