Will it

 

Part 1

Quivering shadows in faithful lights

Of winds that will to be viewed

And leaves that will to be wanderers.

Part II

Bustling shadows in idle lands

Of leaves that will to be people

In ways that will alone will not will.

Peeling the layers

In the process of peeling your layers

To discover who you are

You may change

And have newer layers to peel.

Maybe you will never be able

to peel your way into truly knowing who you are.

But maybe, just maybe

It was always about the process of peeling

Rather than finding what is underneath.

Monotony

I pulled at my string of monotony
Till you came along with your sharp wit
And cut it into two pieces
That spun around each other
In a cacophonous cocoon of chaos
Settling into interwoven knots
Of whatever is the opposite of
Monotony.

Words vs. Strokes

I sit here and write about your painting.
A painting in which you so meaningfully
Hid the meaning.
What was it that you were thinking?
As you halted your paintbrush mid-stroke,
Clotting paint as would your blood to injury
In one corner.
But in another,
the blacks evolve into greens as though you finally managed your blues.
What was it that you so willfully obscured
In a half-open eye,
or a neckline so demure?
Perhaps, if you painted your story in circles
You did not wish for the paint to peel.
Yet, here I am
Peeling, stealing.
Morphing your paint into brazen words.
I sat here and wrote about your painting.
Now,
My poem.

I'm trying to write again

Up, I crawl, within the folds of her saree.

In her prances, my ground shakes

as the earth quakes.

In the fabric, I fabricate tales of survival

As I play hopscotch in the plaids.

In the shadows of the folds, I fold my fears.

Tearing her saree, I catch a tear.

I look up, she is sad.

She looks down. She is mad.

Her hand zooms in on me,
I nearly escape her sinister swat.

But alas, I have flown into her naval--

An endless abyss,
It also prances.

But now, it's my walls that shake.

And my hope,

That has been shaken.

For you, li'l one

As you open your eyes to your first view,
Your mind to your first hue,
Your fingers to your first grasp,
And your mouth to your first gasp,
As you open your arms to greet life,
And take life into your strife,
You are already braver than you know.
And you know--
You will be more so.

Growing up

I was too short to look beyond the ground.

My eyes spanned the insect world--

The patterns in an ant’s path were all I knew about.

Every year, I grew an inch,

And my panorama got bigger.

Now I knew about spiders and short plants and eventually,

Long plants.

I grew tall enough to where I couldn’t tell if I was eating up the information and growing larger,

Or if growing larger made me register more information.

I grew a bit taller after that, to a point where I knew about the sky.

The sky didn’t make a lot of sense to me—

It was blue and empty, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Nothing did, really.

I reasoned that I must have grown too tall too fast.

Maybe I should just sit down.