Of Hands, Ants and More

Picture courtesy: Anthonysarts on Deviant Art

Hands make me sad,
More often than they make me happy.
Because I think the only thing
Understands loss better than hands
Are your lungs.
Hands document the coming and going
Of lovers, friends, parents and pets.
Because hands touch you,
hands hold you by your waist,
Shake hands, touch feet, run themselves over warm fur,
And often, that’s all you end up remembering.

I thought suicide notes
And especially their last sentences would
Make me want to collapse under the weight
of the fact that I had no choice,
But to be born.
But instead, they just want to make me go to sleep
And wake up only when
I am ready,
or to be fucking honest,
Five minutes after that.

I think of ants and how
They can carry hundred times their body weights
and I wonder,
If I am one of them.
Because whatever is inside
is so goddamned dense and clogged.
Just like the drains outside my home. .
And when it’s monsoon outside windows,
and inside rib-cages,
I think the water that spills out,
is pretty much the same.

Diluted childhoods,
like jars of diluted suplhuric acid
sitting inside chemistry labs during summer vacations; forgotten.
Conveniently.
Children growing up smarter, but more scared
Not of jumping down cliffs at the mercy of bungee cords
Manufactured in assembly lines;
But of giving their everything to be kinder to people,
More tender, more free and more loving
than it is socially acceptable to be.

Poems, not understood;
Rather forgotten to be read by people they got written for in the first place.
Homes, not built, because dowry had to be paid.
Songs, lost, because there was no one you could sing them to.
A friend, who’s not here anymore.
Who’s not anywhere, anymore.
Gone, just like motivation.
Silent like mornings after storms.

For The First Time

Picture Courtesy: The Artidote

For the first time when I touched you,
I could feel my backbone dissolve,
one vertebra at a time.
My ribs turned to bubblegum ash,
as my lungs filled with the breaths you took.

For the first time when you tried to hold my hand,
your fingers became a crowbar,
trying to pry open my fist shut tight in vulnerability and defense
and heartbreak began to look like the Golden Spiral, in reverse.

For the first time when I decided to let my guard down,
you climbed into me from the broken edges,
and I let you shape me like a voodoo doll,
with your hands like thunder, touch like tornadoes.
You became my collapsed walls,
and my prayers were the bricks that fell.

For the first time, we fell in love,
I decided to give up poetry once and for all,
because every time we will kiss,
I will write you a poem, and you will never understand.

For the first time, my feelings
became alloys and amalgams of poems I’d written,
Like chemical reactions, happening off neurons and words.
Poetry would strike, when the bell tolls.

For the first time, I wrote a poem
that they did not understand,
I grew a little farther, a little on my own.
See, the thing is, no matter how much
poetry soothes on the surface,
beneath it, it seethes all the more.
There is no saving me, love.
I was forever gone.
My ceramic had hit the floor, when I read you a poem,
for the first time.

 

 

Passport

Painting by Alexei Nechytaylo

So this is what it feels like
to wake up in another country.
This is how the human heart
can ask passports to mind their own business.

When your fingers ran on the length of my spine,
and on the periphery of my existence like dry ice,
I could see what ‘teleporting’ might feel like,
twenty times a second, or more.

When people hug, I think it’s like someone
offering you a cup of warm coffee on a winter morning.
When people kiss, I think it is ‘thank you’.
So, thank you, for writing songs to my soul,
and thank you, for everything true and untrue,
for they are all going to end up in the same abyss,
aren’t they?

You know somewhere in the night, I cried.
And by choosing to tell you,
I’m choosing to hand all the question and exclamation marks
in the brackets of your hands.

To wherever the stars take you, and beyond,
may this remind you of me,
and may I remind you of how
it feels like to wake up in another country,
how the human heart can ask passports,
to mind their own business.