Seven Mays

 The clock ticks.

You take a sip of coffee

from a mug that emptied at the last tick

it makes you sick --

The lukewarm bitterness on rims you licked

Repeatedly

During forgotten ticks

and broken clocks

and memorable Mays.

I Will Possess Your Heart

Every day, I scrolled through
One-dimensional portraits of you.

When your eyes fluttered,
You were a beautiful poet teasing me in morse code.
When your hands grazed the satin,
You were a magician nearly revealing her tricks.
When. I saw your laugh,
I devised a witty joke you would have cracked
To make me laugh.

Weren't you fascinating
imprisoned in my mind.

Cotton

I rubbed

My toes

On the linens

Of my sleep

The warmth

Of your skin

Democratized

The coldness

Of my sheets

Dreaminess

Pulls me away from dreams

Anxious Raindrop

A raindrop perched on a throne of fluff,

Alas! This throne had had enough!

Thunder! Rain! Oh yes, it drained

The weight it held with so much love.

The raindrop fell, utterly confused

Jittering along a jettisoned path.

Missing the skies (as the skies missed it)

Anxious about the ground's wrath.

The ground prepared, protruding its plans --

Jagged rocks primed for abrasive attacks.

Slitting the rain with one quick swoop

Imprisoning waters in enslaved cracks.

The wind however had different plans --

Nudging the raindrop to Brownian bliss,

The ground was then so far away,

Anxiety? Far, far, further, amiss.

And even when the raindrop reached,

Its brethren pooled to receive The One

Embraced by puddles of liquid tact,

Our dethroned raindrop had finally

Won.

(True victory though, was not its fate

But conquering fear of Fear itself.

For when unbeknownst ends await

Oh li'l one, you musn't dwell)

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.

Chandelier

Hanging from the ceiling,

Tiptoeing in the wind,

Were little lights that grazed,

Upon the metal stuttering within.

They gloated in their shine,

Smiled at their divine,

Whilst laughing at the iron clad,

That rust from what it had.

And one day, when the metal frame,

Rotted into a mound,

The little lights that grazed in such delight,
Fell unto the ground.

Uninspired

I can’t write the words,

I can only write the spaces in the middle,

But I need words for that too.

Music to my ears

I looked at her, and she was murmuring to herself.
In her quiet nods and slightest smiles,
I knew she was singing to herself.
And despite the noise all around, despite the fact that she wasn't actually saying anything out loud,
All I could hear was her.

Negative Space Two

Where fingers lie, I saw cells die,

Where they recede, I see them whole.

Your face, to me, is negative space,

Hollow, like your soul.

For Him

The place that she had in the palm of her hands,

That place that emptied and fell amidst her fingers,

Onto her knuckles and unto her veins.

That place that she had in the palm of her hands that held his face,

Ended up in her heart.

The Placebo Effect

“Take the pill, take the pill!”

she said. “I will, I will,”

said I.

“But what if I die?”

“You might, you probably will,

if not, you’ll go extremely still.”

You won’t feel your body, you won’t feel the pain,

It’ll be alright, you’ll come back more sane.”

So I took the pill, and then I panicked.

“Will I die? Am I going to die? I don’t want to die!

No pain is worth this! Nothing is worth this.

Oh, how I wish I hadn’t done this! What have I done!?

I don’t want to go! I’m not ready to go!”

“You won’t,” she said. “It was a placebo.”

I am the Wind

I stood still on that windy day,

When the trees around me shivered and the sand around me spiraled to encase me like a cocoon,

and I stood still on that windy day,

when it tried to nudge me from behind so I land on its feet, headfirst.

But I still stood still on the windy day,

As I watched the water pulled into the sky and engulfed by it to engulf the sand.

And I stood still on that windy day,

Till I became it, and I could not stand still anymore.

Singularity

I started writing; I made a dot, a dot of infinite possibilities.

It could be the tittle to an I, the top to a L or the cross to a X,

Or simply a period to nothing.

It could stretch anywhere in two dimensions and write a story,

Or spiral around in blues and greens and paint a Monet.

It was all in a dot, the potential to expand.

So I let it stay within,

and let it be a dot of infinite possibilites.

New Start

A faith forgot, a fear evoked, and passion may have lost

And all she did, was sit amid the tears that were but frost.

She wiped her hand, on their iceland, and tried to rub them wet,

But like her hope, her warmth was but, loaned to her on a debt.

And so she cried, and froze her tears, and built her own sad town,

And hung mirrors of crystal tears that were candid of her frown.

But one day, her tears just froze, in a shallow concave tile,

And when she frowned in front of it, she saw it turn a smile!

And though her face was upside down, she liked it well that way,

It made her laugh, it made her blush, she swore for it to stay.

She laughed with joy, and stored that tile, inside her gloomy heart,

Her body warmed, her town got washed,

She got her fresh new start.