Category: Uncategorized

There is no object of my desire
No subject of research
I sell myself to a quicksand of ambition.
This morning I see a small sparrow
Sitting on a flowerpot
A small gulp in the closely knit fragment of my time
So beautiful, so urgent, so cute and so loud
I am transported to a Mary Oliver poem
And brought back to reality
When it flies away,
My dearest object of envy.

Someday I will tell them what I mean by the awful
Things I think
For now hold this orange and stifle the need for me
To need you to peel it for me
Hold it like a gun to my head
Make me chase my dreams at a new altar.
My fears are new; fresh but frozen
Arteries clogged with icicles
We can hold so much of ourselves so tight
We hold so much
Back.
A lonely kitten running away from your feeding hands
(Scared of your newness and strange suspicious kindness)
Stabs you like it should not
No walls are meant to absorb sound waves and splashes of tears
That goes on and on and on.
It's a really bad gimmick, a self-gratifying song.
Let me cradle the leftover news of a week's worth,
No one likes a know-it-all but everyone respects her
And I will lie down the first moment
I find God.

History favours the victor
Poets remember to lament the other side of the story
Knowledge is a playtime of labelling and unwrapping.
I have been asked to make something of myself
But what greater joy than effervescent freedom?
My body is grass
Head, in the clouds
Little men can't understand. I do not care any longer
My eye caves are breeding with Plato's wisdom
My veins thick with Sappho's yearning
And my love, only full, only pure
Liminal and limited but free like I ever hope to be.
I sometimes write incoherent phrases
Throwing darts at the screen
Because I have been asked to ask something of myself
All of this a grand attempt
To string in some goals.
To him who has known my sun side
And nothing more nor less of it
To her who forgot to reach my growing tree-like arms
I cannot conjure new things to say
My skin is no longer smooth and naive
My silence a measured resilient scream.
What can I make of myself, who knows?
But not someone else's dream.

I diversify my distractions until the newspaper ink bleeds into my hair
Seeps into my scalp
Dirty with unwashed exhaustion and dry with flakes.
I paint my ugliness to fill my cup of musing
It's your memory again I'm using tonight
You faceless shape of a girl.
I chase your unwritten rules,
On my toes I arch my back
My fingers crack too loud
Failures are always blasting inside my nerves
Can't you hear? The noise? The crunching chewing of bones?
Your desires, material
My lamp, burning,
I must learn everything and impress the crowd.
It's your ambition I am diving into
And it's your self-doubt, too
On a morning some day my ears will flush with joy
No more of those arid shrieks of despair
On that morning I will rise
In your image
Give back to the world what I want to
Resplendent and solid like a rock.

I am an infidel
No longer a slave to poetry,
Too feeble to lick my blood and rise like awaken stardust.
You are an infidel, robots will replace you,
I will love it, I will make more robots and make an army
Then make some wars
End them with a charity event. Do wear a sustainable gown, please,
My husband will give me a diamond that is virtual and cannot be stolen or lost.
I am lost,
I am not even married yet. My mother is lost and my father is
Just about the average Indian aged man.
I have read enough to know
My utterance need not make sense
Lived enough to know
It must make sense to some
Somehow,
Imagined or real
Barthes killed the author last century
The reader is disgusting and alive.
We are all infidels
Because we are confused,
To celebrate this I shall eat fast food and block my starblood
And you can all go to hell.

He told me my eyes were innocent
Pure, sparkling with a simple undisturbed joy.
He decided to steal it,
And I almost let him, even though my eyes were actually pretty gloomy
A woman written by a man is never less than half untrue.
I was shook again when a woman
Not my flesh or blood but somehow a sleek tug at my heart
She sugared my naivety
Called it a willingness to believe in the best in all.
My closest of my closest,
Quite spiritually my flesh my blood my tears my all
They know I am less naive and lesser a woman
Than such a generous one to
Believe in the best.
You caught it right, I do not believe at all.
You are right,
And we know what's next.

Haven't had the time to be sad lately.
It should be a crime to miss
Melancholy
I am joking.
Yesterday I had the pioneering thought
Never to write personal poetry
Confessional poems, as they call them,
Or at least limit the word vomit
And more often than not, switch to something topical.
Political polemical daily dystopian
Anything but the niche of my narrow, congested life.
I imagined you looking at my poems
Concluding that I am nothing but a woman
Full of herself
Half of human
Thrice a bottle of wine
(I am convinced that my whining with words
Has the potential to intoxicate).
All I could end up writing
My fingers on the keyboard, fight-or-flighting
Just yesterday's date.

You told me once
I should calm myself down
For no one's good but mine;
That anger makes one old and antsy
And raged out moments age our bubble-soft hearts.
I look at the mirror after a good cry
The glaring absence of the glowing skin everyone talks about
Stapled with the new lines on my paper ash face
Pulls my fingers into a fist and it pushes itself against the glass
Thank God I am weak, it doesn't crack or budge.
I am so old, so old, so severely deathly tired and frustrated
Yet indifferent as if there is nothing else to life, nor will be,
Nothing to look forward to because I have let my life swallow me
Every additional year superimposed on the previous one.
My mother is worried that I worry too much
My mother is worried that I worry too much
About the wrong things.
I sacrificed my anger and gestated anxiety instead
Now you tell me. What else?

Another wind that is cold to the touch.
How have you been?
People keep dying, they always do,
In ways unprecedented and documented
Dying like always and never before.
I am unhappy, you know that,
I am not sad, I have decided.
The sun shines on your casual stubble
Growth looks so good on you, I can't but admire it.
We have known each other for a while now
You have become an alternate address
If I am allowed to be a little cheeky
This afternoon.
I tell you about the comedian I liked
The one you dismissed as boyish and lame
And I stir my tea as you tell me about your wedding plans
In exactly seven years,
No more nor less.
I love you, you should know that, like a lost family found,
So I scold you into wearing better clothes
Goad you into listening to the coolest kind of music for our age.
You resist my snobbish takes,
I resist your attempts to find me a good man,
And another winter snuggles our hearts into a low fire
Everlasting and pure.

When the air in our backyard grows mushy and warm
The rain arrives in a rush
My right ankle cries out in a familiar voice
I miss you, in a familiar way.
Winters might be lonely but monsoons are melancholic like no other season, perhaps.
Had I treated my wound sooner
I don't know if I'd meet you like I did one autumn
But here are my broken bones,
Here are my bouts of pain
Here are my chronic reminders of living a life, almost.
The backyard has seen many things over the years
Before my mother met my father,
The way she did one autumn.
Grandma and her roses
My mother and her touch-me-nots
And a plentiful of storms
I remember the two papaya trees parallel to the ground
Lying like two friends tired after a day of playing in the sun.
I could have been the nurturing kind
Turned the backyard into a fine garden
Painted with flowers of the prettiest kinds
And so on. 
Instead I simply look at the scattered vegetation
And the heap of bricks someone kept there for future use.
I build no life of mine. I try to demolish
Whatever I remember of you.
Perhaps you were right, I am creative,
Creating impossible problems for myself.
But I survived a cold winter in a city that wasn't home
Lovesick and strong
I have survived in ways that are small and huge
A lot like you said you did.
Tonight as the weather grows cold and my bones have stopped howling
I make a wish
Not to remember to forget you
But to remove any need for wiping the memories,
To welcome the one who is at my door
Who is nothing like you
And so much more.
An ugly backyard is still green
And you and I are still memories that once lit up our hearts.
I miss you in a quite pleasant way now, I think,
Winter takes over monsoon like a grown-up firstborn.
My mother gifts me a cactus to keep me company
You travel to someone else's heart,
I hope.