My grandmother has a library of medicine.
She watches TV, smiles like a newborn flower
I wonder if I will ever be a bright spot in the universe.
Her real library of books raised me
No friends, no quick fix to a dull childhood
The man I talked to last night did not know a single story at all.
I am defeated, my feed blowing up with women
Without darkened eyebags and thickening waistlines
I am defeated but as always I refuse to give up,
Really.
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Yesterday I heard of a bridge collapsing.
It took me back to a long time ago,
A winter when I was running away from a man
Towards a future carbon-copied.
I wrote a poem
A prophecy
We'd meet at a bridge and find our footsteps enshrined
I wanted you to know
We would keep meeting.
Yesterday when the bridge fell down
I cried myself to sleep
A ghazal mourning my frail routine of self-loathing
Am I human? Am I human?
Don't you know I will always be?
Glaciers will melt and people will die like insects
Men will, let's admit, be men
And I will run towards you
Like flies swarm to sweets
You will be there
With me.
I would never speak to you again
Or look for you in a crowd.
But it breaks my heart that you're not here.
If I could mould my arms into something like a hug
I would barter them for love
You'd be at some marketplace where only ghosts buy their souls.
I write a lot about you sometimes
That's hardly a drop in my ocean
It's saturated with salt though,
Brine upto the brim.
Last Monday I had nothing to do so I poured over our letters
I don't want to throw them away,
They have a lot to teach. Maybe one day
I will show them to my kids
You will be someone's drug,
As always, out of reach.
Finally I am ready to write
That which is no longer fiction.
I am heartbroken,
Promoted to heartless,
Mechanical and cynical like they always thought.
It's true,
All I touch starts floating, shallow,
I remain at the river bank with a rock tied to my throat.
My friend agrees, this is no age for love,
I grow old and the era gets newer until I cannot keep up.
The other day a man called me rare
"Pretty and witty"
"Great taste in music"
Regurgitating compliments mass-manufactured.
Dating app shenanigans,
Criminally boring, and sometimes worse.
One fine day I will ditch the screen
Inhale someone's human
Faith love joy anger hurt
Anything
Anything.
How easily a rat sneaks inside my skin
Nibbling away until I am completely extracted
What remains is a heartless neural mesh.
The past that knocks on my memory tonight
Is pink and silent with its graceful charm
It's too easy to sink myself
Eyes closed, thoughts on mute, limp with bliss.
I am so desperate for a change
Even for the worse,
Which is actually good if you know how to count your way
Up the ladder.
Tongues must be sharp-stabbing and clean-licking
Whichever side you're on.
Or so they say;
Their heavy voices smooth like polished ivory
Sinking my less-than-cocksure voice further down
Deep inside my belly.
It grows weak but unforgiving,
Whirling around my body like a spirit clasped inside a glass bottle
It's no less than a seastorm
I am no less than a sailor who lost his land a lifetime ago.
Descending again into the thick madness of a paralysed rot
You, with your glazed hair and rugged face,
Pull me out. Is it not late enough?
The moon has given up on me, the music has become stale
I have nowhere to be but I need to move a finger at least.
My friend tells me my beloved philosophers
Were nothing but cunts
I laughed and laughed until my mother made me coffee
And my father finally learnt that I am a being of my own.
I can see your arm stretched out
Too bad I cannot clasp it with my claws
Come back another afternoon if your tongue still bleeds with desire
And your eyes don't mourn a loss.
A warm primordial rage is bubbling
Right inside my forehead
My teeth aren't tired of crushing against each other,
Not today.
If I see one more man laughing at a woman's expense
I will break out into a disease
I will infest his body like a demon so dark and devious
He will beg me to let him die.
I am sorry, Junko Furuta, and I am sorry there are too many names
Today I remind myself to never forget.
I am unable to sleep or read or think
Sirens blaring outside my room
Metaphorically, of course,
I have stopped consuming media.
No violence is real if I can't see it, no.
I am strangely attracted to a man who is
Absolutely unnecessary,
Quite unfamiliar but a stock character nonetheless,
He is reminding me that I have been too alone
Too much and too long.
For now I am running back to the slender girl
Of a youth not very distant
It took me a foolish amount of time to realise
Her smile wasn't coy or mysterious,
Her arms weren't always inviting
Nor her shoulders nurturing,
I was, as the story goes,
In love.
She was in love too, back then,
I think she still is,
Like before, none of that's any of my business,
But my revelation a new spark of pain.
I dream of her sometimes and wake up crying
Simply because I am uncomfortably sure
She does not dream of me
Or even remember my kiss.
She lies against her boyfriend's mushy beard
I smoke another one (I asked my bestie to quit)
My laptop begging me to shut it down
And sleep.
If you bewitch men not expecting a witch-hunt
It's not your fault.
I remember a medical student, curious and passionate,
Only mildly mad
And terribly unhappy
That women dig their manicured acrylics
Deep into his heart, lick it clean,
And dispose of him like a rubber glove.
I was almost amused and pushed into saying
You don't fit her like a glove, oh dear love,
But he looked so genuinely miserable that I held my silence
Trembling at the edge of my lips.
He mistook it for some kind of support that borderlines affection
I had only known him for a day
And he took my arm and stabbed himself with it
Deep into his heart, my god,
And I ran, I ran like a woman whose eyes pierce a way through the crowd.
