On some days we're something

You, me, our world.

We are all magic.

You, me, our dreams

We are all ordinary.

You, me, our jokes

We are all boring.

You, me, our destiny.

We are all funny.

You, me, our exes.

We are all liars.

You, me, our lies.

We are all true.

You, me, our tears.

We are all shy.

You, me, our guts.

We are all heroes.

You, me, our hearts.

We are all selfless.

You, me, our clocks

We are all helpless.

It just depends on the day.

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.