In retrospect,
I never kept my love to myself.
Unthinkingly I would touch their hair,
make them laugh,
sing them songs,
insist they looked too pretty to pass up a picture.
I loved them so much I shouted it over the horizon.
Why wouldn’t I?
It cost me nothing.
The expense of it
was all theirs –
they bore my off-key music with their pitch-perfect ears,
they chuckled at my chuckles over attempted humour,
they bowed their heads so I could twist
their hair into horrible braids.
They cut open their chests to make room for me,
the sentient abyss of the sea,
the salty, swirling tide,
kissing a thousand shores, receding
into the endless night.
A Girl Called Desire
Desire is suicidal. Always reaching for the immeasurable heights,
the sharp knives, the cyanide.
I stop her before she goes too far;
she openly resents me.
She has the faith that I lack,
for God, karma, or rebirth, I don’t know;
it’s phony, something science debunked long ago.
Naivety is her personality, wanting freedom before life.
She’s an adrenaline junkie.
She endangers me.
The only problem is, I’m in love with her.
I’ll go anywhere she takes me,
but not-so-secretly,
I want her to be satisfied.
Satiated, fatigued, appeased, pleased.
Asleep
in my arms, tucked under my chin,
dreamlessly drifting.
I wish we could grow old like this.
Regret
Hour after midnight, alert,
a nostalgia, a strange hurt,
the weight of something worth
a while descended on my heart,
warm as the dessert I baked that night,
soft as the skin of my shirt,
insidiously daft.
I might
remember the event as a smarting wound,
I remember the tart repartee.
Yet I yearn still, years on,
for the diverged road in the yellow wood,
the diverted stream,
the unhurt me,
silly but certain,
assertive but inert,
(a self now in dearth),
endeavouring on a coveted path,
when I somehow
fell behind.
I could not endure.
Somehow, I ended up on this night,
travelling, crablike, laterally;
overtly restarting,
but covertly charting
a circle back to my old haunt,
cutting a large swath as I go in the dirt,
exerting myself for the regard
of an age now long past.
Fatal Attraction
These unforgiving ridges cluster around memory. How many soul-searchers has this mountain snickered at? How many cuddled; how many bleed? You are exposed here. There are biting winds only, chafing away the rock and the bone.
Misjudged
His dormancy was a judgement call
That they made but
It doesn’t account for, at all,
The light in his eyes when he starts playing.
The flourishes, the unnecessary twirls, the eloquent style.
The music surging and spilling,
Filling up the ether.
Soaking the barriers between the dream-world
and this.
While I watched, transfixed,
By the irresistibility of it all.
The gorgeousness of his time,
Like flickering embers, overwhelmingly riveting.
Reeling itself, reeling in me,
Until it reached the end of the reel.
The end of it,
When the music and movement ceased.
Subtly, everything shifted
Just a little bit,
And that light at the end of his tunnelled vision
That I am so sure was a blazing bonfire
Is already smuggled away
Invisible to all, including him.
Like desert snowstorms, disconcerting,
But existing.
Brought forth again,
The next time he starts playing.
(A/N: I find it hard to write without feeling something – I haven’t written in months. A song I resonate with is Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb.)
Where’s Home?
Home is the house you’ve grown up in.
Home is the bed your loved ones sleep in.
Home is ruined jeans and black, cotton tees.
Home is the arms of your lover.
Home is where you wake up thinking the light’s all wrong, but you slowly realize it’s all right.
Home is where you tiptoe at midnight to sneakily cook something unhealthy and find two people standing in the kitchen, teetering between pasta and potato chips.
Home is someone who understands all you mean by looking into your eyes, and saying everything in return with a squeeze of the hand.
Home is being stayed by silence, mind whirling in wonder at the way the world works.
Home is where you say you’ll push yourself to do what you’ve always wanted, and you do.
Home is where you can sleep the livelong day.
Home is a smell you can almost taste, but can never place.
Dissociation
“It does not do to dwell on dreams
And forget to live.“
To lay drowned in imagined passions;
Waking up to reality, miffed.
Uttering absentminded perfunctory replies;
While in a perpetual fantasy, adrift.
Considering yourself unfortunately stuck
In places unworthy of your bucket-list.
It does not do to say that you’ve listened,
When all you’ve caught is the vague gist.
Petulantly craving necklaces of rubies,
When you can’t afford earrings of amethyst.
Looking for signs of wear on the teeth
Of the horses that you’ve received as gifts.
Feeling tragically misunderstood when someone suggests
That you could use an opinion shift.
It does not do to try and feign indifference;
Whilst regretting all the chances you missed.
Losing heart in the opportunity of now,
To muse about that pestilent ‘what if-?’
Some times, moving on feels laughably easy;
Others, feels like a dagger’s in your chest buried to the hilt.
You have to remind yourself that you’ve come too far now.
Yet not far enough considering that it’s your heart you risked.
(A/N: the credits for the first two lines of this poem go to Joanne Kathleen Rowling, who made Albus Dumbledore say them in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.)
Some people
Some people
Don’t make you look twice;
Don’t say the funny punchline;
Don’t soothe your crying.
They blow across your lives
Like a storm of dispersed seeds,
And one cotton ball
Lands at your feet.
Some people
Don’t have that “one thing”,
That’s oh-so-unique;
Or a song written for them
That you can’t stop humming;
Or a dazzling smile
That blinds your eyes;
Or arms that sweep you
Off your feet.
Some people
Simply arrive in your life
In the right place
At the right time.
When you’re ready to love,
And they’re ready to be loved.
You can’t pinpoint
What it is about them,
But there’s definitely something.
Those people
Leave.
Actually, all people leave.
But the absence of some
Feels like greater than the sum of
All the rest of them.
They manifest themselves in you;
Away, but a part of you.
They transcend their tangibility,
They become what they never were,
And what you see around you
Is a catalogue of all the things
You never did with them.
Those people
Are the archetypes of your brain;
They are the microcosm
For your vast universe.
It’s impossible to escape
How aesthetically trapped
You are in this whole wide world.
Caught in the sound of drums;
Salty air and seagulls;
A metallic taste on your tongue.
(A/N: apologies for being MIA for the past two months; I’m back for good now.)
Weak
I had an iron heart and nerves of steel; but you forged me into something weak.
(A/N: Yes, I paraphrased myself from an earlier post titled ‘The Blacksmith’, to check that out click here.)
I Thought I Knew?
Days and dreams and in between
The dwams and nightly fantasies
A thought occurred to me.
That seems quite unlike
All of these;
You and me
Leagues apart, never to meet.
I thought I knew
That a day will come
When this would be true.
Do none of our promises
Remain of any use?
I stand accused
Of wanting more than what is real;
Of seeing more in smoke and mirrors;
Of thinking of you as healing;
When you said it yourself –
You aren’t good for me.
The Ruminant 