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.

 

 

 

 

The Parting Gift ( Part 2 )

He took some time disconnect the call.

The thought of having to meet Asha consumed his anxiety in a very sudden way.  Two years. it had been. Two long years.

He parked his car in the garage and quietly unlocked the door to his apartment. As he reached the table, he slid his car keys across it. They scratched the glass and
landed on the cold marble with a heavy clank. That disturbed him. That sudden noise jolted him back to his anxious self. Strangely enough , this time the anxiety pulled him elsewhere. It pulled him to a part of his wife he had chosen to keep. It was a mere piece of paper he had torn from her diary the day she left. She used to write well, he thought ,and this was his favorite.

” I’ll tell you how it feels, a heartbreak.

It can be the melodramatic heartbreak. Every one can read it off your eyes. Where it feels like heavy metals have been melted hot and poured into your blood. Left to ruthlessly run around every inch of your body, reminding you of stories you want to forget. Hurting every time you choose to blink or move your feet. Or every time you breathe in and breath out. Or every time  you tell your pillow a story about yet another teardrop.

Otherwise it can be a silent one. The one where no one knows what happened and no one has a clue. The one where the heart broke a little everyday. One little part at a time. The one where you outgrew one tear with the next in silence of those nights. The one where your eyes have no story to tell anymore. You become unaware. So unaware, that even your hands didn’t know which way to shuffle when you got accustomed to the eerie sadness.

And I’ll tell you what is dangerous.
The un-preparedness of not knowing in which way your heart shall choose to break. ”

Every time he read it, he felt a twitch in his heart. But this time, a tremor crossed his hand as he folded back the paper. It had grown crumpled by now. The creases had their own little stories. They knew his favorite lines, because they were the ones where his fists clenched tighter onto the page.

He wondered why he chose to walk away. What came back in answer was not what he wanted to hear about himself. So he chose to look away and not listen. He had stopped asking himself questions he was too afraid to know the answers to.