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.

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.

 

 

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.