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.