Smearing paint across my forehead and
dancing naked on the streets didn’t work out
My curtains were still overtly possessive about me;
they were cleaning up the mess I was making and
the wind groped at it’s opportunity to
grab at my neck,
The crickets were dying, and so
was I
But the blue sock on the balcony I’d abandoned
as a two year old kept drenching in the rain
So much so,
that they turned orange. A stinking, dooming, cursed orange
which made me gag
How often does blue turn orange? How
often do I scream with my hand between my parted legs
for the sole purpose of knowing that I can?
By the time when the men are called out, the
system will have farted on our faces and the
stench will have risen from the dead waters;
My envelopes will shiver, empty
for my revival didn’t go far;
yes, this poem is about me, didn’t you figure,
from how it’s coy, from
how it doesn’t read newspapers, from
how it takes notes on how green the grasses are, from
how the crow shifts from one leg to the other, how the aloe in the
garden slowly speaks lesser and lesser, how the head tilts, how she gifts time
to strangers, how the sourness of pavements gets to me, how
the moon is cleaning up today,
it made me wear a crooked brooch upside
down and made me promise to love less and paint

the new corner, white instead.

And then suddenly you find yourself scrubbing charcoal over your days, just so that you can stick the damned memories up there like little yellow stars that would then glisten in the best way possible. Tangle, detangle. Tangle, detangle. And tangle again, every little detail that is carving raped dolls out of your bloody smiles, like a saw carves out of wood. You witness the the shadow, you, being ripped – RIPPP, RIPPP, RIPPP and the sound is deafening at breakfast every morning, is that how my day starts now, you ask the motionless barbed wires of coffee stains and returned gifts and abandoned mix tapes that fence your happiness for what seems like years to come. It’s treachery, how at once, you’re so many lights, and so many pages, so many days, and so many songs, and so much warmth and so much fresh rain and so much melting and so much snow, so much trying and so much failing, so much broth and so much smoke, so much salt and so much sea, and yet. Yet to be broken at the hinge which lies there, at the end somewhere, like a soft white bun, like a gash that you make yourself and simply stare at all the love pouring out. You’re surprised- love, of all things? But love it is.

That night, I buried the salt that had poured from my eyes and dried on my palm, under mud and molasses

And poured a tall glass of red wine allover it

Some of the wine spilled out of the tub and trickled down the terracotta which seemed to then cry red tears

Next morning, a sunflower headed it’s way out the soil

A yellow, smiling sunflower.

How did I know? I saw her dancing to folk music with the cuckoo

And the wind was so happy when he saw her dance

That he bosomed her and together they swayed,

It looked like the yolk of an egg sprinting and giggling, and the happiness in the air was the same as

My mother’s eyes when she befits her pearls with her white silk and hopes for him to look her way

This was a sunflower that didn’t mourn even as the dusk and the night conspired against her and both clicked their tongues in,

She held her stench high and became a storyteller, a gifted one at that

“When the blue mist fades, ” she said, “a thousand figures will arrive, with breasts like blooming lilies and hair like molten lava and wisdom like no man shall ever possess,”

The moon listened, and the leaves listened and the owl listened as she added

“And the walls of flimsy righteousness will crumble”

Do sunflowers laugh?

Her laughter rose high over the mountains and thus she bore me proud

For at first I’d thought they were incantations of love,her stories

And would guillotine my breath, the wine would know it all

But Spring it brought, and Spring is the season of vengeance, taught the sunflower

Take the sun and throw the light all around you, burning all you can, taught the sunflower,

For the light will be soft and dewy, not the bloodshed kind

And the sunflowers that will be born nonetheless, will never mourn.

I took reality into my hands last night

The plan was to mould it into fitting my gap-toothed smile

but that was not what happened

It scalded my palms, burnt my fingers brown

and eventually covered my whole self with soot

The stench of it all rose up my nose and

I felt my intestines twist into a bilious stupor

I screamed and screamed but no sound came out

By then, I could even feel my hair on fire

the meagre tendrils melting away into a raspy black amorphous before my eyes

by every moment

But I was adamant.

I kept trying to grasp reality, the ball of fire reality,

the bare fanged reality

and mould it into fitting my gap-toothed smile.

I fell asleep an hour or so later.

When I woke up, I saw a middle-aged lady

clad in a shimmery blue gown perched at the edge of my bed

She asked me to follow her into the woods

I did not ask her what woods, in the middle of a grey city, I did not want to seem like an idiot

But guess who is an idiot.

When I was little,

they kept warning me not to wander off with unknown people.

Especially not with beautiful women in blue who make you swoony, apparently. Too late.

