The deadly game of survival

You love yourself for being a veggie and for not murdering those little lives for your meal. You paint your face with glitter to let your friends notice how you’re a magic. You believe you are a magic because for all these years, in every thirty days you bleed and survive. Now surviving is important. Even for once if you stop to bleed. Even if it means a new life within you. Even if it takes to suck that life from within.

Sometimes it’s hard to be in skin like, ours. Sometimes our life feels a lot like an apartment that has caught up a wild fire. And when it does, you should leave. Take only what you can carry. No heavy heart, no tears, no first calls, no second thoughts. I wonder how much are you carrying right now. I wonder what weighs you down is not only yours to carry. It frightens me.

There are so many lights in this city. Sometimes they guide you home. Sometimes, they take you really far from it. By the car window, you count them like the touches of your lover that night. You feel just fine until you don’t. Until the trigger pulls itself. Until the bullet leaves a wound to grow with each hour, each minute, each second or whatever. It was fun, stupid girl, he said, with a blade to your nape. And you loved him a little more. Except there never was any blade, there was just his unblinking eyes and your uncountable breaths in exclamations. It was just a heartless him on top and a careless heart beneath your skin.

Under anaesthesia, you recall the mattress creaking and the bed shrieking before your head starts to spin and your lips shake. You wake up only to say that the pain is unbearable. But hey that’s exactly what you already are bearing now. By chance, you are bearing it all alone. The doctor asks you “how’s it going”? to which you reply “good” but honestly you have this overwhelming desire to eat pieces of broken glass. And you can’t have that. Because the doctor has kept you on warm liquid diet.

I see you laughing a little too loud, maybe so that no one sees you marinating in stings of stomach ache and grams of grief. I see you clapping, because maybe you needed an excuse to hold them. Now you don’t believe you’re a magic. You’re a little girl, wearing oversized pajamas. A tiny life in you is dead and I just sit there with my eyes closed and say, it’s okay. Not everyone’s survival is important. 

Why am I not one of those babies

How useless men feel

when they no longer have

something to save,

or to kill

so they make sure

they shoot a horror movie,

only that it is real.

They make sure

Some bags never return their homes,

Only that their lessons shake the earth up.

They make sure

Some hundreds eyes never get dry,

Only with the tears of the deepest grief.

They make sure

Some photographs bleed,

Only that they  never stop to do so.

They make sure

Some babies sleep under the ground,

Only in the name of god.

How senseless

it is to call them men.

some words I almost sent you

Hey

Clichéd, but ‘sup?

I hope you’re staying warm. 

I have been staying strong.

Just that some time like

12:12:12 and

Days like 12/12/13

Are cold.

So cold, that they give my heart

An ice cream headache.

And me wonders

What it all means –

The people, the trees,

The buildings, the roads

The music, the silence,

The job, the joblessness,

The day by day things,

The dreams at night

The waste of time,

of myself.

My rhymes are unspeakable.

Your love is unreachable.

I don’t know what is more terrible,

The chills of what happened

Or the ache for what never will.

Just that some time like

12:12:12 and

Days like 12/12/13

Are drab.

So drab that my eyes

Don’t mind shedding,

As they refuse

to stay strong all the time.

I realize when I’m writing this,

There is a prayer under my breath.

Old - but not that old.

Young - but not that bold.

And when I’m writing, I am praying,

That you’re keeping nice and toasty.

The day the world would stop

No one will move.

Nothing will shift.

Someone would kick a diet Pepsi can away, when it will happen. And the can will just hang in the air.

At the National Security Gurad office, Mr. DIG while picking up his favorite pen from the non-copper pen holder will freeze. Right there.

A drop of sweat will shine on Mr. Ashley Lobo’s temple. He’ll be held back with his huge arm on the petty shoulders of an eminent doctor, against the flash of his lovely digital camera.

Manu Yadav in the hills, most likely be sitting cross legged, attempting to boom a joint. He will too get his position fixed.

A shopping bag of Dubai duty free shop will get stuck in mid swing, carried by frozen Praveen Sarjan for his frozen girlfriend.

The long and diagonal shadows of Sriraaz and Mobin will set still. 

In the centre of the diving board and the surface of the pool, your fat ass cousin would be halted with a grin on his face.

Somewhere under the magical skies, your newlywed sister will get to admire her love a little longer than usual.

For that very moment there will be no noise, maybe just the fading words. They would leave the mouth and lose their guts.

Birds in the sky would just stay wherever they will be.

A tide will become motionless right before the sea shore.

The world will cease to turn and clocks to tick and tock.

Most importantly your darling blackberry will get some moments of quietness.

And then, I will turn to you

close my eyes,

and kiss you.  

