Goodbye?

How do you give a farewell
when time runs so fast
that by the time I finish
uttering ‘Goodbye’,
you have already traveled
257 meters in the air?

My hands tremble
as they try to become
conch shells, but fail
to save your voice,
like conch shells
save voices from the sea
from over a hundred years.

My back curls a little
and I bury my face
closer to the screen
to feel closer to pictures
we didn’t take,
yet the only thing
I end up feeling
is farther apart.

I don’t feel Gold is
the most malleable substance.
I’ve grown up to believe
it’s distance.
Because distance
can feel the same
across a bed, a room,
a city, a country;
an entire lifetime.

Have you ever thought
what it feels like
to see your memories
in advance? Would you care
to take a dive and tell me
how you deal with goodbyes?

Because I’d like to find out
if your heart does break
a little, and if you hide
a small tear, that builds
in the corner of your eyes
as you float up, and the people
you leave behind sink,
in some way or the other?

Letters get posted,
some received, some lost;
like songs.
Everything is risked
when you begin to feel
the heavy and the light
that comes with ‘Goodbye’.
You don’t know how many days
it will take to forget faces,
and places you went to.

It’s begun to rain here,
and it reminds me
of how you think
I am indecisive.
Words spill out
and become sentences.
Like days, becoming years.
My poems, you don’t understand
and for once, just for once,
I think it’s okay.

Her

This got written for The Great Indian Poetry challenge #12. The thing I was told to write about was ‘I couldn’t stop looking at her’.

She reminds me of postcards
and of the feeling I had when
I held on to my first set of crayons.
She’s like the first bicycle ride without a fall.
She looked at me from across the hall,
and I, couldn’t stop looking at her.

Supernova smile. Jupiter jawline.
Neptune neck and her earthly eyes.
She takes me along on cosmic walks
and bends me, the way light bends
near a black hole; she is all the gravity that there is
in the Universe, and I, have no choice but to fall.
Oh Boy, I couldn’t stop looking at her.

There are times when she tap-taps Morse code
onto my shoulders with her lips,
and I respond with profane gospels
mumbled into her ears.
It was 4 AM and we had just got done making love,
and I, couldn’t stop looking at her.

We fight. She has tornadoes
at the tip of her tongue.
She throws around her wood-chunk words
and I crumble them with my hacksaw haughtiness.
She looked at me like a bell jar
about to implode,
and I, couldn’t stop looking at her.

She now reminds me of songs
I will never be able to write.
and also of the feeling you get
when you lose your favorite action figure.
She looked at me from the photograph,
and from the deafening silence she’s now become.
Hollow, like eaten-up wood.
Winters did come; winters did leave.
Yet I, couldn’t stop looking at her.

Her name

You’ll never find her.

She’s changed her name.

She’s changed like a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, only backwards.

She’s changed her perfume,
praying to God that the smell you think of when you suddenly wake up at 3:30 AM is not hers anymore.

She’s changed her eye color,
so that even if someday you chance to look into them, a different her looks back at you.

She got the piercing off,
so that every time she looks in the mirror, she isn’t reminded of how you did drugs off her belly button.

She’s changed her address,
so that even if you knock, it’s not the right door.

She’s not your graveyard anymore,
where you can go and pretend to die when you feel like shit.

She’s just gone. She’s lost information.

She’s changed her name.
You’ll never find her.

.