She took me by the hand,

blindfolded me even (idiot, it seems, is the least of my issues),

walked me deep, winding into the woods and then grew wings

Just like that, she grew wings;

laughed at me, because, as I later realised

I was all black and brown and

scathed and bald with burns on my skull

from last night

So she laughed at ugly me,

broke but still holding up, me, grew wings and flew away

Flew away into the sun.

I gazed at her flying away into the sun and the light

and said nothing

As I turned around

I saw a beast with my eyes, and slowly I realised I was looking at a mirror

And then, I couldn’t bring myself to even look properly at myself. There was nothing human left on me. The parts, unrecognisable, the clothes, barely covering me, bald, completely bald

with a scarred head

almost like the Pantheon crying at night

My hands, they were a totally different shade of charred. I couldn’t bring myself to look at myself, no. The only thing I could recognise, as I walked closer to the mirror, were the tears.

As evening glided in, I was in festive mood

all day, I had snapped off branches and twigs and made a torch.

Evening, rejoice.

I set fire to the torch and leaped from one place to another, all around, in the woods

setting fire to the trees, the roots, the dust, the rocks, I was setting fire to all of it

all through the woods, I danced around, torch in hand, setting fire to everything around me and watching it burn. Oh, the mirth of it all. Oh, how I danced. Oh, how I lived.

Much later, when the moon rose

I fell asleep wondering why people make such a fuss about the sun rising.

The words sat in bold, raised scripts on the page. Script smaller than the usual naïve ones in books. The other books. So the words, ‘He poked his tongue in his cheek and smiled.’ I poked my tongue in my cheek and smile. That honey filled moment when you act something out the way a character in the story is doing and suddenly the image you had in mind on reading that line is alive, and you made it alive. Hadie would say this habit right here has some weird connection of my obsession with cinema. Cinema is the word, really. Movie sounds hollow, naive. Movie sounds like sour coffee, while cinema, well. Cinema sounds like tea. So much more character yet so much less gaudy. I remember where I learnt that word from, ‘gaudy’. Eighth, English lesson, being aware of every atom and molecule in the room, and yet this senseless mull of obliviating myself from the rest of the world, Lady of Shallot being read out in a soft, lilting tone. She used to wear pastel coloured yards of grace and ill applied kohl in her eyes, her accent standing out. Maybe it wasn’t Lady of Shallot, maybe Daffodils. Either one, there is this vivid memory of me scribbling words and phrases down by margins, and her, teaching, teaching, as if she is Lady of Shallot herself- locked away away and away in a tower where she weaves, eloquent, sad, in a white gown.

And then there are some books that you can read, all the while building a cocoon around you. A protective sheath. A disappearance. A better universe altogether. If I could disapparate, like Rowling ever so wisely says, I would. I would feel my breathing toughening, my whole self being tightly woven around and transported to somewhere else. I would be disapparating like cats and dogs. Like Potter and Granger. Like Black and Lupin. They build up, arguably the most wholesome part of my childhood. So I would disapparate right into books, and out of them into more books. Who needs a race, who needs revolution, who needs hope, who needs anxious knots, who needs losing and finding and losing and finding and losing and finding over and over again. Disappear. Fly away. Those tiny bold scripts, I could live through them, by them and in them. I think, I think (And I might as well clarify here that I’m a meagre, meagre piece, a tiny dot. Or tot. Bah.) that is why people write. And read. To live through them, by them and gratifyingly, hopefully, gratefully, in them. In there, when you read ‘He laughed’, you conjure up this image of a lean being, without a face, or a shadowy face, fangs bared, eyes twinkling (eyes are visible, yes), laughing. The word is justice. The words are justice. You read ‘She sits and cried’ , you feel the salt beneath your lids and an extra heart lumped up at your throat even before you finish the sentence. You read ‘He died’, and your world falls apart. You read ‘Taking a huge bite of her bread, she wiped the cheese off of her lips’, you feel the warmth of the cheese dripping down your soul.

Who needs peacing out. Who needs humans. What worth is war, and what, pigeons? I am living by words and breathing paragraphs in. I am waking up to the smell of paper, my clocks have felt tip arms and numbers scathed in a royal fountain ink. My soul, well that is one long novel.