Twenty five things on turning twenty five

1. To err is human. To er, umm, ah, ugh, uh oh is me.

2. I can’t believe I was once the size of a cauliflower.

3. I like wearing black. It helps me feel hidden.

4. It is always good to know the art of disappearing like a magic trick on your fingertip.

5. Poetry is a magical thing. It knows exactly where to reach and what to pull out.

6. Often, I have met wolves and other bad creatures disguised as humans.

7. It aches to grow up.

8. Drinking is absolutely fun even when it is at 11 am and the sun is shining.

9. It is good to stop sometime and sit on a bench in a park. As you stop, everything there stops. Absolutely stops.

10. I am afraid of the times when the music stops playing.

11. Home is the place where you can pee like a goddess.

12. I have been in love with people, and I have been alone. I think it will take time to figure out which hurts more.

13. I don’t like summers but I like the taste of lychee, so yea summer is missed at times.

14. September makes me super nostalgic. The triggers float in the air, enter through the nostril and screw my mind.

15. October is so beautiful, everything prefers to die.

16. They say, most of the serial killers are born in November. Probably this is why I keep killing people in my head.

17. Then there are days in the year I feel like not feeling.

18. It is absolutely fine to have sex than making love, at times.

19. I learnt damaged people damage people.

20. Saying truth makes you feel a lot lighter. Especially, when it is your mother at the other end.

21. I am more than thankful to my mother for making a trillion rotis up till now. I want a zillion more. It is one of a kind feeling to see her cooking while humming a recent song.

22. A lot of my dreams consist of a person in an asylum, sitting on a tree, writing poems on paper planes, waiting for the right wind to kick up. Perhaps that person is me.

23. Mind is a gift. Even if it hurts and lets you have déjà vu.

24. If travelling had cost nothing, people would never see me again.

25. There is something else I was born for. I almost remember it.

Beautiful notes of dirty poets

It is like something was running in our heads besides the car she drove. At a signal, she looked into my eyes like a man would always want to be looked by a woman and there were parts of me nervously on fire. She rolled her eyes and it was then all of me. I remember her stare and my dead slow pulse and the car with the loud music.

It is like something had turned on besides the radio in the car she drove. At another signal, she gently pressed her thumb against my skin, shoved her fingers in my mouth and I swear I could taste how my next few hours, next few days, next few weeks or whatever would taste like. I remember the night was velvet blue.

We reached the kind of hotel that people use for nothing but fucking on a really bouncy mattress that has seen several of lovers like us, bleeding between its five star snow white sheets. The room was royal. A place that royally saw us, held its arms out like a God almighty, and said “Go crazy, kids. No one’s watching.”

It is like something we try to love what we cannot tame. Especially when it is an angry woman and the things she carries. She pretended to know my name and offered to play titanic. She’d been the ocean where I gone down on. It was my skin that crawled underneath her fingernails and it was me between her bent knees. She seemed to have left everything tender at her dressing table. I remember my heart beating out of my head.

It is like some dirty kind of poem you don’t tell your parents about. In half-light, she ran her fingers all over like she was reading words carved into my skin, carefully binding them together into a poem. I heard it playback in my head as I drifted into the most peaceful sleep. She left for home with haikus printed in black and blue on her neck and my name bruised onto her thigh. I remember either of us were dirty kinky poets.

Under the weight of the ground

This city has some shadows here

Those are calling your name.

I doubt if they’re calling it right

Because you’re shit unaware.

Far away, at the beach side

You’re foot writing the same;

While mixing tonic and gin

Without having to hide

As the clouds roll and make a thunder sound,

not even an inch of me gets surprised

that the sky is still the sky without you;

only curiosity kicks in about how is one

supposed to reach people

when all the telephone wires

are buried under the ground

Little lives

I want to apologise to all those ants and bugs I stepped over,

The spiders I smashed with some object against a surface,

The worms I misguided from their respective ways,

The bees I closed my windows on,

The cockroaches I sprayed away,

The chicks I savoured

And the lambs I gorged on.

For they were the small lives,

The little souls with

All the fucking right to live.

I’m not the best human being,

But I’m trying, trying

And trying.

I can only wish in that little time

of their lives they flew, they glided,

they hovered, they felt, and they loved.

And they loved the ones whom they flew with!

I’m not the best human being,

But for these sins

I’m dying, dying

and dying.

They never tell what you need to hear more

They say it’s hard to remember things –

where they left their keys,

when was the time they had their heart spilled,

who made them laugh so hard they cried,

or the name of an acquaintance,

or the pet place of their childhood,

or their grandmother’s anniversary –

but no one ever did mention about

how much effort we put into forgetting.

I, for that matter, feel exhausted

from this effort to forget.

There are legion of things

that have to be forgotten,

and a major part of me

is incessantly just

trying

to forget. 

If it was meant to last, it would have.

The last time I saw you was the day I get the first tattoo.

Sorry, it does not say anything about falling in love

but about what to hold on to as we hit the ground when it gets over.

