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.

 

 

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.