mimimusing

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.

I knew all the jokes, all the right ways to lean in
Or lean out and laugh
I couldn't do it. The gods wouldn't nurse me,
The flowers wilted promptly,
And I sat with you with my mouth ajar.
Nothing I said was performance
I was a river, monsoon madness,
And very, very polluted.
A 21st century stream of consciousness.
We perhaps are no better than water and oil
But I am so free today
I offer you my gratitude and wish you the best,
May you have all the magic
And may I retain mine too.

You called me too complex the other day,
My jokes too jalebi. Jilipi, to be precise
And your caution a disgusting reminder of
A man wooing a woman without knowing her.
I was laughing with a friend, breathless in giggles,
We slid into speaking like our fathers
The wisdom swirling in that adda lingo
We are so complex and comical,
When will you get it?
I wish I could wait, but you and I both know,
We can't, after all your distracted chasing
And what not.

I will write in very simple words
How I have yet to crush you in my head.
That misty morning when your poem popped up on my screen
I was half asleep. It awakened me to such beauty
The moment I saw your name under it I squirmed,
You small, ugly man, you arrogant asshole,
You write too well. Why?
If only you were mediocre and forgettable
Or at least treated women right
I would have loved to pick your brain and tug at your heart.
Remember the night under the trees?
I was singing. I didn't know I was performing for you
Still ashamed of it, I hope I am.
The next morning you woke up in her bed,
I am sure I cried a little. Then buried that graceless desire right inside the mud.

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.