No matter where did the tattoo artist put the ink,

it was only within my chest that hurt like the million needles.

The tattoo artist assured that the wound

will heal soon and the design will take over.

I wondered how much time it will take

for the wounds which you slashed into my skin

in the last five years.

You ringed my mother to tell that it’s better that I move on

as my bones are aging, while all this time I was praying

that they do so with you by my side.

That night my mother made me sit in a chair

and told me that I do not have to take shit from anyone

especially those who can’t see past my mouth or my eyes or

my long thin hair and past my skin into the beating heart.

She is religious so she told me how god 
in the middle of good things suddenly wrecks our plan

when they are about to wreck us.

Now I don’t want to be a memory but a burden

so heavy on your shoulders that

you.

cant.

walk.

At the late hours of  the following nights, 
tossing in my bed I find myself

taking a trip down the memory lane, 
visiting all the ghosts left behind.

I am haunted by your name -four letters-

that was once my favourite word on the planet

is now like an ice cube on my tongue.

I spit it. I spit it. I spit it.

And I sleep myself to spitting it and a lot other things.

I wake up and leave in the morning

with every synonym of feeling heavy and

thankfully no hand to hold,

that has been strangling my pretty life.

After work I go to market and buy new lip colors

but dammit they do not sell any shade of forgiveness.

All this while the sun didn’t stop to set,

neither had it stopped to rise.

Through my window, each morning it shines on my face,

as if gently reminding me I am still someone worth shining on.

And this is it probably.

If we weren't able to be permanent,

at least now I have something that will.

Sunday Ke Sunday

Today unknowingly I happened to bump into Sunday or let’s say he bumped into me.

I woke up while I didn’t wish to. The bathroom was just beginning to stop spinning and my feet were starting to feel steady on the ground. Sunday hurriedly came to me and he handed his hand. It took me some time to realize it’s for shaking. You know it takes time. And time fleets in a special way on Sundays.

 "Give Monday my love" he said, 

waving and flashing a smile at me.

Countries are small. People are not.

Who cares what colour your flag has,

It’s Independence Day,

Let’s just be happy.

Because in any case happiness is not about

how do we pray.

And to whom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwC1cSIsl8A&feature=youtu.be

While we in the east celebrated Independence day,

certain people in the middle-east

celebrated ethnic cleansing.

Victims faced bombs, missiles and rockets hit,

 and also faced whatever they did.

That little country got filled with air

that smelt of acid and gunpowder.

Shambling through the seas of dead babies,

fathers tore off their mouths open and scream,

mothers sat in silence, forgetting how to mourn

and dying kids between the blood, between the pain

promised to tell everything to the God.

Somebody please teach them humanity

and how much they need it.

Your words like fists to me

You said you like me.

It made me feel like a leaf,

Falling in a certain panic

from a tree.

Slowly, without control,

Only thinking

Oh god, oh god,

oh god.

You said you’re weak.

That night I got home

and knocked on my bones

instead of the door.

And they sounded

so hollow,

They only echoed

that it hurts

everywhere, everywhere

everywhere.

Later, you asked me

what’s wrong?

I locked my answer

behind my crooked teeth.

Swallowed the key

And felt it hit my stomach,

While I managed to say

Nothing, nothing

Nothing.

:)

Seven billion people.

Spread over seven continents.

Spread over one planet.

Seven billion people.

Less than seven billion hearts.

And seventeen billion faces.

Seven billion people.

A hell lot of billion smiles.

And yours is the one

I call my world. 

Memoryloss

Do you remember losing yourself

on finding me?

Do you remember reading me

Like the book of disasters?

Do you remember then

being a band-aid for the cuts I’d been?

Do you remember the grenade I gave you,

Telling it’s my heart.

Do you remember lighting my cigarette

While walking through the forest fires?

Do you remember the black of my eyes

And the white of my bones

And everything grey in between?

To the moon and back,

Remember?

Through a black hole

and for eternity, do you remember?

Yeah, neither do I.

Forgiving is hard. Forgetting is even worse.

They told me on the day one you’re a monster

So I loved you under my bed

After fifty six days, you packed all your stuff,

Took a shower and moved out.

After fifty six and a half days I am waiting

to begin to learn how to ignore

Because now you’re the elephant in every room.

While I’m trying not to think about you, about your name,

everything around me is singing it.

Like a song I can’t get rid of.

The entire night we both spoke a language that neither

Of us could understand.

And I don’t know if it sounded like “please hit me”

I wish I knew you’d cross the line

I could have quietly erased it while you were not looking

But you crossed the line

Cleared your throat

Kissed you knuckles

And took it wherever you wanted

Punched in my face
Broke the windshield

Made me bleed

You should know I bleed enough in 12 months every year.

I don’t need your kind contribution.

So a part of me asked you to leave,

The other made you stay in my head

and I hope we treat each other better this time.