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.

 

Inert Gases and Us

I have spent exactly 54 minutes trying to write something without any success.

I began writing about inert gases

and how they make up

only about a certain percentage of the atmosphere,

but how they seem to make up a little over 100%

of people like you and me.

All of us, unfortunate children of riot,

taking ourselves so seriously that we forget

that we are nothing else but compost for a faraway landfill.

Never reacting, yet ever-reacting specks of dust.

We fight for skin, body and brains.

Who fights for hearts and souls, love?

Who fights for the propaganda of honesty and virtue?

Inert gases at least know how to fill space up with themselves.

We, are busy filling our self with ourselves,

while we forget that hundreds of hearts have slept

unhappiest of sleeps, dreamt the most unfortunate of dreams.

Yet you and I are just worried about world peace,

while we sit and fight in our own courtyards.

Families torn apart with money, hearts with greed.

Who knows when someday people

like you and me reach the atmosphere,

that’s the real reason why there’s acid rain.

If You Didn’t

Did you take a good look at her before you left her?

If you didn’t, you should have.

Because eyes like hers will change as people like you will come and go.

The clouds of doubt in her eyes will rain tears

and leave her cheeks a colder place to kiss the next time.

Her hair now erupts into curls a little more sadly

now that your fingers run through them, no more.

Her color is blue, that of numbness and dissociation.

That of forgetfulness and despair.

That’s the only color you left her with. Blue.

Did you touch her intently before you left her?

If you didn’t, you should have.

Because a body like hers will take the beating of time.

When you run into her thirty-eight years later, she’ll be sixty.

The skin around her lips will no longer be taut and welcoming.

She’ll have wrinkles beside her eyes and scar tissue inside them.

Her skin will hang lose, as if it has given up, just like her.

Her body will no longer be the wonderland.

It’ll be an abandoned city after a long war.

That’s how you left her feeling. Like a war zone.

Did you seek forgiveness before you left her?

If you didn’t, you should have.

Because you don’t break something she called her heart

And walk away without an apology good enough.

Wait. What’s which apology has ever been good enough?

You can’t unscatter people. They’re just gone.

Just like you.

That’s the only gift you left her with. Your absence.

Did you take time out to cry for her before you left her?

If you didn’t, you should have.

For all the conversations she wanted to have and you didn’t.

For the things she felt deeply and you did too.

For all the things that got lost between silence and sleepless nights.

You should have wept, for the damnation of incomplete love.

That’s the only constant you left her with. Incompleteness.

Did you say a goodbye before you left her?

If you didn’t, you should have.

Because dreams that die young haunt the worst.

She feels like a book you started reading

And never finished. You just left her on the bed, open.

Near the window, from where storms and rains

Came in and tattered her pages

and yet, no storm could close her.

That’s how you left her. Without a closure.

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.