1
Ease me, don't tease me
Quantify your love aloud for buckets to fill
Prodding my sharp doubts I incise into your soft corners
But, if you don't appease me, who will?
I soaked myself in rain
Muddy glory, sensuous in petrichor spark
Your breath seemed fresh when we kissed
I buried my hand inside your lungs
To throw out all the hurt, disease,
You smoked into the air in rings
Red. Love. Passion.
Are you scared of my obsession?
Alas, we had come so far.
2
I love you so much it breaks my heart into glass dust on the shore
The music stops, suddenly
I am so bone-haggard, alone, termite hollow and sick
Bereft of you, my love, I waste away into dust
I love you knowing you cannot return
I sealed our fate as we sealed our lips
Cold blues rippled on your face as I refused your kiss
I hate you, I'd said, and you believed my words
I'd pictured pain but it turned out worse.
3
Grieve the skin that has burnt in black
New flesh takes over, you say
Rapid and anxious
Pink and glowing in health
Won't you grieve what smoked and peeled?
It was you, too
Even if it was brief
Skin cells now turned to dust, broomed away
Such pain
I must grieve the skin you'd set ablaze,
So I can let it be replaced
Can we not begin again?
Green waves dilute and deepen in the front yard I like the assortment of plants
I joke, will you skip me like a YouTube ad? We chuckle. I'm funny, we agree She says she'll miss me And I will But I reassure, it's just a new year Sadly(?), not a new me
I can go on about the book I'm reading She calls me a beautiful kid I smile, knowing she's lonely I keep taking advantage of it
There's nothing new about something new There's nothing new to feel I enjoy the chant of daily TV There's nothing new I want to be.
I read what you wrote.
Bring me the coffee so I can read it again,
This time, calmer
This time, knowing
The week is expiring into a nonsensical knot
I have given up on my hair
Sitting in my bed with an ugly grease-bun
Sipping my coffee
I'm reading it again
You write like a bird flying with twigs
Making a nest but not quite, yet
Who am I to review?
Let's say, I'm the cat
I'm eyeing your little home building every dawn
For a chance to pounce upon it
Don't look so shocked, please
Don't pretend you didn't know I am ruthless.
Bring me the fork please, thank you
It's delicious how I can tear apart
Your feeble similes and metaphors
Oh, so easily.
Your poems reek of Romeo and Juliet
No complaints, but, really?
Would you die for him,
Or is it only your many moments
Of boredom turned infatuation
Teen drama cliché
I know you're older, I know
Stop scowling.
The poem looks fine
Could've been a little less flowery
Could've been more like a poem.
Even then, my dear, it's all wrong
My coffee has never tasted so bitter
And whose fault is it?
You fell for the one I fell for.
I hide my heart in a skeleton closet
My arm fat is melting into lumps of grease
How long does it take to be human?
I'm waiting.
Don't look at me with so much pity
Don't look at me
Please.
I've lost my watch, long ago
When I wanted to be a mother of two
Now I am not even a child
What will I do with this massive room?
The rickshaw outside moves, empty
Sullen afternoon in a winterscape
How to mourn something never started
Sunlight frozen on an unborn day?
I was playing with words and he got stuck in them
I knew the craft of meaning making
He was too blind
With river eyes and saltbeds of skin
He never asked me why
I then played with a gun and he got killed almost
I relished the skill of slaughter
He was too kind, again
He held my wrist not to wring it
Asked himself "why did I bring it?"
The gun was thrown away
I took him to the bedroom and locked him inside, I was bored
Closed the doors on his face, so cute
Why didn't he hate me then?
I wish he were a brute
I tossed the keys into the fireplace
Read a book for fun
Ended up breaking in through the window
Our life has just begun.
I hold myself back
My lungs will shatter if I say
I love you
If you could see me crying every night
For your sorrows
Wouldn't you know?
I hold myself back
Like always
Always
I want to be so far away that
Even the moon can't touch me
Even the sun can't hurt me
And then I wash away, lonely
You walk away
My love.
Coffee beans brimming over my cupped hands
We're so many, so small, too much
I think it's fine
Everything green turns grey someday
Our planet, its climate, its crisis
Everything born must die a death
We know.
I think about plastic hazards only when I get some
free time
Only when I can think
Over the noise of my dad watching the TV
Over my mom's relentless questions
Over my agonising thoughts that take me nowhere
“Free some time to think :)”
Free me so I can think
But you say I'll be free if only I think.
I say, I am just a word-mincer
I only care about plastic clogging the drains
Because it flooded the city when it rained
Because I wanted to write a poem about it
Or maybe I needed to write an essay
Alternatively, to impress a man
In truth, I'm not doing all I can
And I know neither are you.
Yes you're reading it, and you cannot run
We feel responsible for ourselves
But we leave things undone.
One day I gave you two stones to keep
Then another one
And I stopped.
You said you'd build a castle
For us to live in
With playful curtains and hours of kisses
Music stained walls
Flowered garden and coloured windows
You said we can have it all
I thought we could, too
I scoured the riverbed for more pebbles
Keeping aside only two
The ones which sang as they tinkled against my
anklets
I, the happy explorer, paused for some rest
Floating like a moonclad lily in motherly waters
I worshipped the god of love
I danced till daybreak and slept like a child
The fourth day we met
You poured before me a sack of stones
They were so beautiful
You were so beautiful
My eyes widened and shone
Your little boy grin and our pile of stones
We couldn't stop smiling,
Our cheeks were alight with hope
I dropped the two stones I had
Our hillock rose by a hair's breadth
I looked up at you and you were a changed man
No longer the boy who matched my faith
But a man I'd think twice before talking to.
How incredibly our pillage of precious pebbles
Turned to rubble
Ashen and disgusting
Cold and dull
You looked at your watch
I looked away
Perhaps we had always known
It was only a castle of sand
You should not have held my hand,
When I was meant to let you go.
I will preserve you like the sun preserves the brown in
my hair
May you need me like you do, forever
Sometimes you jar me into an unthinking sorrow
I doubt my heart, shrieking loud enough to pierce its
walls
When it unflowers and the veins are shed
You appear again, awaken from the dead,
Or perhaps from my very own self
I do not need to know
I hope you'll preserve me like a pearl inside a locket,
too
So that when my heart is rebuilt again
Maybe a little less red this time
I am still whole and soft like a mother's touch
You're still a home, a haven, a shrine
Even if I wander alone in fairs, concerts, cafés and
malls
Carve my way through dingy lanes
Or get lost inside humongous halls
I'll unload into you all my noise
And we can make music
Like we do,
Like we'll do.We'll be preserved in touches unshaken
Doors ajar, no tiptoeing around
Our calm rejoicing in silence and sound
We will keep it all
Life will go, as it goes on
We will go, as we must
Yet we can't leave so we will stay
Preserved in our love and trust.
Sunflower columns invade my windows
I welcome them with broken bars
My human grass in goosebumps, dancing
Oh, the maddening beauty of this world
Remember when we swore it’s pointless,
Linked arms and drank away our hate?
We lived in spite but ah well, my friend
At least I’ve lived to see this day.
It hurts sometimes, it hurts a lot
You remember when you had thought of leaving
So-and-so does this-or-that
Our sunflowers droop and weep perhaps
For unfinished memory to fill the gaps
Of what we wanted the world to be
The flowers are so wild today
Shots fired within my hollow shell
The flowers make me bloom, unruly
My stoic heart is moved, it sways
Where shall I go, through the windows unbarred?
Dig beauty like golden soil unearthed?The world is so mesmerizing
My melancholy swoons, declining
I am just a girl in love.