Kohl. I’ve been tossing and turning the word around in my mind, until I found some dignity for it deep inside my thoughts. Nothing as bold as the colour of it, but just some words that signify how happy and womanly the stick full of vigour makes me. The deep, dark line of charcoal that makes me, and I’m sure all women, feel like we have good eyes, no matter how out of depth, or pasty, or squinchy our original eyes are. Hence, an originality different from the real originality. Not just a cosmetic, but an armour, a guide— not just chemical, but a mysterious novel, not just charcoal but a script, a potboiler at that, speaking of all our tears, of woes as well as of joy. All our big and small moments, reflected by that one fine line of dignity beneath the eyes. :”)

 

My laptop smells like goodwill and success and glass doored studios with plush fur carpets. Do laptops smell like that? Or is it just my uncanny obsession with smells and justifying them with people and places? People, mostly. Like, he smells like a baby just bathed in lukewarm water, like round tears begging for clarity, like lush meadows of happiness. He smells like daisies, I decide. That, and babies. This is not a monologue on him. I try not to break my day into pieces, each one a monologue about him. They are my days, aren’t they? But what about when I’m flying around like embers, soaring, soaring around him? Is he the phoenix, and I the embers he is going to emerge from again? Or is it just us being young and hopeful? Dylan would have said the answer is blowing in the wind. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. My friend. Weird how people become friends over songs. Beautiful, in fact. Beautiful is my favourite word. A week ago I cheated on ‘beautiful’ with ‘obelisk’. I did not cheat on Sebastian though. His name is not really Sebastian. I just needed a similar name. But this is not about him either, not about how he looks at me longingly and I feel nothing other than emptiness anymore. But not with Park, that doesn’t happen. (Again, I just needed a name. And some resemblance, perhaps.) With Park, it always like under the mistletoe, only it’s not Christmas, and I don’t feel like kissing him. Not in a bad way, though. Just don’t feel like kissing him all the while that we’re under the mistletoe. With Park, it’s like he is not constantly at the back of my mind, but he is the back of my mind, instead. Or the front. Or all of it. Nobody waits for his explanations, people just assume. Assume he is guilty, assume he should be punished, assume he has wronged her, assume he should be left alone. I never feel like leaving anybody alone is ever the answer, and I feel him thinking in the same way. We make a good pair. He a sinner, I a sinner. The Lumineers would have asked us to forget what Father Brennan said we were not born in sin. We are all sinners, no point denying that. Some of us just hide the sins behind lullabys and baby’s breath and full, wide eyes with more black and less iris. More fear and less confidence. More innocence and brown rings under the eyes. Brown rings like the ones left in some of the books at the library. I haven’t visited the library in a while now. Long, white tables. Books smelling like school and cardboard boxes. The books my sister passed on to me smelled like her. Like friendship bands and slam books and cream biscuits shaped like cottages and a blue shirt I remember she used to wear. I remember her long, straight hair, always tied up in buns and braids before she left for Guelf University. Guelf is in Canada, the land of leaves the colour of pomegranate red and a happy, calm yellow, in the fall. It’s not true that Park does not know much about me. A lot, he knows. A lot, I intend to tell him, if we breathe long enough together like the embers and the phoenix. I am standing in front of the sea, and learning how to swim for the first time in my life. That is what it feels like when he is not around. If that is what it keeps feeling like, leaving an era behind in school ain’t gonna be easy. I always feel like we are leaving an era behind at the school. Like the presence of all of those new kids, with their new hopes and new raising the eyebrows, and new trios sipping into tetra packs at the ground at fifteen past two. Something about their leisurely way tells me to leave. It falls so perfectly and imperfectly into place altogether.

As my eyes drift to the rack of overflowing books by my bed, all of them holding my soul, my words, my heaves, my sighs together for the past seventeen years, I remember his head full of soft black curls. His skin, the colour of honey and winter dawn and lazy sunrays, his bottomless eyes, all of it float into my mind. My Jovian-Plutonian gravitational effect. And I do not know anymore. Let us fall into the labyrinth.

dark

Dark, dark, dark, tiptoeing into my nails. Underneath my lashes. Right into my skull. Left, up my shoulders.

Blinds drawn. Drapes shut. An underfed ray of light that makes my eyes bleed. I could see the blood dripping down the wrinkles on my face, melting with the warmth of the brown underneath my eyes.

Awake, and I am deafened by the sound of conches. Then I realise they aren’t conches. It’s dread, victorious. It’s exhaustion, victorious. It’s the gyre that managed to pull me down within it, victorious. It’s my demon, victorious. It’s their demons, victorious. All of it loud and valiant and clear and screaming. Screaming like all the conches from beneath the seas and the oceans and the waves and the water. But I can hear myself thinking meagrely behind all of the sound that conches don’t scream, they play. Maybe not anymore.

Asleep, and I wake up with scars on my palm from digging my fingernails into it. While the nerves, blue and innocent, stare up at me from my wrist, I can feel all the naïve that I am, breathing down my neck. As I lie down, I can feel my sins lie down with me and as I stand up, my head spins with the weight of not knowing, the reek of uncertainty paves it way to my nose and I almost faint. My vision blurs with millions of black seeds and I chant what Plath trusted me with while I’m falling— I am, I am, I am.