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.
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.
Diamond wrinkles on her laugh-clad sweet face
I'd burn to ashes for her in the furnace
Keep me like a ring or a shoelace
It's all so much the same
How does she know what skin shakes me
Laughter crackling like a melody
A home that's lighting up under a pallid Christmas sky
It's gifted, how we know our wishes
Tragic when we can't fulfil them
Longing, stargazing, endless questions
"Why?"
She shakes her head, she loves me mostly
I can keep her like some poetry
She will go to dance
I smile and smile until my ribs crack
Sadness swirling down my long back
She leaves a forlorn man.
Loss is a four-letter word
So is hope (and love and shit)
Where am I going with this?
I was looking at a man sipping tea
It’s poetic, my life flashed past my eyes.
A slow but steady train
(Not really going against the grain)
Leaving off passengers
One
By
One.
Some of them waited for the stops
A few pulled the chain
Abrupt in their leave.
I think some of them are still on board.
Where am I going with them, and
Why are they going with me?
I must come home before dark
Before the lake spills over and the bridge crumbles
into stones
(The roads are never safe, anywhere, you know)
The man sips his tea
Maybe he’s thinking of his daughter back home
Who must have a train of her own.
Does she wander like me?
Does she say, life is a four-letter word
So she never has to talk about it?
I keep looking as he takes another sip.
1
She's shaking in her teenage tears
Life is waiting with its claws
I'm looking, it's not perverse really
Just breaking the fourth wall
Instant gratification grips us
Ten thousand kisses inside a group chat
But the kisses are so small
She's wondering where she can go wrong
Sifting crowds for lessons to learn from
It's scary and exciting,
She is meant to fall
I smirk at this, I'm such a cynic
It's so clichéd, not even thrilling
Keep crying, doll.
2
Where is the little man who fell in love with me?
I was stuck with him, playing the lover
Returning his kisses with my cold lips, barren
I couldn’t love him as long as I was sober
He didn’t complain once, not even a little.
I needed to be the silhouette woman
“She was too hard to keep”
I laughed (and then cried) when I left him,
When he said he needed me
Where are you, my little man?
With your songs and letters and eyes of sheep?
Here I am, a little woman (surprise)
But you have no more love to give.
