Category: Poetry

If it's because I have never been in love
There is nothing else to write, perhaps, I am right
Or that's what I thought.
My friend, however, tells me
My friend, who is young and old enough to have felt the pangs
And their dull reverberations
During lonely cigarette breaks
My friend who I will cherish for life, tells me
A heartbreak is a heartbreak,
Small or big, love or not.
I look around, I don't meet any eyes.
I remember you, and you too, and perhaps you, once,
For a second,
When everyone is dancing and the buzz swirls in their cups 
I look away to find the source of my empty arms.
Of men I don't think about and women who I aspire to be
I will not write tonight
Tonight is for me,
My cold hands, silent nods, terrible, terrible
Terrible lack of a language
My smooth sorrow chugged down my throat with every beat.

Suddenly the window clears and you see the outside
Then within
Unhappy, unhappy. Better than false hopes 
No man, broad enough to cover your dread,
Laughter not raw nor gentle,
My face dripping off and splashing on my pillow
A woman of wails and failed tugs at the heart.
I spoke of some old longings
The need that burns into my time
Leaving my days shapeless and impotent for a future
But the shadows nodded their heads
One quick jerk and there they fly
Away from my body
I am looking for what I should look for but never expect to get.
How hard as a rock have I become
I wonder
Not a mountain, not big enough,
But the rose glasses are off
Another lifetime of loneliness,
Of chasing more shadows perhaps.
For now I look outside as the rain hazies it all
I scroll through my phone
Unhappy. Unhurried.
Unmoving, to a fault.

I kept looking inside a room full of people
Where my heart isn't
If love is a traveler,
Why isn't my shell cracked through?
I loved him, I thought,
His face dissolved into a pebbled path
Yellow ochre, brown, caramel, smooth
Shiny black round ounces of clever tease
Adorable,
A miniature eternity full of joy.
In my people watching blues
I miss him
The idea more
The rain on a running kitten, so beautiful
And honest
I'd give anything for a lick of warmth
Anything to be missed
In a way that is unreal and not mundane.
No inane throwaway words
Nor promises heavied by the want to make one happy
I jut my jaw out and breathe in,
Hoping for a deep-seated longing
A centrifugal force
I, the main character, the favorite catchword
A narcissist's heaven
A hungry kiss and I will call it love.

An old quarrel, a misfit love and a heartbreak
A child’s heart snaps like a chalk
It bleeds uncomfortably
Haven’t you heard it screeching on a blackboard?
I wish I’d shouted at you, but I didn’t
We ended
Neither on good terms nor bad
Just like a bird speeds towards its death
On a crystal clear pane.
Sometimes I use you like a compass
Not the kind that leads a lost sailor to his land
The kind you can prick into a soft flesh
In a sadistic drive you train yourself to feel.
I can move past you
Medical opinion forbids picking at old wounds
I should move past you to make room for more
Yet I need you, my original sin
Without your touch my pen wouldn’t bleed
I wouldn’t know how a child’s hand
Drops forever, limp,
In a school courtyard where everyone is blissful and stupid
Not marred with the agony of loneliness
Yet.

I don't always understand poems
The enjambment tugging at my shirt too often,
Or words too fat for my Indian teeth.
Sometimes it's the pure unavailability of simple things
Like the weather of snow and my Kolkata sweat
Nothing alike. But it shouldn't matter
Should it?
I almost never understand myself
How it gives up on imagination
The very moments I need it,
How else can I cry to that song?
I keep writing about how I don't know how to read
An unkind man would perhaps call me out
Throw my circular logic at my face
Push me to shout and accept my lack.
I don't always understand poems
And I almost never understand myself
And if you ever ask me to explain the ones I write
It would be like explaining a joke,
Only a thousand times worse,
Imagine period cramps that last all year,
Imagine something else if you don't get them.
Poetry, jokes, goals in life,
I have to imagine something else if I don't get them
But my brain (for I have no heart) gives up too soon
I'll just keep writing about it,
I guess,
Or imagine something else to do.

Half of a night, a beautiful song kissing me to sleep
A body is always making itself present
Pain, a fundamental truth.
Incompletion, an unfortunate calamity,
Hearts sewed with a sloppy thread
Detached too quickly.
Cannot live with or without it, I know,
It's a relishing moment when I feel like a woman
A wonderful and horrifying creation,
Living.
My thoughts, feelings, words, all made up
And dismissed
By none other than myself
Yet I am proud I exist in a way that has made me so happy
Sometimes.
The song drains my soul of all the clouds tonight
I will crucially close my eyes to all that hurts me
I am happy, I am
Sometimes, sometimes. Alive.

I know a man who wants to be
Reasonably happy.
I pride myself in knowing nothing else
But that
There is no such happiness.
He reasoned with me, his words washed into my eyes
And hardened into salt.
The loneliness of reason, doesn't he know?
You throw your fingers out in the dark
Trees shake and crumble
There is no free will
We try.
I tell him,
I try to,
But my lips don't make a sound.

I need to write a letter and burn it
In hopes that the ashes will reach
Every corner
Perhaps a speck in the tea you drink
Or the spice on a midnight piece of chip.
I do not care about hygiene any longer
I have been unhinged in your care,
All of you,
Who have pricked into my skin and left their scent inside
Should know the weight of the grief
On my feeble veins.
Closing my eyes I would travel to a place
I loved to complain about
The first two words more crucial than I'd thought
And now that its life is fissioning out
To the corners of the country
The place will cease to exist.
I will write a letter and burn it
My grief a precipitate of that reaction
My tears, catalysts
And I will burn too
With a longing that will never die or live again.

I watched her words unfold
I built my world around them, I tried, but
Her hair jingled in a way I could only envy
And I would pay to remember the sound.
I got distracted,
And I swam ashore to someone else
Whose hair was cut short and firm
Who did not know how to
Go any deeper than the seafoam.
What a waste, what a waste,
All giggles and no tears
Makes us madmen, don't you know?
I flew far away, I had to.
Now my mirror is shining black and only I can hold my gaze
What a twisted way to confess
The sad fate of Narcissus.
I still get distracted,
I'm looking for punctures
If I escape through, will you be waiting?
With my heart inside my palm dripping blood
I can show you a life of running.

I cannot sleep tonight
The interstices between my breaths
Scream for fulfilling thoughts
There is nothing but rain spitting bitterly on the street outside.
A beautiful woman sings at my feet
She asks me not to look for love or freedom
Perhaps I am not free to love her either.
I cannot sleep tonight and will not sleep for a few more nights
Years
Until my hair runs so long
That anyone would know it's mine
Anyone would know it's me that they are to seek
And love.
The woman smiles and sings again
I will listen to her, I do not want to sleep
She tells me of stones that maidens pick up
As they splash their way
To the river that births a village
And the maidens pay the unpayable maternal debt
In what else but tears
No stone was a gem, so the song goes,
No happy endings appear.
The woman at my feet is cruel, I think,
The woman at my feet is wise,
Yet I string my few pebbles into a necklace.
My eyeballs are no less stony
No wonder I cannot sleep tonight
And will not for some nights more.
The woman will sing
My heart will weep
As I see her go.