Starry Nights and Explosives

 

I read this poem at TARQ, an art gallery at Colaba, Mumbai. This was inspired by a woodblock art by artist Soghra Khursani. I’m waiting for a picture of the painting from the people at TARQ. Just to brief you, I have spun this poem looking at these works of art like two people in love, but trapped in two dimensions. Their agony, exasperation, love and disturbia. 

If I were Van Gogh,

I’d paint you a thousand starry nights,

so that the Milky Way would run out of stars

and you would run out of words.

 

If I were dynamite

and you a wall of stone,

I’d place explosives carefully in the nape of your neck

and whisper in your ears, “Let go.”

 

If someday you’d care to look back,

You’d realize how unordinary we were

to have not handed out the fucks we had

to the world, sparing them for each other instead.

Holding on to them like roses waiting to fill the air with themselves.

 

If someone would look close enough,

they’d see how paper thin our existence and ego is.

Lovers once, now mere subjects caught on canvas,

impressioned onto cloth by woodblocks.

 

If the universe could listen to us,

It’d know that we became galaxies.

Galaxies became us.

What we forgot was the death of every star,

a black hole could come up with astral explosions.

We became explosives.

Explosives became us.

Trapped in a dimension to which we didn’t belong.

Separated by a distance we couldn’t fathom.

 

If people would look at us here,

and not think of us as monuments on the wall,

do you think, they’d be able to hear

the gospels that leave our lips in prayers,

pleading for one last starry night,

and for the final traces of explosives

that would go off somewhere in the paintings we’ve become?

So that finally we’d know what freedom feels like.

Finally, we’d taste liberation.

 

 

 

 

Maps

Let your soul travel till the veins on your wrists start to look like subway lines.
Let your heart wander till the sound of church bells in different cities start to sound like a song.
Fall in travel, before you fall in love, because only the ones who have wandered can tell when they are home.
Kiss lips of strangers and fill your mouths with them till you realize that you are swallowing little parts of them and you are changing to become a sum total of each one of them.
You’ll understand why your dreams don’t really make a lot of sense. It’s because they aren’t yours alone. There are other stakeholders.The ones who are responsible to make you tuck your hair behind your ears the way you do today. They are the people who take a hit in someway when you decide to stop breathing. You affect them like they have affected you.
What’s wrong and right, dear stranger? Do we really get to decide anything after all? Have we not been decided for already? It’s funny how we think twice before we choose the flavor of ice cream but for once don’t question the course of our lives.
Therefore, travel. Find out if travelling is overrated. Find out if people can really change you. Find out if maps are nothing but tricks to make you lose your mind, because travelling is a paradox, like art. No matter how much of it you’ve done, you’ve not done it enough.

Travel, in your own little ways. Travel till you don’t smell like your perfume but like your conscience. Travel till the lines on your palms remind you of maps and not of fate. Exhaust yourself. Become and un-become a traveler,because there is no particular city in which one should die. We should die a little and live a little as we move on from one world to another, until we all begin to look like maps.